Well, while I’m still in Ghostbusters mood, let’s talk about an arcade game based on them! I’ve been slow making new Arcade Center posts, but what better way to bring a new edition than talking about the Ghostbusters?

Okay, there might be a better way, but hey, why not?

Read on!

So what’s up with this game?
Made by Data East in 1987, based on The Real Ghostbusters cartoon series, this is a birds-eye view Third-Person Shooter/shoot ‘em up (think the bird-eye view stages in Contra 3). It can be played by up to 3 players on the original machine. Should be 4, but whatever.

You play as a Ghostbuster. I have no idea which one(for player one), since the character you control looks like none of the ones from the cartoon. He’s wearing Egon’s costume, but has black hair… Might be Peter but with the wrong costume and hair color? I mean, look at the next screenshot, all the characters are the same, only with a different colored uniform. And some colors which aren’t used in The Real Ghostbusters.

So what do you do in the game? Well, you shoot enemies, and you capture ghosts. You have 2 weapons: bullets (probably some sort of energy bullet) and your proton beam. Destroying enemies reveals ghosts. Using your proton beam you can reel them in and capture them(straight in your proton pack, it seems, no trap required). You can destroy enemies with either weapon at your disposal. You also get various power ups. There’s some that power up either of your weapons, others that boost your energy meter for your proton beam(which uses up over time, though it seems to go down VERY slowly) and invincibility (Aura power up). The funnest upgrade is the Green Ghost. Why it’s called Green Ghost instead of Slimer, I have no idea, but it summons Slimer, who moves around you at random and kills any enemy he touches, until you die.

Speaking of dying, you die in 1 hit, no matter what touches you. And you’ll die a LOT. If you’re playing this at the actual arcade, bring lots of change because this game will kick your ass. Each credit gives you 3 lives, but even with 3 lives you won’t go very far, unless you’re a master at the game. The screen constantly fills up with enemies, especially in the later stages, and if just a pixels of an enemy or trap touches you, you’re dead.

Why would you want to capture ghosts though? You can finish stages without even capturing 1 ghost, just killing everything in sight. Well, for every 100 ghosts you capture you get a life. Though only at the end of a stage when they’re put in the Ghost Containment Unit. And you need all the extra lifes you can get… if you’re playing on the actual arcade, of course, since you have infinite credits on emulator.

Overall
Not a bad game, but not great. It doesn’t really feel like Ghostbusters, and the developers could have TRIED to make the characters look like the Ghostbusters(seriously, that’s just lazy). The enemy design is pretty much just random ghost-like enemies, with most not really feeling like they actually came from The Real Ghostbusters cartoon(I might be wrong, since I watched that LONG ago(early 90s), and just started watching it again last week, and I’m only at the beginning of the second season). Most just seem like generic enemies that could fit in whatever other game at the time which needed ghosts. Also, weapon-wise, there’s little reason NOT to use proton beam. Unless your normal shot is fully powered-up. But if you die you lose said power ups, so you might as well just use the proton beam.

Overall it’s not the worst Ghostbusters game, and there is some enjoyment to be found, and it’s quite challenging. If you find this game, give it a try.
(no Save Factor on this one, since it’s an arcade game)

Stay tuned for more arcade center posts, I plan on doing much more of those starting now.

If you’re an arcade game fan, it’s more than likely that you also really love shmups. They’re a big genre in the arcade market, and there’s tons of them. And most of them are really good.

Here’s one that I really like: DonPachi. It also has a few sequels, including DoDonPachi, DoDonPachi 2, and some console releases. From my experience, the sequels share the same basic gameplay, so here I’ll only talk about DonPachi.

So what’s up with this game?
Well, It’s a shmup, made by relatively popular developer Cave (of Mushihimesama fame(crazy game >_>), and more recently DeathSmiles). It was released in 1995 by Atlus.

The basic gameplay is pretty much the same as in just about every other shmup ever released. Avoid bullets, get power-ups, destroy everything in sight and kill the boss. This simple formula has always worked very well. Here you get super fast-paced action, great enemy variety and a LOT of challenge. Yeah, maybe not as much as Mushihimesama, but it’s still not easy at all.

Here you have a choice of 3 ships. The Orange ship has a strong normal shot that goes straight, the Green ship has a slightly weaker normal shot but the guns on the side can hit a wide area since they move depending on how you’re moving and the Blue ship has an average normal shot that shoots in 3 pre-determined directions. All ships also have a laser weapon, which, from my experience, is just as badass on each of them. This basically concentrates all fire straight in front of the ship and it does great damage. You use that by holding the shoot button. But since it’s a strong attack, there is a drawback: You move at about half the normal speed. More destruction needs to come at a price.

You also have 2 different “bomb” attacks. The first one, used by just pressing the button, does relatively heavy damage to everything on the screen AND it removes every enemy bullet and stops any other bullet during the duration of the bomb. The second bomb attack requires to be using the laser and pressing the bomb button at the same time. This will make you shoot a wide laser in front of you. It stops bullets and does massive damage to anything that touches it.

But the really great part here is the challenge… if you like stupidly hard games. If you play just the first level, you’ll wonder what I’m talking about, because it’s laughably easy. But starting on the second level, the difficulty goes up instantly. It’s pretty much saying “So you go the basics down? Well NOW YOU DIE!”. Starting at the second level, the number of enemies increases, the number of bullets increases, the bullet patterns become more complicated, and most importantly the bosses become insane. Very much so. Their bullet patterns are a lot more complicated and fill up a lot more of the screen(though not a bullet hell like Mushihimesama), and the bosses are usually helped by normal enemies, adding more bullets to the fray. By the time you reach the final stage (which afterward just makes you restart the game, but “7 years later”), spending a credit for just a few enemies isn’t rare. So to manage with that you need to learn exactly what’s the hitbox on your ship, but also how to evade various attack patterns, and you need to manage your limited amount of bombs so you can use them when you really need them.

Overall

This is a very fun game. Any shmup fan should check it out.
It’s fun, fast-paced, it looks great and most of all it’s challenging. Not a “bullet hell” kinda game, but close enough. It never becomes really cheap, but it’s definitely a tough one.

If you never checked it out, it’s well worth trying.

Well, with an arcade cabinet with TONS of games in my basement, I knew I’d find crazy stuff. But… I mean, just look at this game’s title… you know it’s gonna be weird. Just seeing the title in the frontend, I knew I had to try it out, and I wasn’t disappointed.

So read on for the first game in my Arcade Center posts.


What is this game about?
Some… Guy… stole Babe Ruth’s golden Baseball equipment. And it’s up to the Ninja Baseball BatMan to get them back before they get used for… evil… I guess. So the Ninja Baseball BatMan leave on their quest through the US to find the golden equipment.

As with a LOT of games at the arcade at the time (this one was released in 1993) this is a beat ‘em up. Fight a bunch of cronies until you get to the final boss of the level. Rinse and repeat until you beat the final boss of the game.

This game sets itself appart from most beat ‘em ups though, due to the insanity going on in the game.

Enemies range from baseballs with arms and legs, to baseball bats, to cute doggies with guns, to airplanes, to giants made out of balls, to playing cards and a bunch of other crazy shit. There’s lots of enemy variety, and the game just keeps on getting wackier as you go on. Everything tries to kill you really, and there’s always some weird stuff going on.

The gameplay is awesome. Very fast-paced. You have a choice of 4 characters, each with unique special and normal moves. The difficulty is pretty good, ranging from “Pretty Easy” during the first level, and escalating to “Stupidly hard” fast enough. If you’re playing that at the arcade(if you can actually find it…), you can find yourself wasting a ton of quarters. Special moves, of course, take a bit of your lifebar so you must be careful. The boss fights are very insane too, with unexpected attacks and weird patterns, they’re no walk in the park. There’s a bit of variety too, with some stages that include driving segments. There’s a few items in the game, mostly health pickups (which you’ll definitely need), but the most notable is the “Pink” heart (a heart with “Pink” written on it). This calls the Ninja Baseball Batman cheerleading squad, doing big attacks or powering you up. Awesome stuff.

The graphics… Well, the screenshots don’t do them justice. Seeing it animated it just badass. Incredibly colorful, great animation, some funny and weird animations, smooth graphics all around, great crazy style, this is one of the better looking beat ‘em ups out there.

Overall, Ninja Baseball BatMan is a great game, and it barely ever got recognition(I only heard about it when I found it in the MAME roms pack), but if you find it, at least put in a few quarters in and try it out. I’d be all for a Ninja Baseball BatMan 2 game if IREM were up for it…

Recently I’ve been interested in a fun little project. I always wanted to have my own arcade cabinet, to have something similar to the arcade experience. Sure, I could just download ROMs and use MAME playing with a keyboard, but that just doesn’t cut it. And an actual cabinet with a game in it is… usually pretty expensive and not THAT easy to find.

So I set my goal to have my own upright arcade cabinet. And I found that the best and most cost-effective way was to make one myself. That’s how my quest to make my own arcade cabinet started.

And as you can see this is the #1 of my Arcade Center “series”, so I’ll have much more to talk about. I’ll start with my cabinet that I’m building right now.

Read on, there’s a bunch of info after the jump.


The games
First things first. If you want an arcade cabinet, you need games… or a game. There’s multiple ways to go about it. You can buy an actual arcade board with one game, or go the emulator way like I did. Get a good emulator, MAME preferably (for me it was MAMEUI32), and a recent enough version for your arcade stick to work on it. There’s loads of ROMs, of course, and with the advent of torrents it’s easy to find packs with thousands of games without much trouble. For example, the torrent I got had an overwhelming 6000 ROMs. Some of them weren’t working, or just plain sucked, or were just different versions of the same game, so I cut down that number by a few hundreds.

Of course, if you’re going that route like I did you’ll need a proper program to choose which game you want to play without trouble, and that of course will require a good front-end. This gives you an easy to navigate menu listing all the games you have (and, depending on the one you chose, you have various listing options). The one I found, which I think does a great job, is MALA frontend. Simple to use and it has a bunch of configurations. One thing to check with frontends is obviously making sure it works with the emulator you’re using. I went through 2 other frontends before getting to this one.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about this. Just make sure the computer you’ll be using is strong enough, as some games, even some that seem to be not very demanding, will lag on the emulator if your computer sucks (like the one I’m using… it can barely play Donkey Kong, yet it plays just about anything else perfectly). And if it isn’t strong enough, computers that can run properly aren’t THAT expensive.

The controls
The one important part of making an arcade cabinet, is, of course, the controls. Again there’s a bunch of options here. Buying a pre-made arcade stick, like the X-Arcade and the HotRod, or to make your own controls. At their basics, arcade sticks are just keyboards. So it’s possible to just make your own arcade controls. There’s various ways of doing that, like connecting buttons and joysticks to certain keys on your keyboard. Of course the internet is a GREAT resource for that, I found a lot of different ways to do it when searching for the right solution.

I, again, went the simple way and got an X-Arcade Dual Joystick.

A logical choice. It’s highly resistant, it works for 2 people, it uses good quality components, it’s easy to open up and mod if need be, it’s customizable, and most of all the emulator I used had a configuration to get the stick working with the emulator with no trouble at all. The only thing to remember with this stick is that you must make sure to plug in the PS/2 cable and not the USB, and make sure the actual keyboard is plugged in and with num lock set ON. Only then will it actually work.

The cabinet
Ah yes, the cabinet. Also an important part to get the actual arcade experience. Like I’ve said before, there’s a ton of ways to go with that. My original idea was to use my craftsmanship skillz (lolwhat?), and by craftsmanship skillz I mean using my father’s help, to build my own arcade cabinet and shape it to my liking. There’s many plans and measurements and such to find on the internet, so you’re not left in the dark on that. And if I had indeed made my own cabinet, I already had a chosen design and all. But then I found something interesting. I randomly ran a search on craigslist and what do I find? An arcade cabinet for 100$, all made and it was really good. I asked for pictures and it was pretty nice so I went there and got it.

It’s an authentic Nintendo cabinet. Not in PERFECT shape, but not in incredibly bad shape either. When I went to pick it up, the screen, bezel, marquee, frontal plexiglass, game and controls were removed, but the rest was left untouched. So now I had the perfect starting point to actually put everything in there after getting a good screen, a computer, the arcade stick and testing various software. AND I saved a lot of time too.

Where am I now?
Here’s what it looks like right now (sorry for the horrible picture quality, I was using a crappy camera):

There were some slight modifications to do: repairing a defective button on the stick(instead of just replacing it for an unused button on the stick… damn we’re stupid >_>), putting in the screen at the right angle (it basically just fit by putting it there and nothing else, only little tweaks to get the exact right fit), plugging in the computer and everything that needed to be plugged into it (the back of the cabinet is a random mess of wires right now), cutting a very small part on each side of the cabinet to have easy access to the white “Add Credit” buttons on the sides of the stick and…. that’s about it. OH, and we modified the speaker upfront (that the people I bought this from left there) and made the sounds come from there (simple modification require a set of working speakers of course), which is pretty badass. The arcade stick is at a perfect height, the screen is at a great angle, and the computer isn’t THAT hard to reach.

What do I need to do now? Well, I have to get myself a marquee, since now there’s just plexiglass with the neon behind it (it has a kinda random flashing effect too which is kinda cool). The monitor is placed fine but we’ll need to add a bezel to hide everything that’s behind it and give a more authentic feel to it. I’ll also need to get a bit plexiglass to put in front of the screen. The current molding around the arcade is in bad shape so we’ll remove the current one and put some black molding instead. There’s some other finishing touches to do of course.

Current cost: Arcade stick is 130$+shipping (got mine as a Christmas present, so FREE), computer can cost around 100-200$ (I used my sister’s computer(not that she cares, she lives 2 hours away from me now), so  FREE), and the arcade cabinet’s cost differs depending on how you’re planning to do it (for me it was 100$ for the cabinet + time to put everything together). So for now this cabinet cost me a measly 100$, and the experience is great. There’s still lots of work to do, this is far from final, but I’m already quite satisfied.

So that’s it for my first Arcade Center post (damn I’m good at naming stuff……okay, not really >_>). I’ll have multiple other posts in this “series”, mostly talking about arcade games that are awesome, but also about cabinets and such. And if you have some input about this, don’t hesitate to talk about it in the comments!