Had a great day at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo yesterday.
First off some swag:
Got some new dice. The dark blue ones have holographic foil in them, and the light blue ones have liquid cores:
The last remaining Blockbuster, (located in Bend, Oregon) set up a huge booth that was a joy to visit and check out some tapes (What year is it?):
Got to check out some historical oddities:
There was an awesome Sega Lounge complete with a Sega sound system and period appropriate music:
And I got to play some of my bucket list arcade games:
More details on the arcade experience:
I was very fortunate to hit the arcade during off peak hours. In fact, no one was lining up for the exA machines, so I credit fed through SDOJ, Touhou Pefect Sakura Fantastica, and A̶k̶a̶i Crimson Katana. I also put a bunch of time into Touhou Scarlet Diablolique Fantastica.
My thoughts on each:
SDOJ - exA mode is the definitive mode of the game. The game gets off to a groan worthy start, were you have to pick the lingerie for your loli avatar. The game even goes as far as to tell you it's for appearance only, which really adds to the sleaze factor. But things improve from there. exA mode is uncommonly generous with resources by arcade standards, and features re-balanced patterns and a less insane difficulty level. Still, I didn't love how the game is constantly trying to wall you and how relentless it is with the swarming enemies and bullet walls. There are no 1-2 second pacing breaks anywhere except before the bosses. You will be doing U shaped dodging and cut backs continuously for five minutes until the boss shows up. Made it to the stage 3 boss on my first credit. This game gets pretty difficult towards the end, but I would think this one is doable by mere mortals with enough practice. Sadly, this game was largely ignored on the cabinet, in favor of Fight of Gods, which looked like a straight up kusoge.
Crimson Katana - I really didn't care for the exA mode here. Felt like a less good remix of the Slash mode while lacking the ability to fire your Katanas, so it doesn't have that visceral scoring feel of Slash. Still, a leap above the kind of awful original Akai Katana. Made it to the stage 3 boss on my first credit. Harder than Akai Katana Slash due to the mechanics, but uses the same bullet patterns and enemy placements, as far as I could remember. I guess this game is fine enough as a port of Slash to a new platform, but I wouldn't bother with the exA mode.
Touhou Pefect Sakura Fantastica - So I played a casual credit of the PC version a while back and I really didn't care for it all that much and never returned to it. But there's something about playing this in an arcade environment that really elevates the experience. I made it to the stage 5 boss on my first credit. This is a pretty chill game until a big difficulty spike at the Stage 5 boss, and then Stage 6 seemed quite a bit easier. Also, the game would weirdly have a half second second pause every now and then as I assume it was loading in assets. It wasn't frequent, but when it happened it was jarring. Heard multiple people comment "Oh shit, I didn't know they made a Touhou arcade game" so it definitely piqued some interest.
Touhou Scarlet Diablolique Fantastica - This was the real gem of the show. Also a pretty chill game, saw a bunch of people make it pretty far into it on their first go. I bet arcade operators won't be too happy with many players hitting 15-20 minute play sessions on a blind credit if they have some previous Touhou experience. I reached Stage 6 twice on one credit, but alas I couldn't claim the 1CC. As a consolation prize, I ended up with second place on the Raymoo leaderboard. Pretty much anytime someone changed which game was being played, next player up would go right back to this one. Definitely the crowd favorite of the shmups. I would say most people spent their time either with this game, or Gimmick Exact Mix. The other games on the cab didn't get much play time.
I came away with a new appreciation for the those two Touhou Fantastica games, and will be sinking more time into the home versions in the future.
Also, shout out to the guy with the furry dog ears and tail who claimed Grandmaster rank on TGM3. That was fun to watch and an incredible display of skill. He might never get laid, but he'll always be a Tetris Grandmaster.
And lastly, was the Dr. Mario Championship:
I really don't care much for Dr. Mario, but seeing it played competitively at a high level was pretty cool. Garbage blocks are
very oppressive in this, and players need to constantly adapt their strategies on the fly. Very cool as a multiplayer game.
They removed the bit where you lash a Nazi soldier for information, though. Now you just swing across his spiked pit, and he's cowed by your platforming skills into coughing up the deets.
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