It’s been a long time since I’ve made my last blog post. But not nearly as long as it’s taken me to get to District 82 in De Pere, Wisconsin, one of the nation’s top pinball joints.
This one has been on my “arcades to visit” list (yes I do actually have a list) for years, but it’s taken me until now to make the trip. I’m a 3-hour drive from Chicago, and Logan Arcade doesn’t open til 6pm on weekdays and 3pm on weekends, so it doesn’t really work out to just take a day trip. It had to be an occasion when I happened to be staying in Chicago overnight, with no other specific evening events to attend to, which is a pretty rare planetary alignment.
That actually happened, though, when I took a day off just to hang with my buddy who lives in the Windy City, and we managed to incorporate Logan into our plans which otherwise involved shithousing various overly-engorged meat-centric sandwiches and consuming copious amounts of alcohol.
Continue reading “Arcade Visit: Logan Arcade, Chicago IL”
Are there some old games that you just never really…”got?” I mean, for classic gamers, of course we can’t all be experts at every single game (oh really? You’re a world champion at Donkey Kong and Tranquilizer Gun and Digger and The Glob and Night Striker? Yeah you’re not).
If we’re being honest, sometimes, for whatever reason, some games just don’t “click” with us. Maybe we didn’t get much opportunity to play them, maybe we just didn’t understand how to play them effectively because the rules and mechanics were too obtuse for whatever brand of neurodivergence we have. Could be any such scenario really.
As enthusiasts, we all want to be good at lots of games. Or, at least, understand them well enough to know whether or not they’re worth our time.
For me, that game was Crazy Climber.
Continue reading “Climb ’til It Clicks”
Mukwonago (muck-wanna-go), Wisconsin is a village near Milwaukee, with a population of fewer than 9000, and allegedly, home to America’s best apple pie. At 715 Main Street, there’s a building labeled Kay’s Academy of Dance — but if you’re not interested in learning the Fox Trot, go around back and you’ll find Vintage Vault Arcade!
Continue reading “Arcade Visit: Vintage Vault, Mukwonago, WI”
In 1982, Nintendo — then of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior fame, and not much else in the U.S. — released an arcade game based on Popeye, the beloved classic American cartoon character. Popeye was a smash in the arcades, and was ported to most of the home game consoles and computers of its day.
Unfortunately, that was just about the last we heard of it.
You guys. I’m worried about Popeye.
Continue reading “I’m Worried About Popeye”
While my family was in Lawrence, Kansas over a weekend in May for my son’s college graduation (kid just earned his Master’s Degree in Architecture, you know, no big deal or anything), we spent a day visiting a few fun places in Kansas and right across the state line in Missouri. Kansas City boasts a few arcades/barcades, including an Up-Down location (see my visit to Up-Down in Des Moines, Iowa, which I also visited on a trip to see my kid), but from what I saw online, the one that intrigued me the most was Draftcade.
Much like Up-Down, Draftcade is a small chain with a location in KC, one in Toledo, Ohio, and another in Richmond, Virginia. They seemed to feature a decent collection of video games and pinball, as well as Skee-Ball (which will always convince Mrs. SuperHyper to accompany me to an arcade), and of course drinks and food.
At last! A project I started back in 2021 and have picked away at little by little is finally finished, and I’m so excited to show it off to you now!
I give you…Laser Game SuperHyper!
Tim Lapetino is the author of one of my absolute favorite video game art/history books, Art of Atari (read my effusive post about that book in the link). Announced on Pac-Man’s 40th birthday (under the tentative name 40 Years of Waka-Waka), his and Arjan Terpstra’s follow-up project, Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon, was published a little over two years ago by Cook & Becker, purveyors of luxurious video game-based art books and prints. Though I pre-ordered it and received it upon its release, due to my regrettable lack of free time it’s only been just recently that I have finally had a chance to sit down and read it. I am happy to report that by all standards, Lapetino and Terpstra have once again knocked it out of the park.
Continue reading “Gamers’ Library: Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon”
As I wrote in a post this past summer, Taito is releasing the Taito LD Game Collection in Japan later this year, including HD remasters of their three animated laserdisc arcade classics Time Gal, Ninja Hayate, and Space Battleship Yamato. It was also noted that the collector’s edition would include a serial code for a bonus game, called Time Gal Reverse. But what is it?
Continue reading ““Reverse” = REBIRTH?!”
When we last left off months ago in Game Room Setup, Part 1, we had just finished moving into our house and I had a big mess on my hands that I need to turn into a great space for gaming, streaming, and chilling. Well, we’ve been here for about five months now, and I am happy to report that I have…a…somewhat smaller mess on my hands.
Continue reading “Game Room Setup, Part 2”
Remember when I wrote an article called Never Say Never, about games I never thought would come out, but did? And in that article, I had a short list of dream games that I still thought would never actually be released, and one of them was a Time Gal HD Remaster?
Well…guess what Taito just announced.
Continue reading “Taito LD Game Collection, or That Time I Willed a Game Into Existence”
UPDATE: The thrilling conclusion to the story, at the end of the article!
Love playing video games? And collecting them too? Well the game-playing doesn’t have to stop when you run out of lives — if you wanna roll the dice on winning and losing some more, why not try pre-ordering your next game?
Okay, that sounds like cynical snark right out of the gate. But I was thinking about this as I’m looking at pre-ordering a title I’m really looking forward to, and realizing that just pre-ordering a new game can be — well, a game in itself.
Continue reading “The Pre-order Game UPDATED 5.5.23”
Retro Game SuperHyper 