(atari-produced usdm cabinet)
the realest of racing roots.

one track, one pedal, 2 gears, infinity degrees of movement on the steering wheel (really?!?!) it does everything it needs to do: be a damn good open wheel (as in formula [number]) racing game for the arcade market of 1982. letting off the gas or a quick shift into low is the most controllable way to lose speed for the tighter corners, but exploding into fellow vehicles on the track will lose you The Most Speed. The biggest flaw with this game is the use of an endless encoder for steering, akin to tempest's knob, might even be the same part but with a deep dish wheel attached. a spartan, landmark "pretend car" experience, served one checkpoint at a time. a response to sega's Turbo, but it would quickly be usurped by sega's response to it. might have felt better if the cabinet had any sort of lock or return-to-center on the steering, as i tended to overcorrect when coming out of turns, but the wheel rim itself was about the same diameter as what's in my civic, around 330mm!!! most arcade cabs have like 280mm-ish wheels.

(additionally, while the sit-down cabinet is most ideal, if you play the standiup cabinet with stool you end up with a driving position not unlike a truck/lorry)

simultaneously hypnotic and exhilarating. tries to convince you to become addicted to sugary energy drinks (the kind that is krating daeng mixed with bubbly water). unlike its sole contemporary at the time, it's less about going up to an absurd speed on a flat plane and more about finesse and the maintenance of your momentum while weaving your way through tight, undulating courses. floaty (duh), yet precise no matter your input device.

less than a year after a solid, but frustrating and flawed first outing, psygnosis clapped back with 8 circuits, pit/health strategy, one new team, and the most important addition, scraping - slightly forgiving collisions that don't bring you to a halt every single time you touch a wall. track memorization and ship acclimation are paramount to success at all speed classes. thankfully you're provided with the resources to put the necessary practice in, and every "event" is just a single race. i'm still enamored with the physics in the PSX wipeout games, from the seamless accumulation of boost as you glide over pads, to the perceived weightlessness until you have to throw up one (rarely ever two) of the air brakes. i could lap any given circuit here for hours on end (and probably have done so for like 5 of them), and still enjoy each and every corner as i just wooosh through them.

wipeout in general is an acquired taste, and the way it functions can come off as a bit idiosyncratic to those accustomed to kart racers, expecting something like "the britbong Jumping Man Kart of Formula Zeroes" from it. some might even jump to a hardline assumption that it isn't a racing game at all because it has combat. placing first and flying clean should be the priority of any player in wipeout Extra Large (because 2097 is a Large number). i tend to remember more about the tracks in the second wipeout compared to the third, but both are truly unparalleled as anti-gravity racing games (a tribute act notwithstanding). just about every other anti-gravity racing game just feels like a vehicle that's stuck to the ground, dependent on your imagination to believe what you're feeling is suspended in air. wipeout, (sans fusion and ESPECIALLY the psx trilogy) in comparison, actually feels like you're piloting a craft through the air.

it's floaty, because it should float.

nightmare labyrinths. sprawling, focused and concise. four disparate realms of enclosed torture, each with their own take on a set of explosion tools and nasty, nasty fiends. the paragon of abstract, less-linear first person carnage. beautifully brown.

after decades of first person shooting games, many of which just blur into an indiscernible soup of drab real life murder machines, the drab fantasy realms of quake still casts the shadows in which they reside.

forever the most first person shooter. the best game id will ever make.

using a monster energy can as an ashtray, in video game form.

CS 1.9 (post comp matchmaking, it was aight but not great in 2012-14) and 2 have been mass-scale neurological poison that eventually made me swear off of competitive multiplayer games entirely (for the better), and for a very long time they had sullied my feelings toward the entire cstrike lineage. genuinely forgot how much fun and surprisingly relaxing it is to get steamrolled on cs_office, cs_assault or any of the Fun Yards. had more fun in 2 hours of just fucking around one night for Counter-Strike's sake than i did in nearly 200 hours of barely making it to gold nova.

the addition of steam networking after the HL25th update makes getting a lil crew together for some counter-strike romps plain simple, romps with friends that don't involve ELO or enticing you to spend $5000 Real Life Money gambling on free fpsbanana downloads, a net positive for the spirit. no need to have people screaming at you because your slightly-off performance at a Computer-Aided-Toy might make some of their invisible numbers go down, no teammates or enemies shaming you for not becoming as much of a gambling addict as they might be. (as of writing actual dedicated servers are a bit spotty but it's incredibly simple to just get a few folks together for a few maps of fragging)

cs 1.6 gained the potential to become Electronic Sports by sheer accident, something it undoubtedly fulfilled as it matured. but it doesn't force itself to be one every single second the code is being executed, something that is expected now in just about every versus multiplayer video game, often through force rather than accident.

in 2023 the vibe of counter-strike 1.6 is less like that of its successors from the '10s and going into the '20s: it's not the little league coach yelling at you after slamming 5 natty lights during halftime for making their kid look bad, the kid that they forced into the Ball Game to vicariously live out their faded hopes of becoming a Sport's. cs 1.6 is the day turned to night spent at a revolving set of skate spots. the only people there that belittle you for your skill (be it a lack or abundance of) are probably assholes from the jump, but if the vibes are off, nobody's forcing you stay there other than yourself. sure some may be better than you at it, possibly even pushing you to improve either directly or indirectly but when all is said and done, it aint about elitism, as the spirit of counter-strike has unfortunately evolved to be. the competition in a 1.6 pub is good natured. if it sucks, you can hit the bricks without recourse, and go join another server.

but action quake 2 is still the better game. cl_righthand 0 is the proper way to play.

the oft maligned, frequently misunderstood space giraffe is a subversion of the tube shooting game, a subset of arcade shooting games that may consist of 5-15 individual tube shooting game specimens total. a part of me has a disdain for this game yet i consider it to be the best game of its console, the xbox 360?

(any good arcade game should leave the player with some sort of disdain for it to keep you pushing through)

now i arrive here, revisiting this game on personal computer first of all, even with the "bright flashy lights mode" this does not hit or vibe as hard as the 360 version, the way the backgrounds look and react to the sound and game on the 360 build is phenomenal sht... consequently this beautiful hazy game was hard to see things on the screen, so toning it down a little bit to increase clarity is understandable, though i still find the 360 to be the better experience if you have access to it. the gameplay itself, you are essentially herding, shooting (automatically) to maintain the power zone and defend from projectiles, spikes and other enemies that cannot be bulled. knowing where to aim your shots with the right thumbstick in the levels to be able to defend yourself & fill the power zone as you gather the herd to kindly take care of them.

a very soothing game, yet it does not skimp out on the difficulty at all. relax, yet maintain awareness. once you get used to the games whacked out mechanics the flow seems to become natural, until it's stomping time. leaves me feeling some sort of a clarity in my head. it still looks great here, i have not tried the clearer version of this game, but its presence is appreciated. a legendary fn game

i have nothing of value to add (this game didn't either) but i must admit that my favorite part of this game was when i was at a local alcohol consumption zone with many arcade games attached (they really should be separate imo) and went to go put chief keef on the Internet Jukebox after that shit was blasting this game's soundtrack to cleanse my spirit from the detrimental effects of listening to Hardcore Gaming Djent once a-fucking-gain, distracting me from important Gameming Tasks such as playing tempest (a good game) after a brief modelo time. (the modelo time was in the parking lot, a true burgerpunk moment)

the bush family is playin with that voodoo bad

bogwater oil company crusader propaganda disguised as the closest to an arcade game people born after 2000 will have statistically experienced. i did try to play it with genuine video game enjoying intentions (best moment was a noobtube headshot across the river and into the house on overgrown) but that desire just went away after getting even more depressed every time i looked at my statistics on the leaderboard, friends or global, it didnt matter. pointless statistics in a scheme run by the powers that be.

in order to fight off this game's primary intent (convincing teenagers to go die for an oil company under the guise of education, in its heyday i almost succumbed to an ammosexual autism spearheaded by this very computer program) i would proceed to nearly become another statistic (victim of the opioid crisis), join a hardcore search and destroy lobby (de_ for the cstrike fiends) attach a rubber band to the right analog stick to spin around, and another rubber band to attach a shitty earbud to the 360 headset mic, load up a soundboard on a laptop and wreak havoc upon the Most Serious G*mer's, absolutely convinced there was another human on the end of that mic, as i spun around rapidly in spawn, letting the rounds drag on as i hear the degrading words degrade into sounds no longer resembling words. that was the most fun i had within the metaverse of call of duty 6 lobbies on microsoft direct-x box three hundred and sixty's Direct-X Box Live Gold Connectivity service. i wouldn't be the f[THIS USER CAN SAY IT!]got i am today without the stern encouragement of the average microsoft Direct-X Box Three Hundred And Sixty's direct-x box live gold connectivity service user.

alteriwnet was alright too

ugh.

so i played this what.... 6 years ago at this point??? damn.. yet i have close to zero memory of that experience. (the moment i first played smb 3 some 24 years ago is still as vivid as ever) i got the thing that's collected about as much dust as my wii u pretty much just to try this, and ended up just using that as a portable neo turf masters/espgaluda 2/virtua racing/outrun machine in the long run, which i don't mind. (which is probably more indicative of my proclivities than anything else, the only first party-ish games i've got for that thing are this, bayonetta 2 [which i later found out isn't really my vibe but i respect it] and the arcade archives port of super punch out).

the competence at which the plastic makers in kyoto produce video games is certainly remarkable, and perhaps people study and obsess over it a bit too much, and cling on to it like so many fellow millenials cling on some half baked wizard-school books that use a lot of words to say a whole lot of nothing (ursula k. le guin did it first AND at least 20 times better). mario odyssey, and pretty much everything from nintendo post-gamecube is so well made that it coalesces into a lukewarm soup of well executed mechanics that don't even meet half of their potential. it's just frictionless and dull. when you try to appeal to absolutely every permutation of a possible audience, something gets lost in the process, all edges sanded down until it can be handled with utmost safety. jumping man nintendo, swording twink nintendo and spacer woman nintendo are basically this medium's equivalent of princess disney, cape disney and space disney at this point. something for everyone eventually means for no-one.

receiving any collectible in this game feels like if a crowd were to appear from behind the bushes and strip mall buildings to applaud you for crossing a stroad at the one marked and designated crosswalk per quarter mile. all reward, no risk. thanks, i guess. while i certainly didn't feel a borderline negative amount of gratification for completing this, as i did when i made it the final world of super mario 3d land with upwards of 60 lives to spare, there are parallels with this and the other Jumping Man amusement parks that have surfaced since the Super Mario Bros. went "New".

there are also parallels between this, Sonic Adventure and Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), except sonic team never really put their gemstones through rock tumblers because they were afraid someone might get a small cut, instead opting to serve it raw, straight off the geode with the dirt intact. that's just another thing nintendon't, but i wish nintenwould.

mario odyssey is basically cocomelon for people who hear this and genuinely go "just like me For real".