Double Dragon 3 for the Arcade was a complete mess. It looked worse than the first two games and played WAY worse.
It also featured an in-game store that allowed you to buy weapons and stuff for real money. It was an early version of microtransactions.
It’s a mess and was a huge failure.
I liked Journey - the quick version is, Journey’s instruments are stolen and placed on five different planets, and they have to fly to each planet to get them back. Each planet is a different video game, with a different classic song in the background; you have to retrieve the instrument, then get it back to the ship while being shot at. If you made it through all five, the bonus round was Journey playing a new song (I read somewhere that the cabinet included a tape of them playing, rather than synthesized music used for the other songs) while you moved a bouncer left and right to keep fans from rushing the stage and grabbing the instruments.
Assuming this is limited to video games - there were some from the pre-video era that were just awful - my vote for the worst is Baby Pac-Man, a pinball/video hybrid consisting of a really small pinball table where, if you got the ball into a certain spot, it would start up a game of Pac-Man, but you could earn some additional features in the video through the pinball portion.
Yep. that’s the one I was going to mention, too but I couldn’t remember the name.
How cool… pay money to watch the same cartoon over and over. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Hey, I bought my kids the classic Scooby Doo box set… That’s pretty much what I ended up doing.
The full play through of Dragon’s Lair is about 11 minutes long. You can see it on YouTube if you want. I didn’t remember how risqué the princess was.
I never much liked “Asteroids”, and my brother was very good at a proto-3D game called “Zaxxon” that I never could master.
I used to live near this place, and tried my hand at those games once again, and didn’t much enjoy them this time either. Still loved me a good game of Centipede, and once again used the initials “YYZ” whenever I got a high store.
Tron. The cabinet design and the vector graphics were cool, but all of the minigames played clumsily and winning or losing always felt more like a matter of chance than anything else.
lol if you think the arcade games are bad you should see the home versions, there’s a guy on youtube called retro core that has a gaming channel and he’s a sort of gaming historian and he does a once a week thing called “battle of the ports” since 2012/13
He takes an arcade game and tries to find every version of it ever made and compares them here’s a list link from oldest to newest https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjnUa-_dnEnMFh2ANIXDqLShwMuDu2Ols
Once in a while, he’ll do a console-only game if there’s enough to make a video of it
He’s a British guy who went to Japan on vacation and never left… Note the first 50 or so he did before youtube existed for a long-dead site so they just have subtitles over the game sounds but there are some cool games here I didn’t even know existed he also reviews emulation machines and such and even occasionally does videos on living in Japan …
Oh and if somethings “utter shit” (one of his choice phrases) he has no problem saying so so the language can get salty …
Mine would be Altered Beast, I don’t think we ever got past the first level.
All the Double Dragon games have aged way worse than I remember, they all play like they’re in slow motion. I believe the console ports for NES and Genesis actually play faster which is when I remember it being good.
I heard once about a very strange arcade game, and I’m trying to remember the details. It was something like you’re trying to pick up a woman in a bar, and you have to strike a balance between being too forward and not forward enough. I’ve been doing a search for odd video games, but haven’t turned anything up yet. Hell, there may have only been one copy of it made.
Does that ring a bell with anybody?
Leisure Suit Larry?
That was available on several platforms, but not as an arcade game AFAIK.
Mine is controversial among childhood friends - Defender. That was just a mess, to me. I’ve got a MAME cabinet and decades later I still don’t get the fuss some of my friends made over this one. Then again, a lot of them don’t get my love of Asteroids (because they can’t fly worth a damn).
Old arcade cabinet called Vanguard. It was a 2D representation of 3D flying through a maze-like fortress, and I simply could not get the hang of how the joystick control mapped through 3D space. Crashed in 10 seconds every time.
Those were similarly frustrating to me because the arcade versions both rely exclusively on buttons where a joystick is easier to play with. I liked the Atari console version of Asteroids due to this.
Defender was my favorite game. I played it a lot in college because I was true to my hometown sweetheart (now my wife).
I could play for hours on a quarter after I mastered it. The trick became dying before you passed a score of 1,000,000 (I think) in order to be able to put your initials on the high score board. This was difficult, because at some point later in the game you got a new ship for every target you hit. I finally figured out to use hyperspace to self-destruct (about 50% of the time) before hitting the max score mark.
I still have a callous on my left thumb from the joystick.
And people say I learned nothing in college…
I also spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing this, and reached the point where a quarter would last me forever. At one point 7-Eleven decided they were going to have a video game championship of Texas, and that required logging scores at your local 7-Eleven and getting top scores across the state to qualify. I had logged just under 1 million, and then they told me that someone had come in and put up 3 million while being watched, so I came in the next night and put up 5 million. I think it was essentially an overnighter, and a tremendous waste of time. But also an element of “take that!“
I ended up going to the championship, and getting smashed by two other players in the finals. A lot of fun, and I got a very nice Centipede T-shirt and a trophy. 
ETA: One thing I learned during the final, which was a race to rack the most points up during an amount of time. Both the other players started out by racing across the planet shooting all the humans, which had never occurred to me, in order to get to the next stage much faster. There’s always, always someone better than you.
Ha-ha, Centipede, I was never much good at that game.
Congrats on the competition. I never did that, but did get a small crowd to watch my play in the college rec area. I imagine some of them saw “loser” on the back of my head…
Wiki says the top score obtained was 33 million and it took 38 hours to get there.
I rarely played for more than an hour or so, but it only cost a quarter. After a while, the challenge was to get under a mill to get you name on the board, as I mentioned. I don’t think the machine I played allowed you to do that if you went over. It was like another trick built into the game system.
I’ve never even had a crowd around me. The closest I got to feeling like a video game pro was in the early 90s when I was in computer lab when someone was asking if anyone wanted to play 1-vs-1 Tetris - the version where if you get more than 1 row at a time it sends those rows to the opponent’s screen - and she took one look at me and could see that in being over-eager, I’d played my hand and would demolish her.
The same thing happened in meatspace tetherball in the early 2000s. Our company had a picnic in a city park where there happened to be a tetherball court nearby and I tried to hustle a game by just softly slapping the ball around with my open palm to entice people to play with me but they said “you’re too good for me”.