Video Games are Rad

The above photograph portrays the swath of destruction I carved through my game room on Sunday night. Why would I intentionally have created such chaos in my normally tidy and uber-organized temple of doom? For probably the best reason of all; an arcade machine.

Having owned an arcade cab in the past (Rygar), and having spent countless hours in arcades (I’m looking at you, Wonderland), I can rightly say that even though I really like classic arcade games, I tend to get bored of the single screen game play and murderous difficulty that they provide. And even though my beloved Rygar was indeed an action platformer, it was really fucking hard, and more of a score-chaser than a Super Mario Brothers. At any rate, I soon became bored and the novelty wore thin so I ended up selling it after six months.

But now that I bought my own house and actually have extra space for luxuries such as arcade cabs, I have been passively trolling for a replacement ever since we moved in at the end in of August. A classified ad and one 80 minute round trip to Moose Jaw later I am now the proud owner of this:

Sweet holy hell is this game awesome. I would put beat ‘em ups in my top three favorite video game genres (along side JRPGs and platformers), and beat ‘em ups don’t get much better than Konami’s 1991 classic The Simpsons. Now, most people are used to the 4 player cabinet. What I have here is the two player conversion kit installed in an Atari Kangaroo cabinet. Unfortunately, the machine houses the standard JAMMA harness and not the JAMMA+ harness necessary to rig up two additional sets of controls (and six button fighters), but I am not complaining. It’s the fucking Simpsons arcade for shit’s sake, and a JAMMA harness to boot. 

The first night I had it my wife and I devastated the games two times through. So much fun. I am excited to have more friends over and play this game about a 100 more times in the coming weeks. I already have my eye on a Final Fight board as well as a TMNT board, so this cabinet can only become radder. 

Overall, the cabinet was in pretty good shape. The insides were dusty as hell, but not bad considering it hadn’t been cleaned out in 18 years and I still have to replace the marquee light, but other than that it’s in pretty good condition. As an added bonus I found an intact copy of the manual in the machine when I opened it up. 

Fitting this machine into my game room meant I had to do some major reorganization, but I actually like my new set up better. The women from whom I purchased this cab also had a perfectly functioning Street Fighter 2 which I am seriously considering tabling an offer for. I got this Simpson’s cab for $300, and I am hoping I can get the SF2 for maybe $175? This women didn’t seem to know anything at all about these games, so i might get lucky.

Below are some photos of the updated game room.