Everyone remembers their first arcade. For me it was a dilapidated joint dragged into the back of a van that drove around town for a week every September, when we saw if anyone had managed to get you out of the Super Monaco GP standings within months. between each visit. For Andreas Firinigl of Nosebleed Interactive, it was somewhere a bit more seeded than that.
“It was really dirty at the back of a dodgy video store in Stamford,” he says over a lunchtime whiskey as we chat online. “There were four or five machines – Rolling Thunder, Robocop and this Japanese board that wasn’t translated so I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. I was talking about it with a friend recently and he was like ‘oh I remember this place, there was a room for porn. It was a really dirty store. “
Indeed. It’s that sort of unsavory articulation that you first take in Arcade Paradise, Nosebleed Interactive’s next mix of business simulation and minigames.
“Basically, you work in this dead end in the laundromat,” he explains. “You have a few arcade machines in the back where you start with like three cabinets in the back. It’s concrete with no wallpaper, those spooky storage cabinets all over the place. In my head, it’s in this arcade. Stamford looked like. Either way, cabinets end up making more money than washing machines, so you start building this arcade.
It’s the central loop of Arcade Paradise, although it’s as tight as it is in Nosebleed Interactive’s Vostok Inc., a curious and characterful mix of click games and two-stick shooters. “There is a day / night system here,” says Andreas. “You order your arcade machines on a PC and then you have to wait for it to be delivered. And when she does, you might as well try to see what it looks like, and then complete a goal within her … “
If the management side sounds compelling, these are the minigames where Arcade Paradise’s heart seems to lie – in fact, calling them minigames seems a bit reductive, with many of the generous selection being tributes in their own right. to the classics of yesteryear. And in some cases, paying homage is not enough.
“The way we chose the games is to choose the ones that the folks at the studio love,” says Andreas. “If we can do them justice, or add something to them, that is. So Drop 7 – this is my most played game of all time, and I still play Blitz mode. I was wondering if we were adding to it. items, what is So there are random drop amounts – it gives you more survival chance – and you’re more encouraged to get chains. Get a big chain and we basically give you power- ups where you can shuffle the numbers or turn the board upside down, that sort of thing – and it works really well. “
It might be the breakfast whiskey, but Andreas has an infectious energy and has worked his way into his games just like I’m sure he will find his way into Arcade Paradise. Andreas is one of those bubbly balls of energy that you are sometimes lucky enough to come across on a game show like EGX Rezzed – apologies for self-promotion, and I might as well admit that our own paths s ‘are crossed there several times because Andreas is a friend of the site – where he will present you the countless small demos and prototypes that he has tinkered in his free time.
Turns out this is the genesis of Arcade Paradise, its publisher invented the masterpiece of finding a way to wrap them all together. “People have asked why we don’t just use ROMs in Arcade Paradise,” says Andreas. “Well, you can’t have that much creative freedom that way. Some of these games have full XP systems, upgrade systems, we have a match 3 game that looks like a JRPG with some graphics. type Mode 7 … To complete that and get the infinite modes for this you watch for 2-3 hours, and this is just a game. “
This is one game from a selection of over 35, although not all of them are cut to size. “The way we structured it is that there are demo games – there’s a side-scrolling beat’em-up, an OutRun-esque thing with an XP system – they’re like our anchors, and then there are smaller games. As I included the first game I played – Blitz on the Vic 20. It’s really simple, but it’s satisfying at the same time. Every game has to be worth it. “
It’s a project that certainly seems worthwhile, at least to older players like myself with fond memories of the backrooms that once served as the local arcade. They may not be as common anymore, which makes the prospect of having one that I might call mine even more promising.
Article source https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-04-29-taking-the-arcade-to-new-heights-with-arcade-paradise