The Arcade Club: The Return

The Arcade Club, Bury, is approximately 300 miles from my house. That’s a bare minimum of 5 hours in the car, without stops, a little longer if you fancy a wee and an overpriced Ginster’s pasty en route.

It’s hard to justify this sort of trip to most people, gamers or not, but every time I’ve visited, within ten minutes of entering the building, the memories of the journey fade away, and I feel a sort of chemical intoxication I find it almost impossible to explain. Nowhere on earth makes me happier.

During the height of the pandemic, it was impossible to justify a roadtrip to the other side of the country to play videogames. For swathes of the last 2 and a half years, the place had been forced to close or open with harsh restrictions, but now, as we enter the Spring of 2022, and the country is apparently set up to ‘lIvE wItH cOvId’, it was advertised as being business as usual.

I can’t articulate quite how special it was to enter, and feel straight away that not only was it the same as I remember pre-pandemic, but somehow better in almost every regard.

I’m glad I waited beyond the mask mandates, bar restrictions, machine-wipedowns, and track and trace log-ins. All of these were necessary for the time they were in place, and many of these caveats no doubt helped the place stay solvent when they could have faced financial ruin. But for me, selfishly, I didn’t want to taint my memory of this place with anti-bac quarantine, or attendance windows. I didn’t want to be shuffled to a table to be allowed to order a beer.

I know we’re not free of Covid. I know it’s still affecting people and their families directly, mentally, materially and financially. But in the same way people saw the ability to attend a live show again, or the cinema again, or the pub again as a glimmer that our old lives were resting, not gone, the ability to grab a bottle and spend half an hour with Sega Rally was my head above the parapet moment. I think we’re going to be ok.

Me and my brother got up at 3am, drove straight to Manchester, had a breakfast, and then stayed inside the Arcade Club from 11am when it opened, to around 10pm when we started to flag from the nocturnal start.

We played a lot of games. We drank many beers. I had a great time.

Please go and visit the Arcade Club.

Here are some of the games I felt particularly noteworthy:

Daytona USA (1994) / Daytona Championship USA (2016)

The Arcade Club is fascinating to me as it covers such a range of arcade experiences. In the late 70s and early 80s, the arcade was the place to play games, full stop. By the late 80s and early 90s it was the place to play games you couldn’t play at home owing to the more powerful hardware usually present in arcade cabinets. By the late 90s it was the place to have game experiences that wouldn’t translate to home hardware, and by the 2000s and beyond, it was a place for skill games, strange reworkings of mobile games, and occasional marquee releases from the remaining big players like Sega and Raw Thrills.

The Arcade Club has every single one of these eras serviced, and being able to jump between them is just such a historical and sensory thrill. Case in very real point, the Bury site now houses an original 1994 Daytona USA cabinet, as well as its updated, spiritual successor, 2016’s Daytona Championship USA. Two chalk and cheese arcade eras serviced by, ostensibly, the same game.

In ‘94, Daytona was about as cutting edge as videogames could be. By 2016, even a modernised version of Sega’s classic felt a little long in the tooth, though was still able to attract players with their shiny pound coins because it was big, brash and bombastic.

Either one in isolation is a decent time for a quick two minute joy ride, but of the two, as bookends of a franchise genealogy, the modern reimagining just doesn’t hold a candle to the original. The modern game has more content, and is naturally sharper to look at, but its handling is less nuanced, its track designs a little sloppier, and its overall vibe just isn’t quite there. I can perform badly in Daytona USA and feel like it’s entirely my fault. I didn’t action that drift early enough, I didn’t steer across the corner at the right time. There’s a learning curve to the way the car controls and the way you’re expected to master the courses that just isn’t there in its revamp.

In Championship USA I had fun in two player, sure, but even after half an hour’s play, I could feel I wasn’t getting any better, even when I was convinced I had a handle on how the game wanted me to approach it.

Dariusburst Another Chronicle (2010)

I’ve talked about Dariusburst Another Chronicle a decent amount before. It’s a ludicrously cinematic shoot ‘em-up that I feel appeals equally to bullet hell diehards, and total genre newcomers.

Presented in an absurd 32:9 aspect ratio, it revisits the ultra widescreen of Darius I and II’s arcade cabinets, and presents something it’s impossible not to be wowed by. Home ports are great: the expanded content of the PS4 and Vita releases of Chronicle Saviours, or the differently expanded content of the Switch and PS4 releases Another Chronicle EX+, offer an absolute embarrassment of riches. AND YET, nothing really prepares you for playing this in an arcade setting, with its two widescreen HD monitors glued together, huge sit-down cabinet, and frame-rumbling speakers.

At its best, the arcade as an archetypal concept is about pairing enjoyable interactive experiences with outright spectacle. I can’t think of many examples of games that do this better.

Alien vs. Predator (1994)

A Capcom side scrolling brawler widely considered one of those holy arcade grails. Licensing (I assume) meant that it never had a home release, via compilation or solus, until the insane Capcom Home Arcade in 2019. I’d never played it, even using emulation, until this visit to Bury.

For the first few stages, it’s a great time. Sprite work is crisp and expressive, the four playable characters are all unique from one another and offer varied movesets with lots of offensive and defensive options. 20 minutes into my playthrough though, it just started to get really boring. Wave after wave of identikit enemies: 30 xenomorphs here, 30 predators here, 30 marines here. By the final stage I was genuinely willing it to end.

It’s perhaps an unfair comparison, seeing as the series was only ever a home product, but the pacing of something like Streets of Rage and its sequels puts AvP to shame. It’s an interesting relic, sure, and has some smart ideas that keep combat fresh, at least for that first window of play. I can’t imagine coin feeding this to completion though and not feeling thoroughly cheesed off that I wouldn’t have been better off dumping my cash elsewhere.

Flicky (1984)

Odd how our tastes change, isn’t it?

Flicky was on a multi-game collection I owned for the Mega Drive as a kid. It was never a favourite. A sort of 5 out of 10 that seemed a silly choice when you could be playing Gunstar Heroes from the same cart. Whilst Gunstar is still the game of that particular grouping I enjoy more, Flicky is for sure the game I would play more.

Every time we hit the Arcade Club, me and my brother trade off high scores in Flicky. It feels great in the hand, with momentum, mid-air control, responsiveness all just absolutely nailed. You collect birds and drop them off at the goal. The more you drop off in one go, the more points each is worth. The quicker you drop them off, the greater the level bonus. Avoid enemies, collect birds. Easy.

But very soon after the game kicks off it becomes a twitch platformer that demands quick thinking and quicker reflexes. Do you hold out on a platform for safety from the cats and frogs of Flicky’s world or propel yourself off a split second quicker in a wild Hail Mary of a jump to the goal to maximise your score bonus? You quickly memorise stage layouts and routing, enemy pathing, bonus stage patterns. It’s all good stuff. And in an Arcade it becomes some of the best stuff.

It’s as fun as the most cutting edge machines in Bury because its core is so timeless.

Sonic Sports Basketball (2016)

Get the ball in the net.

(we played this for 60 solid minutes)

Zoo Keeper (1982)

I’d internalised the name of this game at some point as I remember reading that it represented one of the earliest examples of the ‘platform’ game. Perhaps not the very first, but certainly contemporaneous with titles like Pitfall on the 2600 or the original arcade release of Mario Bros. in ‘82 and ‘83 respectively.

It’s an interesting little game. Regular stages have you running around the perimeter of an animal enclosure, with each step adding a brick to the wall to keep the animals encased in the centre of the screen. You can run and jump to avoid escapees, collecting a net that allows you to shoot the runaways back to the centre of the enclosure. It’s manic, with pretty slippery controls, but lots of opportunities for giant last ditch leaps which always feel good when you pull them off successfully, skidding onto a net and mopping up the last few stragglers.

Bonus stages pop up every few levels and present a proper platforming climb. You must make your way up the screen along horizontally shifting platforms, collecting bonuses en route to your goal at the top.

It’s a good time!

Quick & Crash (1999)

If I was one of those weenies with a ‘man cave’ I’d stick a Quick & Crash machine in it next to my makeshift bar and poorly installed, wobbly optic measures. Just the most addictive party game I’ve ever played. When we arrived at the Arcade Club this was one of the first machines we made a beeline for.

Four rounds of quick draw. Start in the holster and then fire away. Shoot the target. Shoot the two targets. Shoot the moving target. Shoot the moving targets and cup. I talked in more detail about why this game is so special when it was inducted into my top 100.

When I hit my lifetime best of 4.1 cumulative seconds for the whole game, I wanted to run laps around the place with my shirt over my head. I think the score remained at the top of the leaderboard for the entire time we were there. I have never felt so powerful.

Time Pilot (1982)

I’m good at Time Pilot.

I play a lot of games and I’m not very good at a lot of them. But Time Pilot? I’m pretty decent.

Back when I was a hound for Xbox achievements and gamerscore, I played a lot of tosh. Grubby games with frequent achievement unlocks for a ready quick endorphin hit. Every once in a while though, I’d get stuck into something that took time and effort to learn, to game, and to get better at. The Xbox Live Arcade release of Time Pilot become one of those time sinks.

Living with my then partner in the final year of university, I kept a flipped, mostly nocturnal schedule, playing games through much of the night, chipping away at a smidgen of dissertation in the afternoon, and then starting the process again. For reasons I may never truly be able to recall or understand, this schedule coincided with me playing a lot of Time Pilot.

I got good enough that I felt compelled to write a guide for the game’s toughest achievement: reaching the fifth and final stage before without losing a life.

On the 5th of April, 2010, some 12 years ago, a 22 year old Chris sat, likely in the glow of a MacBook’s display to write the following.

May it guide you, young pilot:

“Get in the habit of shooting in a constant arc. Like Geometry Wars, just waggle the left stick in gentle quarter circles whilst shooting CONSTANTLY. You'd be surprised how often what looks like certain death will turn out OK as your bullet stream cuts through a gaggle of biplanes.

When you get good enough to reach stage 4 consistently, break out of the habit of restarting immediately on death. It's worth finishing out the stage for practice against the enemies' ungodly speed.

Stage 1: Just spin wildly. Focus on the area around your ship to avoid the arcing bombs and bullets, but you should be fine.

Stage 2: In my opinion much harder than the helicopter stage. Try to keep heading in a single direction - I always went SW - and ignore the giant ships as they don't contribute to your level total, and take more shots than you realise.

Stage 3: Keep heading in your chosen direction, traversing in a lazy circle around homing missiles if they get to close to your tail. Once you get the hang of shaking them, the level is plain sailing.

Stage 4: HELL. Here all craft travel at the same speed as you. Despite guide's suggesting that you continue to travel largely in the same direction, I found the only way to progress was to take the fight to them as per stage one. Like the helicopter stage, homing missiles should be dealt with by spinning gently around them, however you must be extra wary of all other ships when performing your aerobatics.

Don't give up! Everyone has skill and concentration ceilings. If you reach a point when you keep dying on stage one, call it a day.”

In the arcade, losing a life isn’t the end of the world, but I like to think the groundwork I put in over a decade ago helps me loop the game and top the leaderboards everytime I visit the Arcade Club as a 30-something adult.

Rhythm Tengoku Arcade (2007)

If you ever need an example of how arcade culture differed in the East and West, look no further than this.

Rhythm Tengoku, the handheld rhythm title from the WarioWare development team released near the death of the GBA, received a Sega developed port for the arcade. A Gameboy Advance title, blown up and stuck inside a bespoke cabinet.

It’s fantastic, because the original release is fantastic. But it does highlight, whilst not a problem, an issue that the Arcade Club can face at times: linguistic accessibility.

The vast majority of games available here are very, very welcoming and friendly. Arcade games always needed to be able to communicate their intentions quickly to snare new players with otherwise unfamiliar machines. One level of the Arcade Club though devotes a lot of its floor space to Japan-exclusive contemporary rhythm games. Although Rhythm Tengoku isn’t exactly new, it’s grouped alongside these bigger, newer machines by virtue of needing a level of prior knowledge or Japanese to get into and play.

Games like MÚSECA, Groove Rider, Jubeat or Taiko no Tatsujin are all fantastic to play and easily understood when in-game, but are not that easy to actually work your way into, especially in a freeplay arcade when others may have started, given up when they’d got twisted with the menus, and left the game hanging. Tengoku is easier to manage as a few duff notes in a stage and you’re back at the main menu, but some modern titles offer lengthy tutorials, log-in methods to maintain scores, linked play, and lord knows what else, all of which can be tricky to navigate in and out of if you don’t know any Japanese.

Jubeat is one of the games whose interface I wish I understood a little more of. The game itself is a fantastic Simon crossed with Whac-a-mole rhythm action thing that has you stabbing at a grid of sixteen cubes to keep the beat. The amount of times I came to the machine and just had no idea what I needed to do to choose a song and get playing though was a bit disappointing.

Virtua Tennis (1999)

My brother Tom, my Arcade Club companion, has a love / hate relationship with Virtua Tennis.

This video, recorded back in 2013 as he soldiered through the arcade ladder on the Dreamcast edition of the game, represents very closely how Tom now plays Virtua Tennis at the Arcade Club a decade on, expletives and all.

House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn (2018)

Possibly the newest game I played on this particular trip to the Arcade Club, Scarlet Dawn was a real surprise seeing as a) I had no idea new House of the Dead games were still in active development, and b) it feels so unlike House of the Dead.

I like the original pair of HotD games a lot. They’re campy fun that take the shoot-off-screen-to-reload gameplay of Virtua Cop, and apply it to something grubbier, more bloody, and more B-Movie.

Whilst Scarlet Dawn retains the aesthetic of the series through its schlock, poor voice acting, and rigid corridor gameplay, similar to Daytona’s modern reimagining, it loses all of the skill based gameplay the originals carried.

You could get good at Virtua Cop and House of the Dead. It would take a fair few credits to get there, but with perseverance, a bit of memorisation, and quick reflexes, it would be possible to get to a point where a single credit would last you longer and longer.

I don’t think that’s the MO with Scarlet Dawn. In our casual co-op playthrough, we burnt through the equivalent of probably 20-30 credits each. In a regular setting, remember that would be one or two pounds a throw depending on the arcade, and I don’t believe, even with practice, you could cut that down by much if you intended to credit feed through the game.

You always carry a machine gun, and enemies always attack in hordes - great for spectacle, sure, but totally impractical when it comes to giving the player a fair shake at making it through a scene. Even with a constant left to right spray, you can’t keep the mass at bay. The lack of a manual reload as well makes it feel a little lacking in terms of moment to moment strategy too. You can switch up your firearm to a special weapon you choose at the start of each stage, but ammo is relatively low, so their efficacy really only goes so far as to make you shout ‘COOL!’ the first time you launch a rocket into a zombie’s chest.

The cabinet is cool though. Two handed guns, air pumps that puff you in face to simulate taking damage, a rumbling seat, and a massive HD screen.

I had a good time with this one in the moment, but it’s not a vintage release.