was VERY reluctant to buy marvel vs Capcom 3 when it was on sale because of the slop machines that are aaaaaaa devs.
said screw it and pulled the pin. Sat on it for about a week and finally booted it up last night… I absolutely forgot that these AAAA devs used to make games, not stores with games attached.
very refreshing to be bought back to the ¢25 arcade machine games again with no stupid stores, cosmetics, characters locked behind a wallet.
Now if I can just find a street fighter game that is in the same vein that doesn’t have stores with stores and nonstop ads for junk.
Yeah, arcades as we knew them kind of died, but they still exist. They’re more focused at kids than they used to be, and often times they involve adaptations of cell phone games like Angry Birds or almost-simulator-rides like Fast and Furious that cost $8 per play.
Arcades have always been about providing experiences you can’t get at home, but they’ve had to repeatedly pivot what those experiences are. First that meant playing games at all, before home consoles existed. When home consoles became a thing, arcades still had cutting-edge hardware better than what you could get at home. During the Street Fighter boom, arcades were a social hangout to play multiplayer. But now we have much better home consumer hardware, and we have the internet for multiplayer, so every game that can be played at home has no real need for an arcade.
There are still four things left you can find in arcades but not (common) consumer hardware. Gambling for kids, racing games with an immersive setup, rhythm games with increasingly wacky control schemes, and pinball. Modern arcade rhythm games are actually going through a bit of a renaissance right now and I’m here for it.
I’ve got some bad news for you.