Same here. I’ll never own a pinball machine. It just looks like a headache.
It’s not too bad if you buy one of the new Stern machines. Alternately, make sure you have some places near you that can do service on things you can’t fix yourself. Again, I’m very lucky in where I live. TNT Amusements is not far from me. That’s the guy who does all those crazy YouTube videos of pinball machines.
My friend who owns the Ghostbusters got his from Coin Taker in Sunbury, PA.
Obviously, it’s either money or time or both if you own this stuff. Since I have three boys, I’ve so far been immune. Eventually I’ll have at least one pin and a Neo Geo. That’s the plan anyway.
Wow, really? Played the hell out of it with a standard controller. I need to get a NeGeCon some day
It’s like all of the responsibility of owning a piano, but with less utility and more stigma, lol.
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And less people to help you tune it.
Unplayable might be a slight exaggeration, but there’s a big difference when using the analogue controls with the NeGcon. Makes it very hard to go back.
Paperboy with the handlebar controller is spot on. Some ports of Paperboy are better than others, but none of them get it quite right.
I didn’t realize paperboy was an arcade game.
Yup. Which is why it sucks so bad as a console game.
Another one with weird arcade controls that I never got to experience is Marble madness. I’m ok with playing the decent megadrive port with a controller, but using the massive trackball must be something completely different.
You can sort of do this on the Mega Drive in a very specific situation:
https://segaretro.org/Marble_Madness
Atari Games’ home console division Tengen produced their own Mega Drive copy for the Japanese market in 1993, which is different to the Electronic Arts version. This is similar to the situation regarding the Mega Drive port of Klax, in which Namco produced their own copy for Japan. This Japanese version, which appears to have been produced internally by Tengen of Japan, is much more faithful to the original game (but whether or not it is a direct port is unknown), and features trackball support through the Sega Mouse.
Crystal Castles is ALSO not as fun without a trackball.
I love TNT Amusments. The have the best videos. Someday I’ll get off my ass and make the 1/2 hour drive to see what they have. They’re constantly discounting cabs
this thread revealing all the greater philly area residents.
Apparently we are legion!
I got to play this for the first time a couple of years back.
The trackball requires a lot of spinning to get the marbles to accelerate and slow down, which gives them the feeling of gaining a tremendous amount of acceleration and weight behind them, it’s pretty cool.
It would have only been possible at the arcade with the space to move the large trackball with two hands. Namco had a similar control setup with Pac ‘n Roll on DS, but Pac-Man feels a lot lighter and nimbler since it would have been impractical to ask players to roll the virtual trackball on the touchscreen as much. It just didn’t feel as satisfying, but the game had its own unique challenges and level designs to accommodate the speedier handling
I thought NiGHTS came close. Not that it isn’t still fun, but the game was clearly specifically designed around the Saturn’s Analogue Controller.
A lot of this comes down to the very wide turning circle of the Saturn’s analogue nub, the levels have evidently been designed and balanced around the wide turning circle this produces, and the game is a lot more fun when played this way. When I revisited the game on PC with an Xbox One controller the controls were too tight and you had to simulate that wide turning circle yourself by restricting the speed you rotated the stick. Not so fun.