Smashed Street Fighter

For my birthday I decided to go with my friends to a new bar in town that has a few arcade cabinets. It has Donkey Kong, Double Dragon, 1943, Street Fighter II and Pacman. Channelling my inner-Billy Mitchell I mainly played Donkey Kong most of the night with my friends.

Then an old friend I used to work at Gamestation with challenged me to Street Fighter II, we'd never actually played each other at it before and had always talked trash to each other about who was the better player. I was always confident I could beat him due to my turtling Ryu style.

Anyway when the machine was free we stepped up to the cabinet to play, I placed my drink on top of the arcade cabinet and grabbed the controls. Then I noticed my glass starting to slide, then to my horror I realised the top of the cabinet slopped backwards. The glass slipped away from me and fell off, making an almighty smash on the floor behind Street Fighter II. The bar was quite busy and noisy, I thought to myself, maybe no one had noticed?

I looked gingerly behind me... and I saw a bar full of amused eyes watching me.

Oh the shame.

I ended up losing the Street Fighter II match afterwards too. Maybe that's proof that video games and drink do not mix.

Little Arcade of the Golden Axe

I was lucky enough as a boy to have a small arcade open up in the basement area of a shopping centre close to my house back in the early 1990s. It was by no means massive and housed about 6-7 arcade cabinets, but to me and my friends it was incredible to have this just on our doorstep. I'm struggling to remember all the machines, there was definitely a Gauntlet II machine. Gauntlet was the cheapest machine at 10p a go, but because you're always losing health it was a deceptive coin guzzler.

The most popular machine was that of Golden Axe, that was the one everyone crowded around to watch. Back in 1990 the big detailed sprites looked incredible, the music and sound effects... but most of all the magic. When you collected potions you could unleash magic, and the more potions you collected before using them the more powerful and visually impressive was the magic. Makoto Uchida designed a great new spin on the scrolling beat-em-up with Golden Axe's hack and slash play.

I remember one of my friends was the best at it and could defeat Death Adder on just a few credits. He loved that game. He was pretty crushed when his parents bought him a Super Nintendo for Christmas and realised he'd never get to play a home conversion of Golden Axe. He even converted my basic Master System version of it.

One weekend things changed, Golden Axe was there no more. And in its place was a new machine with odd octagonal joysticks. It was Midnight Resistance. Kei Akibayashi's novel take on the run and gunner wrong footed a lot of us used to the hack and slash of Golden Axe. But it did not take long before it was the most popular game that everybody crowded round in the little arcade. The rotatable joystick meant you could fire in a different direction than you were running and the power-ups for the weapons were fun.

Eventually there was less and less machines in the arcade and no new ones came in, so everybody became bored and lost interest with the little arcade. And I stopped going.

A couple of years later I rented the home conversion of Midnight Resistance for the Mega Drive, the controls just did not translate well to a 3 button control pad. But I enjoyed it despite its flaws as it reminded me of the little arcade and the good times me and my friends used to have down there. I decided to go down there and see what had become of it. The old place was now a pet food stall, but just a few paces down there was the 4 player The Simpsons Arcade Game. It was a pretty unforgiving beat-em-up but had great graphics. And a coin gobbler.

I guess some things just do not change.