Arcade vs Console

So, I’ve covered two essential topics so far: the golden age of arcades, and then where arcades are now which have mostly come back in the form of barcades. In my first post I went into more detail as to why Arcades began to fade away, but the reason that is relevant to this post is the innovation of the home console. the NES, or the Nintendo Entertainment System, was revolutionary. Just think about it, the idea of buying the game once and you owned it to play whenever you wanted in your own house. In some ways it was vastly superior than having $10 in quarters making your pants sag a little lower while you jingled over to the arcades. Today I want to talk about the differences that were seen between games on the Arcade machines vs those on home consoles.

The NES has many great games with what some consider, superior counterparts. Some like the superior sound design of beat ’em ups from Turtles in time or X-men and experience of just being in an arcade. Turtles in Time had voice acting, compared to the text boxes that were in the SNES port, among other small character sprite and menu changes. Then there’s others that have the game slightly altered like the original Super Mario bros to prevent exploits such as ways to obtain infinite lives to manipulate the score board.

That was the exact experience I had at a local arcade one night, I was attempting to be a hot shot and make it to the top of the score boards, when I noticed certain enemies were missing. This was again, done to prevent cheating in certain parts. There were also jumps that were slightly modified to be more difficult. On top of that there was also some minor differences such as power ups being moved, replaced, or removed entirely from levels.

Some have reported that games like Turtles in Time, while they may have a better soundtrack on the arcade cabinet, it lacked the refinement that the port did. For example it has stated there is unfinished animations or glitches when fighting enemies.

The next point I find a bit controversial because of the passion in the community, but there is a debate for fighting games as to which may be superior. Some games such as the original Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter 2 are debated as to whether they’re better at the arcades or on the home consoles, with some stating that they both have wonky controls that don’t work well on the big arcade systems(which wasn’t an issue for sequels)or the NES and SNES inferior sound and sometimes inferior graphics, as both fighting games did not have the glitches that Turtles in Time did.

Even some games such as Tekken Tag Tournament were running on PS1 hardware in the arcades, where the port was released on the PS2, the next generation console of the time. It boasting better graphics and tighter controls. Mortal Kombat had many changes between the Arcade and the SNES port, the Sega Genesis remained faithful, even going as far as to not change some of the odd animations that would raise an eyebrow due to how unnatural they looked.
Graphics aren’t everything though! Another popular fighting franchise, Soul Caliber, was the exact opposite, despite releasing on the Sega Dreamcast, a rival system to the PS1, PS2, and SNES, was inferior due to the worse controls which made it an overall inferior experience.

A special type of game as well, one that was terrible, were games that were made into literal random button sequences. These types of games would be merely made into cut scenes, and would want you to press button combinations at random times. Some were ported to the NES,SNES, and the SEGA CD as completely different games(and they weren’t much better). The best(and maybe only) example is dragon’s lair. I had the chance to play it at a Marc’s once, and the stiff controls and dying in one hit made it an unpleasant experience very fast. Bottom line: don’t play any of them to retain the most sanity.

There are many more games that have got either faithful ports from the arcade or entirely different games all together, however I think you get the idea: The idea of Arcade vs Console is for the most part subjective, with some people despite the issues the arcades had, still going to play them because it is nostalgic and holds many more memories and allowed them to connect with strangers, where others prefer the home console port for the sake of being convenient, but if it was better that is always a plus.

I hope you enjoyed and got a solid understand now that not all arcade games were the exact same as their console counterparts, be sure to come back next week where I discuss games you may or may not have known about due to their obscurity, good or bad.

And for those of you that were curious about the location of the arcade in the Waldo picture, here it is. Be sure to check out my Instagram for updates for the next post!