After stuffing ourselves last night with various skewered meat offerings at Oh! Taisho in the East VIllage, some friends and I went to Chinatown Fair, a NYC arcade that is apparently world famous according to the deep annals of Internet video game forums.

YouTube’s got a pretty good walkthrough of the place, conveying just how hardc0rez it is. Most of the games are head to head tournament fighters, many of them obscure even to mainstream gamers. There are endless variations of Street Fighter, Tekken and the “Marvel Vs…” and “Capcom Vs…” series. For good measure, Chinatown Fair includes some old classics like Pac-Man and Galaga and some new ones like Dance Dance Revolution, but the focus, especially by the clientele, is on fast-paced, combo-driven combat.

We went at about 1 a.m., and there were probably a couple dozen people there. Despite the ferocity of the competition, Chinatown Fair doesn’t feel too intimidating to outsiders. There were plenty of machines to jump on, with the exception of a few favorites, where joining in as a newbie would constitute a waste of a token. Two guys had set up folding chairs in front of Tekken 4: Dark Resurrection and were playing with Playstation controllers that they brought and plugged into the machine. I mostly jumped around, trying out the fun but expensive Time Crisis 4 ($1.50 per game), some of the fighters, a scrolling shooter called Giga Wing that I liked and of course a few rounds of Metal Slug.

I only had two interactions with the regular crowd, and both occasions resulted in my ass being surgically removed, cooked and placed before me in short order. I was trying a game called The Rumble Fish 2 and faring pretty well against the computer when a guy entered the arcade, popped a quarter into the machine and nonchalantly beat the snot out of me while talking to his friends (to be fair, he basically gave me round 2 after I told him I’d never played the game before). The second time, I imposed on a game of Super Street Fighter II Turbo and got sliced up by Vega. It wasn’t close, but it felt like a more legitimate loss, because unlike most fighting games, there’s no emphasis on memorizing 12-button combos.

It was a good time, but I’ll probably return to Barcade before I go back to CTF for another whooping.

Cabinet, Teh Hardcorez | No Comments »

Before I begin, I’d like to say that building the arcade cabinet has been an extremely rewarding experience. There really is nothing like playing the classics on your own machine, tweaking it so that it’s just the way you like it. You’re basically shaping your own arcade experience. And, even people who don’t like video games are usually impressed. Periodically, I’ll post information on how to build your own. Mostly, these will be guidelines rather than set instructions. I patched together my cabinet by combing through lots of Internet sources, and chances are you’ll want to do the same. I’ll try to help out.

–(gratuitous TRON cabinet!)–

The first thing to do is decide what kind of machine you want. They come in all different shapes and sizes (thanks to klov.com for those images), and what you choose may depend on either the functionality or the look you’re trying to achieve. From what I’ve seen, most homemade models stem from three basic types:

There’s the tall and thin upright cabinet, best for one or two standing players. My machine is modeled after the Defender upright cabinet. You’ll find dimensions for that at over here.

There’s the cocktail cabinet, where two players sit at opposite sides of a screen that faces up. Instructions here.

And of course the frickin’ huge cabinet, which usually allows for two to four players, plus extra features like trackballs (Golden Tee!) and spinners (Arkanoid!). Check this site out for dimensions.

Stay tuned ’till next time, when my Dad — a Jewish guy from the Bronx — and I start weilding power tools. Yikes!

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Here’s a shot of the arcade cabinet in progress. My old man and I have been working on it on the occasional weekend for about a year now. Control Panel needs to have some miscalculations corrected, and it needs some side art too. But it’s fully playable.

More pictures here, here and here. Bonus points for naming all the games on the marquee. A number of friends have asked me how it was done, so I’ll post more info on that soon.

Newman, Cabinet | No Comments »