So here we are, the first edition (And hopefully not the last) of ‘What Music Means.’  In this series, I will remix a song and you will hopefully enjoy it.  Or not.  Sometimes it may be good, sometimes it may be bad.  You don’t know.  That’s half the fun.  It’s like opening a box of cereal for the toy.  You might get the super-rare Shredder Power Ring, or you might get your 400th Michaelangelo.  Just be glad your mother bought you 400 boxes of cereal just so you could get your toys.

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Today I went to my favorite arcade for the last time.   No, it wasn’t shutting down like most arcades, I just couldn’t bring myself to witness it’s slow demise. Like an ailing loved one, seeing the decay of what used to be is heart wrenching.  What was my home away from home is now a husk of it’s prior majesty.

Before the lights got dim and the pickings got slim, the arcade was thriving.  The day I turned sixteen was the day I had a free pass to game town (not the name of the arcade).  It’s because of my fondness for the place I write not to lament it’s passing, but to remember it’s living; to share what I experienced, in a place few more will share, in this Internet age.

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Okay, I discovered this by accident. It’s how to play the full Banjo game from the trial.

Step 1: Get into Spiral Mountain
Step 2: Go to the giant Ape and make him hit all 3 orange tiles. Make sure the one furtherest away from the tree stub with the monkey is hit LAST. DON’T GET THIS JIGGY YET.
Step 3: Get the orange from Ape’s tree, and give it to the monkey on the tree stub. GET THIS JIGGY.
Step 4: Go to the mole hill above the tree stump, learn how to egg attack, and beat the Ape. A Jiggy will fall.
Step 5: If done correctly, the 2 Jiggys will be right next to each other. Jump right in the middle of them. You should collect 2 Jiggys at the same time, extending the trial.

TRY IT OUT. The only thing you can’t do is save.

Looking back on arcades as a whole, I’ve noticed a slow decline in clientelle variation.  From the very beginning, as I’ve mentioned before, I remember having all sorts of folks frequenting Ebeneezer’s, all coming together for one common purpose:  To play the vidya.

While there are certainly many people in a modern arcade at any given time, it seems like not only are there fewer females and non-whites, but the few who do visit these places hang around in little cliques.
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There’s one thing that would piss off an arcade denizen more than anything else:  When someone new came in and started ripping and tearing into the regulars.  Worse still, when they’d brag about it.  Essentially, as it was put to me, you made fast friends or fast enemies, especially when it came to fighting games.

When I started playing Street Fighter II, I was about four or five years old.  Of course, I was awful at first, but the big dogs took me under their wing, probably because seeing a preschool-age girl kicking ass at a serious fighter was hilarious.  Or maybe that’s just why I’d have done it.  Regardless, kids learn quickly and I was no exception.  Within a couple of months, I was the Ebeneezer’s Street Fighter II champion, and with every win, I’d receive cheers from everyone except for the poor sap who thought they could beat me.  It wasn’t until much later that I realized that I had become a secret weapon.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.  Every arcade had someone like me:  The person you’d trick someone into playing with when you’re pissed off just to watch them cry.  Even nowadays, I’ve had the (mis?)fortune of seeing a 300lb. zit-covered behemoth annihilate a muscle-legged little Korean boy at DDR, so some traditions still live on.

Now, to put this in perspective, not everyone who came in would be given this treatment.  It wasn’t some sort of freakishly cruel hazing ritual, to get your ass handed to you by a toddler.  It was specifically reserved for the jerkoffs who would saunter up to the cabinet while someone else was playing, toss in a quarter, destroy their opponent, and then continue from where said opponent left off, all without so much as a ‘Hey, can I play you?’  Worse yet, would be when they either didn’t say a word, and acted like their opponent didn’t exist, which could be topped only with an utterance of ‘Too bad.’  At that point, I’d be carried over and placed on a barstool, handed a coin, and given a reassuring grin.

Those types of people tended not to come back.

Then, there’s the type who stuck around.  They’d come in, be nice, smile a lot.  Maybe they won, maybe they didn’t.  They were usually weirded out by the little one who got picked up by mom at the end of the day.  They sure as hell didn’t play Street Fighter with me.  The struck up conversations with the people they played with.  They made fast friends.  Eventually they even talked to me!

And the community grew.

You know what I miss more than anything else?  Ash trays attached to arcade cabinets.  You never see that anymore.  Ebeneezer’s had several:  Pac Man, Galaga, Space Invaders;  they all had ash trays attached.  I was reminded of this when I went into a cabinet store in Manassas recently, where there was a stand-up Gradius cabinet for sale.  On the front were four screw-holes where an ash tray had once sat, proudly holding the butts of many-a-cigarette.  There were still ugly black stains where someone hadn’t finished putting out their smoke.

Nowadays, arcades are clean almost to a fault.  The carpets are pristine and vacuumed, the screens are wiped down several times a day, and there’s a ‘no food or drink sign’ visible at every turn.  For some reason, this frustrates me to no end.

Obviously, food, drink and cigarettes can damage the cabinets; it only makes sense to be cautious.  On top of that, not everyone smokes, so keeping the air clean is only polite, but in banning these things, something seems to have been lost, and I can’t quite place my finger on it.

We still have noise, flashing lights, fat dudes with sweaty pits (even more so since the advent of DDR), but we don’t have snack counters to chill at, the lights don’t reflect off the smoke, and that particular stink I find so comforting is missing. (continue reading…)

Most of us, maybe even all of us, have been to a pizza place, either it be Rocco’s, Round Table, Pizza Hut, you name it. There were always several arcade machines in a corner, the handles and buttons having been molested by several greasy hands over time, the coin slot having been eroded by many coins going in, the machine itself being stained over the years by misuse. However, for me at the local Round Table’s Pizza, there was a favorite of mine. The only reason I always wanted to go there. I spent a large chunk of childhood here, wasting several quarters over time, for one game in particular.

That’s right, Sunset Riders. This game was possibly the most mind-wasting and money-burning game I have ever played. I must have given that one machine over fifty dollars in the course of all the time I have played it. Nostalgia goggles aside, this game is a fast-paced shoot-’em-up set in the Wild West. Not much else to it besides playing one of the four main characters, all of them buddies looking for a bit of cash. Vigilantes. There isn’t much anything going on story-wise, and that’s part of the game’s charm. It cuts right to the action. Also, if you notice in the title screen, it properly shows each character. Nice touch.

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There’s something to be said for difficult video games.  Back in the eighties, during the height of arcade culture, games were not only a challenge, they were downright unforgiving.  Playing Wonderboy in Monster Land was enough to make a kid cry.  The generally-accepted reason for this is that the games were made to take your money:  You had to pop in another quarter every time you lost.  However, that difficulty transcended the arcades themselves, and home consoles tended to tear the player a new one as well.  Sometimes, this was to make up for the relatively short length of the games (This was usually the case for beat ‘em ups), though other times they were genuinely difficult.  Still others seemed hard as nails simply due to bad game design (Anyone remember Bayou Billy?).

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Ah, back in the 90s Capcom owned the licenses to a lot of awesome things, such as Disney and Marvel Comics and created some memorable and kickass games. They also owned the license to Jojo`s Bizarre Adventure and made one of the best overlooked 2D fighting games ever. This game is based off the popular in Japan manga series Jojo`s Bizarre Adventure, specificly Part 3, ”Stardust Crusaders”. The game is also known as Jojo`s Venture in some places.

Now, what is the most important thing in fighting games? Gameplay. The series`s unique form of superpowers called ”Stands” lend them self greatly to the gameplay of the game. The game uses 5 attack buttons instead of the Capcom standard 6, and the 6th button is used to activate the character`s Stand, a ghostly spirit that stands by the character and becomes the primary offense. This can be used in many different ways such as trapping your opponent between yourself and your stand or summoning your stand to attack as your character retreats. But some characters still use the stand button as a regular attack button due to their stands being perma-on. Stands also provide a slightly different, usually stronger moveset. If you take damage when your Stand is on, the Stand bar goes down, when it`s empty, your Stand shatters and you cannot guard for a few seconds. The Stand mechanic provides an interesting twist on fighting game character types like a trap setter or a charg character.

Aside from good gameplay, the game also provides other good things. The game combines Hirohiko Araki`s unique character designs with the standard Capcom anime-style sprites to create some interesting visuals. Sure it might not seem much if you look at the screen shots, but to a fan it brings joy. The game also has a interesting story mode which is somewhat deep for a fighting game. It tells you the tale of Jotaro Kujo and his friends as they venture to Egypt to defeat the vampire Dio, thus preventing Jotaro`s mother`s stand from slowly killing her. The story mode is composed largely of fights but also includes a lot of mini-games. The minigames in this game aren`t too bad, some of them being enjoyable, my favorite being the beat `em up segment where you fight zombies. The only problem some might have is that story mode forces to use a specific character in a specific plot point instead of letting you chose your own character, but this also lets you re-create scenes from the manga, which the story mode closely follows.

This game also has some internet fame due to Dio Brando`s super combo where he stops time, drops a road roller on his opponent, throws knives at his opponent, beats the road roller to an explosion and lets time resume.

This game has been released on the PS1 and a updated version on the Dreamcast. I reviewed the PS1 version.

I love this game. It provides hours of enjoyment.

8/10

Presumably ‘The Outfoxies’ refers to the act of out foxing one’s opponent, which I suppose makes some sense. The rest of this game…less so. A bit of a lost gem, The Outfoxies was created by Namco in 1994. Presumably fueled by sackloads of narcotics bought with the profits Ridge Racer brought in. Long before Super Smash Brothers heralded a new breed of super-competitive console gamer this was a title which, if anything, was an even more mad-capped take on the 2D fighter genre.

The gameplay is essentially a 2D predecessor to the likes of Power Stone and Super Smash Brothers. You enter a series of one-on-one fights to the death against various opponents including a top-hatted chimp named Dweeb, two Children Of The Corn-esque blonde children, a circus freak and her pet lizard and a wheelchair bound professor. The inappropriateness of some of the characters is what makes the game so odd. Maybe it’s just me, but shooting a pair of kids in the face with a machine gun just seems wrong. Ah yes, the weapons though. You start each round unarmed and with only your puny

Yes, that's a whale.

fists as protection. It won’t take you long to find something more destructive though, as the multi-tiered arenas are littered with a multitude of items with which to inflict pain. These vary from swords, grenades and rocket launchers to pies, barrels and lumps of coal (found on the steam train level).

The arenas themselves are also of note, with each one featuring destructible scenery. Ceilings collapse, walls break, pipes explode leaving new areas and weapons exposed. Knowing how to use the scenery to your advantage is as important as anything in this game. Conveyor belts, trapeze artists, even sharks feature in the various stages and can be used to your advantage or peril.

It’s difficult to fully encapsulate how bizarre this game is in words alone. It’s also quite well polished and a real blast with two players. Above all else, this game is just plain fun. It’s a real shame The Outfoxies never found its way onto a home console. It would certainly make a welcome addition to WiiWare/XBLA/PSN, with added online multiplayer. Sadly that’s about as likely as being attacked by a knife wielding primate. Do yourself a favour and hunt it down. If nothing else, it has a monkey in it.