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The Mike Toole Show - The Amazing World of Anime Arcade Games

Did anyone play Gundam Federation vs Zeon in the 2000's?

I know that I'm in the extreme minority here, but I'd love to see these games given at least one definitive release each, ideally in the style of something like the Pinball Arcade.

Out of all those "interactive movie" type of LD games, I've always said that if there was one I'd ever want to learn to play through it would be Badlands. That, not Dragon's Lair, was actually the first one I remember seeing in arcades as a little kid, and some of the visuals in it stuck with me for years afterwards, long after I'd forgotten the name of the game itself. I've had a chance to play Badlands a few times at California Extreme (a yearly classic arcade convention) over the past several years, since it usually makes an appearance there along with several other games mentioned in the column, but I still haven't made much progress on it. And no I'm not going to download it for emulator - I don't care that much.

Now all animation in arcades is used for is Pachinko.

HIT THE LEVER!

Heh, the closest I had ever heard about to any of these things is Night Trap, which I suppose, in a way, is a spiritual successor to those LaserDisc games. Well, I had heard of Dragon's Lair, but that was long after they had left arcades.)

Ah, Badlands is often found at California Extreme? Now that I have the time to actually head there, I'll go check it out if I get the chance to visit the event.

As much as many of the remaining arcades not named Dave & Buster or Round 1 have a lot of video games from the 80's and 90's (Galaga and Cruisin' World ad nauseam), I have not seen a single LaserDisc game with fully animated cutscenes or backgrounds or interactive branching stories or anything discussed here...and yet, I've found four F-Zero AX machines.

Night Trap? Ah!!--Get out of my Sega CD-owner head!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaCWphCrXTw
(Wasn't so bad, but you had to be watching six security cams at once to even know where to play when.)

Sega CD came and went so quickly, it never got the credit for being the missing evolutionary link between SNES/Genesis cartridge and Playstation 1 disk, and bringing laser-style full-motion video to games before the Philips CDI.
And CDI had more ambitions to being a proto game/video player, long before the idea of putting video on small CD disks was considered acceptable.

One major thing that makes LD games rare is that they are much harder to maintain and repair due to the scarcity of parts for the disc readers. Control boards, drive belts, motors, etc.. Not to mention that even the discs themselves becoming unreadable due to scratches and oxidation. With the format over twenty years out of date, there aren't too many manufacturers creating replacement components.

However in recent years, there are hobbyists who have come up with workarounds using modern technology. A common method is completely replacing the LD player with a specialized ROM board that emulates the functions of the player and keeps the game video on flash memory. Like other games, there is a dedicated community that is preserving the titles.

CAX always has a section every year with at least a dozen or so laserdisc games. Badlands is one of the ones that's featured there most years, along with all the ones you'd expect to see like DL, Space Ace, Mach 3, and that "holographic" Time Traveler game Sega put out in the early 90's (which I mostly remember for the cowboy character in the attract mode drawling, "Remember, pardner. Winners don't use drugs"). A few more esoteric titles like Thayer's Quest and Cobra Command are usually available too. Other ones Mike's article mentioned like Astron Belt and Cliff Hanger are there sometimes, but not every year.

These days, the only permanent arcade I know of that still has any laserdisc games is Weir's Beach in New Hampshire, which is basically the mecca for classic arcade enthusiasts, but even they only have a couple. Though I'm sure if you scoured the US you'd still find a few more tucked away in odd corners here and there. The last time I saw any laserdisc games in a normal commercial arcade was the early 2000s. There was a mini-golf place local to me that had Dragon's Lair 2 in their arcade up until around 2001/02 or so, and there also used to be a Namco arcade (now long gone) at the Great Mall in Milpitas, CA that had a Galaxian 3: Project Dragoon machine installed. Project Dragoon was a massive 6-player game the size of a small room, that actually used two synchronized laserdisc players to create its background images. Unsurprisingly that was the only place where I ever saw it, though I understand an even larger 28-player version used to exist at a theme park in Japan.

Well, I've never been to California Extreme, so I didn't really know. I had been wanting to go ever since I heard about it a couple of years ago, and I looked up how to get there, but as I worked weekends until now, I never got the chance to. (Days off without pay were possible, but my manager always turned them down unless it was absolutely necessary. I only managed to attend Anime Expo 2014 at all because I had the opportunity to go straight to the district manager.) I only knew about the pinball section there, which is how I first heard of it.

How big is it anyway? It sounds mighty big.

Is Weir's Beach actually by the beach? I've been to some beachside arcades, and unless it's a dedicated hub for arcade fans that gets constant maintenance like Musee Mechanique in San Francisco (which is awesome because they have pre-digital arcade games, a truly rare sight), the games tend to be in pretty bad shape due to the humidity and salt in the air.

Massive. We're talking somewhere north of 500 video and pinball games set up every year. I've been going fairly regularly since 1999, and there's a group of us who make arrangements to go together every year (with me flying in from the east coast unless I can't get the time off from work). If you really want to get a feel for it, this guy posted a three-part walkthrough video of the most recent show's main gaming floor on YouTube - all three parts together are about 40 minutes.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

If you're especially interested in the laserdisc games, he gets to those in the last few minutes of part 3, including some good Badlands footage at about the 13-minute mark. I also noticed Bega's Battle, Road Blaster, and Super Don Quixote in the video among the games that Mike discussed.

Also note that he just filmed the main hall. There are also other rooms nearby where they always set up a bunch of cocktail table games and stuff like air hockey and foosball, and in the last few years they've also started setting up another room with classic console systems too.

No, Weir's Beach isn't on the ocean. It's on Lake Winnipesaukee, a freshwater lake in the central part of NH. The arcade is notable enough that it even has its own Wikipedia article.

I've been to Musee Mecanique a couple of times - it's a very cool place. Lots of unique games, and stuff that probably doesn't even exist anywhere else anymore. Speaking of beachside arcades, the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz had a couple of really good arcades the last time I was there too, very large and a great selection of classics (I remember it was the first time I ever saw a Space Invaders pinball machine). That was about 15 years ago, though, so I don't know what they still have nowadays. Unfortunately I can't give you any recommendations for arcades in the LA area. There used to be a good one in Pasadena that me and my friends sometimes hit up when I was in college, but I know that place closed several years ago, and we never went anywhere else.