Retro Arcade Box

There was a street fair in town on Sunday,  and though we almost never see a product we want or need anymore, one table had a little game console with 700 retro arcade games installed.   I couldn't say no to having a treasury of games like that at my fingertips.

It was easy to set up.  It turns out that about half of these were Japanese editions that I would not be able to read,  though there would be some surreal element to not knowing what is being said.

Still,  that left a few hundred,  including classics like Defender, Galaga, Ghostbusters, Arkanoid, Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Panzer Attack, and others.  Scrolling through a list of hundreds of items is tedious.

It is really odd looking back now, how these games had so little memory or file space.  It's amazing they could deliver so much content with so few resources.  These days,  for a simple game, we'd probably pack a dozen mp3 tracks for music, but each of those files is 100x the memory absolve back then.  Not to mention the graphics and actual game code.

Trying a few of these now,  about 40 years after we used to hang out at the arcade,  I can relive how these were designed to eat our quarters.   Play for less than a minute, game over.  Add another quarter.  Then I saw the clincher ... the CONTINUE button.  You just reached level 12 or whatever, and ran out of lives.  The CONTINUE option comes up, often with a countdown timer,  so you have 10 or 15 seconds to put in more money or your so-called progress is lost forever.  I never had more than a few bucks to spend at the arcades  and after running out of coins I would line up for a bit watching the top players do their runs.   I never had any of the actual gaming consoles either.   So it's interesting to see these titles again.

These days, we're used to apps with seemingly endless content, usually with in-game quest books & bestiaries and external fan wikis.   Looking at one of the titles that sounded amusing,  I played Fester's Quest for a bit.   A globby little pixel-art Fester walks around with a cone- shaped gun,  constantly shooting.   But none of the blind or floating heads have any lore or story.  Oh,  this new thing fires little shurikens?  If I go down these stairs,  it's completely dark?  I guess i was supposed to find a lamp?  I stumbled across a kind of inventory page, saw i had two lamps but don't know how to use them.  The lack of back story was bizarre.  I easily found some online pages about it,  but none of this is in the actual game.  How do people have names for things that were never given names?

For Fester, reading the online reviews was a lot of fun.   I hope you like being the slowest thing on the map and walking all the way back from the start every time you die.  At least you get to keep your stuff.

This has been a really fun find so far.