The screenshots for Street Fighter are a bit more systematic than most other galleries on Svatopluk’s Arcade, there is exactly one screenshot for every enemy in the game. Now I’ve inserted subheaders with the countries and the names of the enemies. That’s all.
BTW the R-Type gallery is pretty systematic too: There are two screenshots for each level, one generic and one with the end boss.
The unpredictable popularity of games hits again. The latest surprise is Comet Busters!, an Asteroids clone with ray-traced graphics, digitized sound, and multiplayer over modem or Internet. I added it on July 27, and it is currently #10 of the 16-bit Windows games, though it hasn’t made any of the other lists yet.
About two years ago I came across the shareware version of Nebula Fighter, a 1997 shoot ‘em up by Fabrizio Farenga and Alfredo Siragusa. The closing credits announced the full version for November of the same year, to be distributed exclusively by a Texas publisher, One Reality. Later I uploaded the shareware to Download Central, and it became quite popular (currently DOS game #9, new download #5). Here’s a screenshot from the Nebula Fighter shareware:
I have often wondered if that full version ever manifested. I still don’t know, but probably not. The game was however published two years later on CD-ROM, but as a Windows/DirectX game. Holodream Software, the label under which Nebula Fighter was developed, still maintains a website, and still offers a Windows demo for download, which I have now put up as well, untested and untried. Here’s a screenshot, from the Holodream website:
Nebula Fighter is interesting because like Katharsis or T-zer0 it represents an attempt to salvage a dying genre into a new era. None of these attempts was particularly successful, and the games remained mostly obscure (currently Nebula Fighter does not even have a MobyGames entry). For a while, scrolling shooters just like the once so dominant platform games were simply considered quaint. As the interest in classic gaming rises, these latecomers may be discovered again.
Anyone familiar with Japanese games is probably aware that Christian imagery is a recurring theme. Not really Christian symbolic, because the imagery is often taken out of context. Japanese designers just seem to love European churches and their stained-glass windows and see them as bright, cheerful places.
This out-of-context usage sometimes has quite strange results, stranger than Aeris growing her flowers in a church in Final Fantasy VII. But the strangest I’ve encountered yet is in Namco’s Rolling Thunder. This game, like so many others of its kind, has the player-hero rescue a girl from a criminal organization. Well, and when he finally finds her, he finds her like this:
As an afterthought to my previous post: Arcade games are determined mainly by their underlying business model.
Usually a game is sold to the player. How long or how often he will play it is of no concern to the designers, as long as he feels he got his money’s worth. Online games are a bit different. They make money primarily through monthly fees, so the player must keep playing it for the game to be profitable. But online games are relatively new, and their predecessors, the BBS door games, were never more than a niche.
Arcade games are among the oldest forms of games, they were never a niche, and their business model is completely different. They are sold to publicans and amusement hall proprietors who want the games to make them money. They must be designed in a way to keep the player inserting quarters.
The predominant system here is inherited from pinball machines, in part because arcade machines were often manufactured by pinball companies and in part because it is a tried and true system.
A pinball player gets a number of balls for his first coin. He can keep on playing as long as he keeps his ball in the game. He can score points with skillful play, and if he amasses enough points, he will get a free ball. A really good player might play for hours on his first coin, but he has to be really good. Arcade machines replaced balls with lives and changed little else about the system.
Of course, the designer has to keep a careful balance. If the game is to easy, players will not lose enough lifes and not insert enough coins. If it is too difficult, they might get frustrated and play elsewhere. This and nothing else is what defines an arcade game.
It is interesting that this system of lives and points was so pervasive, got so much accepted as part of the gameplay and not a business model, that many pure home platform games feature it as well. Even Wolfenstein 3D still has it, though it has a system of savegames as well, and lives thus don’t even make much gameplay sense.
Here are a couple of recognizable arcade machines that were cloned on Windows 3.1.
The one arcade game that was implemented most often on Windows is Missile Command. The oldest implementation goes back to the Windows 2.x era.
Asteroids has several implementations as well, though not as many as Missile Command.
Chomp by Jerry J. Shekhel is a good and authentic Pac-Man clone, Ms. Chomp by Peter Siamidis did the same thing for Ms. Pac-Man. The latter is even more authentic because it replicates the tate screen.
Hurricane is a clone of Tempest.
Killer Cars is a remake of Head On.
Squirmer The Game and Worm War are clones of Centipede.
