Topic: The Switch Arcade Community Thread

Following on from last week, my parents wanted rid of an old telly from their house, would be rude not to use it! My new favourite thing is rotating TVs for vertical shooters

I can also play Mega Drive again as the other telly (a new 4K) doesn't have a SCART socket, this one does I had a HDMI > SCART converter for the 4K but it introduces lag. The Switch has completed my games room, it's my favourite machine by far!

@monkeyspasm Nice one,what an amazing set up you have.

@monkeyspasm I am in awe! Amazing

@meppi64 Can I just say again how happy I am to have come across this thread?

I'm a huge fan of shooters and shmup games, and the contest here for Danmaku Unlimited 3 brought my passion for them back to life it seems. Now I want to play everything again, from favorites I've had on the Dreamcast and 360, to games I never got around to playing. I'm going to look more into Bullet Soul now.

@monkeyspasm That's simply incredible. Now I know what I want to do with my garage when the rest of the house has been renovated.

@CaffeinatedGamer
Couldn't agree more.
I have been looking for a place such as this for a decade now and always failed to find something that really felt home.
So many places are drenched in negativity or fanboy wars, and when you find a place for a nice topic such as this, it tends to attract an air of arrogance quickly.
Luckily, none of this is to be found here, and I hope it can keep growing without turning into something like that. Guess we'll all just have to be vigilant and emphasise the positive things over the negative ones.

A huge part is thanks to @OorWullie really. He went though article comments and funneled the names he could find into a topic that is extremely tough to get of the ground. Believe me, I've tried a couple of times to get some kind of high score challenge for classic games off the ground and failed miserably every time.
Personally I'm here due to a big part of @Lroy since he approached me in the comments since we like the same kinds of games.

So yeah, I'm really glad to be here as well after wondering the vast wasteland of toxic message boards for over 10 years now.

These challenges in particular have re-lit my passion for these games and then some.
It's not a surprise I've been scouring for classic Saturn, Dreamcast, 360 and even Japanese Famicom and GameBoy games since joining in the fun here. Really want that Money Idol Exchanger for Game Boy that I never knew existed before a week or two ago....lol

It also helped in rekindling the fire for the preservation project I've been working on for 15 years. Bringing classic UK video game magazines back to life.
It's really easy to burn through your passion for something like that when you work 40 hours on a magazine and sometimes only get 1 or 2 positive comments on them. It can seem like you're wasting a huge chunk of your life doing something no once cares about any more.
And then you discover a small group of people who do share the same love and passion for the things you adore.

Speaking of magazines, I just finished issue 23 of the Official Sega Saturn Magazine literally minutes ago.
And since this is an Arcade thread with lots of shoot em up love, I don't think anyone will mind me posting 2 of my favourite articles in this issue.

Man, that system didn't get anywhere near the love it deserved back in the day...

Out at work all day today but just wanted to say I love the Switch Arcade Community we have forged here and I'm sending hugs to you all 👍

This thread has been forged out of pure epicness!

Tengai is just amazing!

@meppi64 Nice work, Salamander Deluxe and Thunderforce V looks superb.Oh to have those on Switch. I wonder what the chances are of it ever happening? I never really liked Thunderforce IV back in the day, couldn't get into it. I probably would now if I gave it a go though.

@GrailUK hear, hear!

@OorWullie
Yeah, both of those are really really good.
Doubt we'll be seeing either of them again any time soon though.
Sega owns Thunder Force now and doesn't seem to be interested in doing anything with it after 6.
And Konami, well is being Konami in 2018, which is just as much of a tragedy as Sega nowadays, heck even moreso.

Oh, I don't know if anyone would be interested in this, but for someone looking for a crazy hack & slash game, Amazon.fr has Fate/Extella for €28 now. (Just ordered it myself actually) Seems to be getting harder to find for some reason and ebay prices are starting to creep up. Perhaps it didn't get a very high print run and there won't be a second run?
But even better yet, they also have Stern Pinball Arcade on Switch for €23!
That's an absolute steal for that price. Worth it alone for Ghostbusters if you ask me, but then you got Star Trek and AC/DC on there as well which are both brilliant and a couple of other really good tables, besides one or two that I don't really like.

@meppi64 Right on! I completely understand the process of finding a good, and especially positive, message board. Growing up I spent much of my days posting on the IGN boards in the Dreamcast and Sega boards, but as the years continued to pass the community disappeared. So I kinda went my own direction to talk about games and left message boards behind. But it's so easy to get back into again once you find a good home with an awesome community that shares similar passions.

It sounds like I owe another thank you to @OorWullie then for getting this entire thing started. Thank you!

Shmup fans have always been great though. And having a helpful community to share tricks and tips makes the experience that much better. I remember playing through Akai Katana on 360 and putting up a decent score. I posted the video on YouTube as a top 100 attempt, which is good, right? Well, I got a helpful tip on how to increase my score and immediately jumped to 78. But then I increased it even more soon after.

But that right there is where I think I'll start having a lot of fun. If I know people in the community here are playing a certain game at the moment, Bullet Soul, for example, it'll cause me to want to go play it as well. So I could easily start playing more of my classics again in addition to each new game that comes out on Switch. Sounds like fun times to me!

Speaking of classics, that's an awesome project you have to bring classic magazines back to life. What's the process, exactly? And see, that right there, now I want to grab a Saturn again for some more fun. Haha.

@CaffeinatedGamer I'm the same way. When I get to read people how people are excited about certain games, I want to jump back into them even though it might have been many years since I last played it.
And especially in this kind of setting, that push is even stronger.
I tend to get distracted very easily though with any shine new (or old) thing someone flashes in front of me. lol
Just now I actually ordered a bunch of games thanks to getting back into Musou Orochi 2 yesterday evening, even though I have played it years ago on PS3, then again on PS4, Wii U and even Vita.
Been a long time since I really played a musou game besides Hyrule Warriors, which I quit the moment I knew a definite edition was on it's way on my new favourite system.
I became a huge fan of KoeiTecmo about 5 years ago during a long summer vacation as I wanted something different to play and decided to give the musou genre a try, even though it was being ridiculed to hell at that point. Grabbed Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 and had a blast playing it that summer.
Quickly got a couple more games like it and before I knew it, I was importing Japan only releases that never came out here.
From playing a couple of hours yesterday, I realised just how rusty and inadequate my extremely limited Japanese vocabulary is and how hard it can be to navigate a game with so much kanji in it when you have forgotten even the basics of how it used to play.
So I'm looking into grabbing a dictionary, taking a bunch of pictures and trying to hammer the most used words into my skull in the hope that it somehow will stick and make my life a bit easier in upcoming imports.
Should be useful for EDF5 as well I recon. Love that series and that's probably my most wanted series on Switch, followed by Gundam Breaker.

As for the site, you can either read a whole bunch of articles on the site itself, although the pages are quite small for todays displays, or you can download the full magazines (I recommend the Max-Rez versions for the best possible quality) and read them in all their glory.
I got together with a couple of the editors of several of these magazines to make sure they were okay with them being digitised like this and even got a bunch of missing MAXIMUM issues from Richard Leadbetter himself a long time ago to digitise and restore to their former glory.
http://www.outofprintarchive.com/news.html
You'll find the download links in the Magazines section of the site.
I take about 40-50 hours per 100 pages, which might seem like a stupid amount of time, but then again, it's not just a quick and dirty scan I'm going for. There are a bunch of examples here: http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articles/features/out-of-pri...
Especially at the bottom, you can see clickable examples of what a page might look like before and after I'm finished with them.
Everything is ad free and I've never accepted any money or such, which is why I actually started my own site nearly 10 years ago. I've been at a couple other sites, but in the end those didn't seem to have the best of intentions. So everything is paid out of my own pocket and I'm not interested in gathering a following or becoming an internet celebrity or something silly like that.
Which is why I hope it's all right to post this here as I know self-promotion is kinda frowned upon, and understandably so.

@meppi64 Actually, I've now decided that you are a bad influence on me. Two seconds on your site and I'm already on eBay searching for games.

That's so awesome what you are doing by creating digital versions of those magazines, preserving a piece of gaming history. I'll have so much fun going through those old articles and reading up on games. The amount of time it takes you to do that is significant, yeah, but it's well respected and appreciated.

I'm a big racing fan as well, both sim and arcade. I immediately saw the Le Mans 24 page and then found out about Motor Raid. I want to play that now! I love all games and can pretty much get into any genre as long as it's done right, but I have a special connection to racing and shmups. And it probably all stems from the competitive side of it all. High scores and fastest lap times.

I enjoy the Dynasty Warriors games from time to time. I think the most recent one I got into though was the Vita version. So yeah, it's been a while. However, I did play a lot of Hyrule Warriors as well. The games actually remind me a lot of Ninety-Nine Nights, which I loved that when I first played it. I actually just now discovered that Tetsuya Mizuguchi served as Producer on that game. He's the one responsible for Rez and Child of Eden. love Of course, that also includes Lumines and Every Extend Extra which are also great games. I can't wait for Lumines Remastered on the Switch.

Been some very interesting and notable arcade games hit the Switch eShop recently. All of which are calling me like wallet-opening sirens 😂

From ZeroDiv we had Psikyo's sequel to SAMURAI ACES mentioned above in glowing terms by @oorwullie

We got Hamster Arcade Archives release of Nintendo's much desired PUNCH-OUT! coin-op. Hamster also completed the Neo Geo SENGOKU beat-em-up trilogy with parts 2 and 3 in quick succession.

So what's coming up next? I know we have had some pretty big announcements but memory fails me sometimes. Do help an oldie out and remind me 👍

Always like to look forward to each weekly eShop arcade offerings. One day we'll get that R-TYPE Arcade Archives release Hamster have promised. Shmup royalty right there. Fingers crossed for DOUBLE DRAGON 2 and CONTRA and GRADIUS and....

@Lroy Next week brings Samurai Shodown 3, Ninja Kid and the the big one, Dragons Blaze. Just the 1 from that selection for me.

Sengoku 3 is superb. The amount of moves each character has, the difficulty, the graphics and animation are all top notch. Great game for Caravan mode too,that's what I've been playing. Think I'm 6th or 7th on the leaderboard. Won't be there for long though. Punch Out is really good too, a nice piece of gaming history to have on the console.

@OorWullie Yeah, I'll be grabbing TENGAI, SENGOKU 3 and PUNCH-OUT! In the very near future and of course DRAGON'S BLAZE as soon as that one hits.

EDIT: NINJA KID will go on the wishlist for further consideration. May have to see if i can try that game on MAME first and see.

@OorWullie Oh, I just looked up Dragon Blaze and watched the video in the news article here on Nintendo Life. I haven't heard of it before, but I'll definitely be grabbing that one next week. It looks fantastic!

Edit: I forgot how much fun and even how challenging Nanostray is on the DS. I was in the mood to play that again and it destroyed me for the first 4-5 playthroughs of the first stage. I finally got the hang of it again and beat my old score though. Has anyone else played this series in the past?

BAD DUDES... has been added back to the coming soon section of the North American eShop. Release date of April 5th. Price $7.99.

No sign on the European eShop yet. 😢

@CaffeinatedGamer I think I've played this game on the DS or one of them at least. Isn't this the same folks behind that 3D top down shooter for Wii U and 3DS where your ship is Micro-size and you shoot bacteria? It's late here and I may be getting mixed up.

@CaffeinatedGamer haha, sorry about that!
Thanks for the kind words! Most people forget that classic gaming was more than just the games themselves. It was the atmosphere, the camaraderie and friendly challenge of going up against each other, but also sharing tips and learning from one another.
And in the age of the internet, it's easy to forget how big a role magazines played back then.
I have a lot to be thankful for to the people who put together CVG between 1995-2000, Official Sega Saturn Magazine and the French Joypad magazine. They opened my eyes to so many great games that a lot of others simply wouldn't cover, either because they weren't popular enough or because they didn't see any value in them.
And yet somehow many of those games ended up being some of my most cherished memories during those years.
So I want to do my best to bring these magazines back to life, give them the attention to detail and love they really deserve and try and make it so that they will be available to anyone who wants to go back in time, to still read them many years from now.

Ninety-Nine Nights is one of the few games from Tetsuya Mizoguchi that I somehow missed out on.
That being said, I just ordered a copy on ebay for under £5.
Speaking of racing games, till this day when you ask me whats my favourite racing game is, there's two that immediately come to mind. Sega Rally 1995 and WaveRace 64.
I can (and do) still put Sega Rally on today and lose hours playing it. It's like going into a trance and watching the game play itself at this point. Really strange. Not surprisingly it's by Mizoguchi as well.
The only racing game that I can compare that feeling with it the Zone Mode in WipEout HD/Pure, although it's not quite the same.
The WipEout series is actually the series what kept convincing me to buy the next Playstation system actually.
Still love the first 2 the best with Pure as a close follow up.

Lumines was such a wonderful surprise. It still baffles me how we are getting a remake of my favourite iteration of that game, and on Switch no less.
I'm going to lose many hours to that one again for sure. It's again, one of those perfect games to free your mind and just drift away into the game.
The man is a pure genius at that!