Sunday, September 2, 2007

Later. Right now lets play Global Thermonuclear War.

I realized that I probably designed the website for a scope of people who already know what I'm talking about.

For those of you not familiar with how Mame or other emulators work:
What happens is the original circuit board of whatever game you're trying to play, is converted from a physical 'ROM' chip to software. It's a faithful exact reproduction of the original information. Mame then uses this to reproduce the game exactly as if you were playing it in the arcade. My intent is to have a cabinet that will have the controls to play as many of those games as possible.

Some of the most influential games from my youth:

Centipede. I can remember being at Owl's Nest resort in BC every summer and coming out of the lake soaking wet. I'd run into the arcade and blow a few bucks on centipede. (Probably not the safest thing).

Ms Pacman was pretty awesome as well, but I lacked the appropriate skills and usually only made it to the 3rd or 4th screen.

Gauntlet was a game that captured my imagination. One of the first games I heard in the arcade talking, I spent months recreating mazes on paper, and many hundreds of dollars playing it. It was a great cooperative game as well.

Street Fighter 2 CE. What can I say, the game that caused me to blow insane amounts of cash polishing my upper cuts and hadoukens. I can remember catching the bus with J and Coon to ride across the city to the 7-11 which was the only place in the city at the time that had it. Kids were lined out of the arcade every day, all day.

Mortal Kombat 1/2. Finishing moves, blood, gore. It was fantastic.

Saturday Night Slam Masters. This game captured me in university, and it was one of the first games that I truly dominated on. I managed to win a tournament playing it, mostly because of the 360 degree skills I had mastered playing Zangief on Street Fighter. With the character Rasta, I would make short work of my opponents.

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