What are the games from yesteryear that you loved and adored, but for practical reasons you will not ever really be able to play again? Or at least you probably won't be able to play them again. You don't have to name games that are completely extinct and 100% inaccessible, but at least ones that would be exceedingly difficult and unlikely to find (I'm thinking of old arcade titles that never got ported to home platforms or emulators).
"Why would I never be able to play a particular game ever again?" Types of inaccessible games might include:
House of the Dead 1 - the Saturn port is awful and really not the same game as the arcade. Arcade cabinets are increasingly hard to find in functioning order, at least in my neck of the woods. Supposedly some sort of remake/remaster is in the works, but I'm skeptical that it will turn out properly. The motion controllers of today don't really do a great job taking the place of a proper lightgun.
Lucky & Wild - old arcade game where one player drives a car and the other player blasts enemies with dual lightguns. Impossible to find in modern day arcades, difficult to replicate with an emulator.
Lady Gaga Revenge - released just in the wake of her groundbreaking first (and still best) album, this game introduced me to the music of Lady Gaga. It's a fairly straightforward "Tap the notes as they come down the track" rhythm game, but I had a shit-ton of fun with it and for a low-price they included pretty much every song on the album. Tapulous, the developer of this and the Tap Tap Revenge games went bankrupt and issued a final software update that forced the game to do an online-check, deliberately borking every one of their titles. So if I wanted to play this, I would not only have to find an old iOS device running an outdated 32-bit version of iOS, but I would somehow have to download an old version of the game that didn't require a ping from the Tapulous servers.
Silent Scope - Not truly a light gun game, this was a sniper game where you shot dudes with a plastic gun, but when you looked down the scope of the gun there was actually an LCD monitor inside that magified and zoomed in on the spot you were pointing at onscreen. This is a pretty textbook case of a game that can't be replicated at home, so if you can't find it in an arcade then you're never going to be able to play it (at least not the right way). It was actually ported to PS2 and other consoles, but without the gun and scope it's kinda crappy.
Top Skater - in the same vein as Silent Scope, this is an arcade title that you simply can't bring home. It had a tilting skateboard that you can stand on to control your character.
"Why would I never be able to play a particular game ever again?" Types of inaccessible games might include:
- an MMO or online-only game where the servers have been permanently shut down
- Extinct games from online BBS systems of the early 90's
- an iOS/Android game that no longer runs on recent versions of the operating system
- a rare arcade game that is not emulated
- a Shockwave/Flash browser game that is no longer available on the web or backed up anywhere
- a rare arcade game with a unique control setup that cannot be faithfully replicated at home or on an emulator
- at this point, sadly a whole lot of light-gun games
- some kind of location-based videogame experience, like the BattleTech Centers of the early 1990's
House of the Dead 1 - the Saturn port is awful and really not the same game as the arcade. Arcade cabinets are increasingly hard to find in functioning order, at least in my neck of the woods. Supposedly some sort of remake/remaster is in the works, but I'm skeptical that it will turn out properly. The motion controllers of today don't really do a great job taking the place of a proper lightgun.
Lucky & Wild - old arcade game where one player drives a car and the other player blasts enemies with dual lightguns. Impossible to find in modern day arcades, difficult to replicate with an emulator.
Lady Gaga Revenge - released just in the wake of her groundbreaking first (and still best) album, this game introduced me to the music of Lady Gaga. It's a fairly straightforward "Tap the notes as they come down the track" rhythm game, but I had a shit-ton of fun with it and for a low-price they included pretty much every song on the album. Tapulous, the developer of this and the Tap Tap Revenge games went bankrupt and issued a final software update that forced the game to do an online-check, deliberately borking every one of their titles. So if I wanted to play this, I would not only have to find an old iOS device running an outdated 32-bit version of iOS, but I would somehow have to download an old version of the game that didn't require a ping from the Tapulous servers.
Silent Scope - Not truly a light gun game, this was a sniper game where you shot dudes with a plastic gun, but when you looked down the scope of the gun there was actually an LCD monitor inside that magified and zoomed in on the spot you were pointing at onscreen. This is a pretty textbook case of a game that can't be replicated at home, so if you can't find it in an arcade then you're never going to be able to play it (at least not the right way). It was actually ported to PS2 and other consoles, but without the gun and scope it's kinda crappy.
Top Skater - in the same vein as Silent Scope, this is an arcade title that you simply can't bring home. It had a tilting skateboard that you can stand on to control your character.
