Category Archives: Arcade

Computer Spiele Museum in Berlin!

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This weekend I’ve been to Berlin with my friend NinjaBrite, we had a relaxing weekend with a lot of fun. One of the best things we experienced though was the Computerspielemuseum (Video Game Museum). It’s a permanent museum on Karl Marx Allee in central Berlin and it’s got a lot to offer!

NinjaBrite outside the computer spiele museum in Berlin

They had loads of retro gaming consoles on display in pretty green boxes, all labeled with the name of the system. I photographed mainly all the ones I didn’t own, so I would remember what to look for next ;D There was only one game displayed in these green boxes, which was Atari’s E.T.! But there were lots of other games there that you could play in other areas.
Console display Console display
Atari Touch Me

They also had an arcade area with original old arcade cabinets that were free to play!! This was totally exciting for me since I’ve hardly ever gotten to play any arcade machines, except when I was in Japan. The coolest one was of course the original Pong arcade cabinet, and an old spacey green arcade cabinet with some kind of shooter. You only got the try these out on mondays though and we were there on a thursday :( but we got to play a lot of Donkey Kong, Space Invaders II, Frogger, Gauntlet, Asteroids and others ^^
Me with the first pong arcade cabinet

Spacey old retro arcade cabinet

Donkey kong arcade          Asteroids arcade          Asteroids arcade

Asteroids arcade          Space invaders II Arcade          Frogger arcade

Space invaders II Arcade          Space invaders II Arcade          Poly play

Gauntlet arcade cabinet artwork          Gauntlet arcade          Gauntlet arcade

There were a lot of cool things to see, read about and experience. For example they had 4 computers playing Ludo against eachother, a 5 player pong you could try out, a computer you could ask anything and another computer which was impossible to beat!
computers playing Ludo
5-player pong
Ask the computer anything! 42?
NinjaBrite tried so many times to figure out how to beat the computer in this light game

Immediately at the entrance there were life sized statues of famous characters such as Link from Zelda, Rayman, Jak & Daxter and Lara Croft ^_^
Jak & Daxter, Link, Rayman, Lara Croft

They also had a GIANT Atari Joystick! It was even working and hooked up to an Atari 2600 Junior and you could play Pacman with it ^_^ I of course had to try it out! It was difficult but worked well!
Giant atari joystick Me playing with giant arcade joystick

Another cool game we tried out was Rom Check Fail! This was a recently made game (don’t remember by who..) that was basically a bunch of old classic games merged together in one big glitch! Really hard but really fun to play ^^ One second you’re playing as Pacman in Mario world, the next your the Asteroids ship flying around in Hyrule haha ^_^
Rom Check Fail!

This was a GREAT museum! And I recommend anyone going to Berlin to go see it ^_^

Pinball fantasies and some xbox

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I was at a housewarming party on friday, and we had a lot of fun playing an old classic Pinball machine from 1976! It was Elton John’s Captain Fantastic! Haha..
First round we played I actually won, but I guess that was just beginner’s luck because every game after that I lost.. =(
I took some pictures of this beautiful machine: ^^

Or “Bally Capt. Fantastic”, look how silly Elton John was ^___^

I was player 2 ^_^ 43.180 point, however people later got up to around 70.000.. but I was proud since I had never even played on a real Pinball machine before. It was completely different from the pinballs on video games..and much harder!
          
“Feel them bumpers” and “Buzz them buzzers champ” ^_^

And tonight I’ve been finishing a game that I started a looong time ago with my friend Becky. It was Borderlands for Xbox 360, we had already finished the story mode and taken every achievement in the game except the two last ones for the final expansion pack. These were not hard in particular, however they take a long time to finish. It’s the Underdome expansion, and it’s basically just about killing off hordes of enemies. Each stage takes about 2-3 hours, and there was a total of 6 of them.. We only had two left, but never really took the time to finish them until today, so JIPPIE! Today we have maxed out the achievements for Borderlands (amazingly awesome game btw) ^_^
Borderlands massacre .. hehe

NINJA BASEBALL BATMAN!!!

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I have it, a Korean version anyway of both the first game and apparently a sequel, it just recently arrived from ebay <3 I’m just waiting for my new computer to arrive so that I can play it. It would have been a lot cooler to find an actual arcade machine with the game though.. well I’ll just have to keep an eye out for that on Ebay ;D

Trip to New York

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In December I went to the U.S of A with my boyfriend. We first went to New York for a week and then down to Miami Beach for another week. In New York I found two game stores which had a bunch of exciting retro games! However, it was in general extremely pricey..

The first store was awesome, however a bit disorganised. I didn’t wanna take any pics inside cause there was this bald rude looking man behind the counter, but they had like EVERYTHING. It didn’t look very Retro going up the stairs, however they had mainly Atari and NES stuff ^_^ My boyfriend got bored quickly though and wanted to leave =(

The second store we found was so awesome! They had everything so tidy and neatly displayed, but everything was behind glass and even more over prized =( They had a bunch of stuff I wanted to buy, like Donkey Kong Game & Watch! But it was too expensive.. I’ll just have to Ebay it instead…

While in Miami we decided to look up some vintage arcades where they might still have some of the old classics like Pacman and stuff. My nifty friend Gaston googled a bunch of places that might have the retro arcade machines close by, one of them had appeared in the documentary “Chasing ghosts beyond the arcade” (Youtube it, it’s an interesting documentary). So we rented a car to get to the places, a big-ass-mother-f*cking-jeep. I’ve never driven a bigger car, and it was scary as hell to drive on the american highways among all the other big-ass cars  (and I HAD to drive since I was the only one with a licence).

The first place we went to had no vintage stuff at all, and not many games at all.. The guys stopped to shoot some Terminators for a while, and after that we left.

The second one was way out in nowhere, called Gameroom Superstore and was the one that I think was part of the documentary. It had been a place for restoring and selling old arcade machines. It was however closed, even though the signs were still outside, apparently for several years according to the neighbours that we asked… it was sad. The place still had their website online.. they should shut that thing down! It’s misleading >_<

People had even vandalised the text on the door to the Gameroom Superstore. “This is not a coin operation gameroom” was now “This is not in operation gay room” … So after having driven for hours back and forth we went back to Miami Beach.
It really felt like chasing ghosts.. there were no vintage arcade machines to be found anywhere. The closest thing we came to that was an old pinball machine in a bar in Miami, but it’s not the same =´(

Apart from the lack of vintage gaming experiences the trip to the US of A was a lot of fun with family and friends <3