Awesome Arcade Games

Konami dusts off the ’80s run-and-gun classic for today’s generation. While Contra: Operation Galuga mainly offers new graphics and audio to the NES arcade shooter, it also has a few new stages and enemies and adds a four-player arcade mode. It’s time to steal lives from your kids.

Weird Al’s Museum of Natural Hilarity runs on the Multimorphic P3 pinball platform, which combines mechanical components with video screens. The game is packed with wacky levels inspired by his music. Obstacles include a hamster wheel and ball run course, and it plays 17 of Al’s novelty tunes and over 2000 voice clips.

A while back The Slow Mo Guys showed off how TV screens display images in slow-motion. Now Gav is back to look at a different kind of arcade display, a vector graphics monitor used in Atari’s Tempest, Star Wars, and BattleZone. These displays draw images like an X/Y plotter rather than line-by-line or frame-by-frame.

Alan Becker revisits his Animation vs. series yet again. This time, his stick figure characters attempt to play classic arcade games on a MAME cabinet. As they fight over the joystick, things go off the rails and they crawl inside the machine in an attempt to debug the system.

It’s been some time since we set foot into a video arcade, but back in the day, we pumped more than our share of quarters into arcade machines. Captain Gizmo gathered data on which games raked in the most coin over the years, and it’s amazing how little the rankings changed since the 1980s once you adjust for inflation.

TAITO celebrates 40 years of its 8-bit arcade shooter. The board game asks players to use cards to target an army of aliens headed for their bases. Available in a standard or deluxe edition, or with an awesome limited edition diorama signed by Invaders’ creator Tomohiro Nishikado.