I wish I'd known about this when I still lived in Baltimore. York is about 90 minutes north. I always loved Nintendo arcade machines.
There is actually a Tilt arcade in a mall near me in Phoenix, though. The lower level is all the typical redemption stuff and racing games, the top level has old-school arcade games.
The Atari Flashback collection on Switch has over 100 games. No Solaris, though, since Doug Neubauer was smart and made sure he actually owned the rights when he made it. SNK's collection is pretty robust. A lot of Taito games are showing up as Arcade Archives titles, but other than Elevator Action and Legend of Kage, I've never heard of most of them. One of them is a pirate-themed re-skin of Jungle King.
I remember a lot of Space Invader clones. Atari's version on 2600 was weird. Texas Instruments came out with its own version that Taito could probably have won a copyright infringement suit against. Gorf was a mishmash of Space Invaders, Galaxian, and Phoenix.
Fun fact: the company that distributed Phoenix in the US was based in... Phoenix.
My favorite memory of the N64 was Super Mario 64. It was like nothing else I played abd today is still one of my favorite Mario games. My other favorites were Mario Kart, Zelda, Star Fox, and Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon.
As much of a classic as Space Invaders is, it should be a regular feature on consoles. Galaga and Centipede are readily available. But for whatever reason, Taito generally makes it hard to find versions of Space Invaders that aren't on mobile phones, and I don't like touch screen controls in games. Thanks to Futurama, I will always associate Space Invaders with "Tom Sawyer," by Rush. And vice versa. This was the first time I played Lunar Rescue, but I did play a clone of it made by Brøderbund back in the day.
A Taito arcade collection would be great. Other than Space Invaders, my favorite Taito classics were Zookeeper (which I thought was a Mario game when I first saw it), Space Dungeon, Jungle Ki...Hunt, Elevator Action, and Arkanoid.
I remember playing the Operation Darkness demo. I owned a 360 but not a PS3 at the time, so I was curious to see if it was an adequate substitute for Valkyria Chronicles, which went on to be my favorite game of that entire generation. It wasn't.
The 360 was my only Xbox console. The E74 error got it, and at that time Microsoft was still in deep denial about the E74, so they wanted $150 to fix it. So I was kind of done with Xbox. I switched over to PS3 and got Valkyria Chronicles. The one 360 game I would still want to play is Tales of Vesperia, and I can get that on any of the three systems now.
Lunar Lander is on the Switch Atari collection, which is a compilation of all three volumes.
I downloaded the Space Invadera Infinite Collection (which is pricey for what you get.) I've been playing a lot of Space Invaders. I also played some Lunar Rescue. i never played the arcade version until now. I did play a computer clone of it made by Brøderbund back in the 80s.
I wish they'd do a full Taito collection with games like Space Dungeon, Zookeeper, and Jungle Ki... err, Hunt. It's mindbliwing that It's so hard to find a playable version of Space Invaders that isn't on a touch screen mobile device. It was only the most successful video game of the 1970s, after all.
Stage Select:
It's funny, I wrote something about Saturday Supercade, one of the first video game-related TV shows I can remember, a short while back. It had shorts based on Donkey Kong, Frogger, Q*bert, Pitfall, Kangaroo, and Space Ace. Mario looked a lot different on this show than he did later on in Nintendo's official artwork. Saban localized a few episodes of an anime based on Dragon Quest III in the early 90s that aired at 6 on Sunday mornings where I lived. That's why, when I first saw Dragon Ball Z a few years later, I was surprised at how much it looked like Dragon Warrior. Usually it's people wondering why Dragon Quest looks so much like DBZ.
The Legend of Zelda. I'll make a confession: I was a pretty regular viewer of the Super Mario Bros Super Show, and as a rabid Zelda fan, I tuned into the Zelda cartoon that aired on Fridays. Well, excuuuuuse me, Princess! But given what they've done with franchises like Castlevania on Netflix, I think it's time to see if a good anime studio could do justice to a TV adaptation of The Legend of Zelda, especially now that the series is much more developed than it was in 1989.
Fallout would be interesting as a Saturday morning cartoon show. It even has a character that just looks made for a Saturday morning cartoon, Vault Boy. The Fallout series already calls back to the radio serials that eventually gave rise to Saturday morning cartoons. You could have Vault Boy and Dogmeat having comedic adventures with Super Mutants, the Brotherhood, the Enclave, and the ghouls.
Some kind of Final Fantasy multiverse cartoon would be a neat idea. You could have a trio of Final Fantasy heroes, say, Cloud, Squall, and Terra, facing off against a rotating slate of bad guys of the week, ranging from big villains like Sephiroth or Kefka to minor villains like Ultros, Gilgamesh, or the Turks, in the style of the 1989 TMNT series or even Batman: The Animated Series. Mark Hamill would be perfect as Kefka.
Cage Match:
The Primal Rage dinos would just make short work of the Bloody Roar fighters like that poor frightened cow being lowered into the T-Rex cage in Jurassic Park. Besides, nostalgia holds stronger for Primal Rage. It came out at the height of the motion-capture M-rated fighting game craze inspired by Mortal Kombat and the dinosaur craze inspired by JP. Bloody roar came out in the time of Virtua Fighter, Tekken, and Final Fantasy VII.
But maybe we can throw Bloody Roar a bone. The raptor fighters in PR have the Bloody Roar fighters cornered... and then one of the T-Rex PR fighters reaches down and bites into one of the raptor fighters and the other raptors attack it in a frenzy, allowing Bloody Roar to escape. We'll call it a draw.
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I knew Go Shiina would be at the top of your list.
My own top five are Koji Kondo (my single favorite piece of game music is the Zelda Overture, especially the later renditions of it), Uematsu, Koichi Sugiyama, Hitoshi Sakimota (he composed the music for so many of those SRPGs I love), and Noriyuki Iwadare (composer for Lunar and Grandia, and was also heavily involved in the later Smash soundtracks.) My honorable mentions would include Bobby Prince (original Doom), Motoi Sakuraba (most of the Tales games, including the recently released Arise), Shimomura, Kenji Ito (SaGa), and Hiroki Kikuta (Mana), Michiru Yamane. However, you can tell your brother that Donkey Kong Country was primarily composed by David Wise, with assistance from Robin Beanland and Eveline Fischer.
In March 2013, I drove to Omaha, Nebraska to see Distant Worlds. I actually got backstage tickets for myself and my wife. We got to meet Mr. Uematsu (it was his birthday, as it happened), as well as Arnie Roth, who is the director of the Distant Worlds concerts. Mr. Uematsu autographed my FF9 cover art. I still have it on display on my shelf.
I'm just waiting for Nintendo Land to open up at Universal Studios in L.A. Definitely going to that one.
