Just had the opposite of that pinball game I had the other day where I had a gr4eat first ball and crap all the rest.
This time I had 2 shit balls that drained almost straight away, thought "oh well I'll still play the last one out for the practice" and got 10 million and a bunch of extra balls off it for my best score on that table.
(here's the full pages, so you can see it was actually intended as a pisstake; nobody in their right mind would ever pay 3 grand for an old, dead game like Space Invaders...)
@apzpins I wish we'd made an offer for this when we came across it in a seaside pub a good few years ago. We went back a year later to see if they still had it and it'd been chucked out :(
Reading more Play Meter magazines and just got to where they saw the innovative Atari polygon-based game I, Robot. I don't think they had any idea what they were seeing there and didn't know what to make of it. They'd just been through the false dawn of laser disc games and in 1984 it felt like their industry was falling apart and they hadn't a clue that this weird little Atari coinop had just given them an actual glimpse of what was to come, the genuine future of games.
I actually got to play I, Robot back in the day (my friend Tony Takoushi actually had a coinop machine in his house) and it was certainly an eye-opener (appropriately enough, if you know the gameplay).
One thing I loved about it was that they realised it was actually fun just to mess with the (then startlingly new) polygonal graphics and they had a separate mode where you could just do that. I was just starting my own Psychedelia experiments at that time and I felt kind of validated by that.
@mcchessers Fucking rare, no doubt. I did see one in the wild in a London arcade, and then the one at Tony's place. It made an impression on me much the same way that Tempest had years before, the idea that I was seeing something entirely new and important somehow.
@Jamesac68 it was the fallacy of isometric, it became a fad because people thought it looked cool but in almost all circumstances it's actually horrible to play in isometric. We got it particularly badly in the UK, where proto-Rare released some isometric Speccy games and for years afterwards, at least on the Speccy, there was an absolute plague of me-too stuff done in isometric which would have been far better off in a more conventional display mode.
it's amusing reading these seeing the coinop industry get its knickers in a knot about certain movies that they were sure would bring the industry into disrepute but which were actually a bit rubbish and immediately forgotten.
Giles likes to dig out and watch terrible movies so I am definitely going to have to look out ones such as "Tilt" and "Joysticks", both of which had Tosh Man in quite a panic :D
I'm sure there's a bit of bandwagon jumping going on with the legal threat adverts. You see them for the crappiest things, games into which not even a milliBraybrook of talent went. "Do not copy Smegatron! OR ELSE!" and then you fire up Smegatron in MAME and it's abject bobbins that nobody in their right mind would rip off.
(Best to read these old mags with a well stocked copy of MAME open just to check out what they were actually talking about at times).
