Obscured View

So myself and Driph went to the Arcade amusement show here in Vegas yesterday. Aside from a few racing games and a nice Indiana Jones pin, it was mostly amusement stuff you’d find in Chuck-e-Cheese or the like. There were also a few sad realizations that we saw as we walked around that disappointed me, especially from a design point of view.

First up, one interesting trend is that several of the arcade games were ports of console games — racing and flight games. So now you’re paying quarters (and multiple judging by the size of these sit-down cabinets) to play the same game you can go home and play on your 360.

Wow.

Arcades were essentially killed by consoles, and now we’ve got console games bleeding back into that space and propping up the arcades that they killed in the first place. Interesting.

I realize that most arcades exist to take kids’ allowance, and nowadays the crane games and other games of “chance” are much cheaper and quicker to manufacture than designing a video game or a pinball for that same purpose, but it’s still disappointing to only see Stern turn out for the pins, and the Japanese no where to be found. SEGA and Capcom were distinctly absent, which was sad.

Of course, I’m only sad because I wanted to get my hands on Street Fighter IV.

So the other sad thing was seeing pinball, one of my all-time most impressive things to design, being trod upon. I can’t imagine the amount of engineering and design that goes into making a good pinball game. There’s more physics than I ever could handle in every curve, slope, and angle in those games. I can understand that creating a pinball game likely takes a good amount of time and effort, and since all the tables are unique to that pin, there’s a big risk in not making back your money on that specific table.

Oh, until now, that is.

STERN had the brilliant idea to take the same board — same layout, same light locations, same ramps, same mechanical workings, flipper arrangements, and mini-game — and re-skin it as two different machines, “Shrek” and “Family Guy”. All the components are identical in both, with the audio, figures, and shot names changed. However having both machines next to each other made me sigh. Driph and I were enjoying a game on the Family Guy one, and then while he was playing a ball, I simply meandered over and saw… the same pin with different skinning. I didn’t finish the game of Family Guy after that. It kinda sucked at my soul a bit.

It’s a sign of the times more than anything else. When I was a young arcade kid, I thought pinball was stupid — something that the stoned older kids would waste their time with because they were too high to play a game that required “skill”. It was only when I got older that I could appreciate that there was a game behind the flippers and ball, typically one that was much more nuanced than a lot of those quarter-eaters that I would play instead. Considering that pinball is all but nonexistant on consoles, I bet kids today wouldn’t have the patience for it either, nor understand how cool they can be.

Generational? Nah, more like a barrier to entry. “You must pay this much attention to what you’re doing before you get how cool this is”.

On STERN’s site you can find out it takes a year from prototype to production of a pin, so with that much time wrapped up in one, it’s no wonder. I guess the Shrek license was announced in January, so wow — fast turnaround on that one!

The Indiana Jones pin appeared to have a unique board, and was a lot of fun. The 8-player multi-ball was a blast… until I broke the game during it… whoops.