General Arcade and Retro Chat - Insert Coin -

o1s1n wrote: »

Arcade Club, and a line of people on PCs. Righty O!

Can't say I ever saw anyone dressed like that in the arcades I went to in my youff! Woodies, cigarette burns, crap stools and the deafening music from Tetris are what I remember. Still, whatever draws the punters in I guess.

Did The Rage open their one yet does anyone know?

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

I was a gamer in those heady mid 80's, with major jealousy of the C64 EU releases from the US, being a Speccy owner.
But some of the ports were superb.
US Gold, Ocean and Imagine, great games, possibly greater poster art work though!

Shush you..you guys got a decent Chase Hq port...the c64 one though....shudder

DinoRex wrote: »

Yep. And it's an area of gaming history that is usually completely overlooked due to it not really happening in America or Japan.

That's one of the things that pisses me off about the modern retro scene.
History plus big rant coming:

The 70s-90s period in Ireland and UK had a VERY different gaming scene to the U.S. Relatively lower incomes meant that games had to be cheaper , and the market allowed a larger amount of home computer brands to flourish.So you could have Commodore,Spectrum,Amstrad,Atari,Oric,Dragon,Acorn plus a few more all able to coexist, at least for a while.To keep games prices down most 8 bit games were released on tape, disk versions existed but tended to be pricier.While games could cost 10 or 12 pounds there was an entire industry built on games at a 2 or 3 pound sales price. Which meant you didnt need a huge team and a lot of money to produce a game. Its a bit like a cross between todays indie market and mobile games..a lot of terrible shovelware but enough leeway to get some really different,crazy or good stuff.Plus there were publisers who would buy older titles and resell them as budget games a year or two later.similar to the whole "platinum games" thing sony did from the ps1 era on.
Plus instead of one or maybe two different home conversions of arcade games , you sometimes had 10 or 12 all quite often totally different.
When the games crash happened in the mid eighties the market here wasnt really effected as it was so diverse.Nintendo never made much headway here as the market was so fractured, there was a half hearted push of the NES but it wasnt handled well, few releases, badly optimized and totally misspriced.(In the UK "Boots the chemists" was the main distributor)Sega did better by distributing the SMS via Virgin , and optimized games , and priced things to suit the market in fact it outperformed the NES sales wise. The NES did get a proper push here , but not until 93-94 and then as a budget console for younger kids.
By the 16 bit days things were a lot closer to the US market but the home computers still took up a decent market share had dropped to the two 16 bit machines (Atari and Amiga), and the fledgling IBM compatibles market.

What pisses me off these days is that because a lot of retrogame youtube channels and sites that cover stuff prior to maybe 1995 are based in the U.S.
80's gaming history is regarded as " Atari VCS/Crash/Then Everyone had a Nintendo ".But the worst thing of all now is that UK/Ireland retrogamers who weren't around then think that's how it was here.
Which it wasn't.
Anway here's two games that probably couldnt have been made in the US :



Bonus a great video of terrible games by a man who once said I looked like "David Brent, that twat from the office"(good times).Contains rude words (probably)





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*The US had Commodore/Apple and Atari and those were a much smaller more niche market than consoles like the VCS and intellivison.