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Party tips
brad808:
Just thought I’d share some of my tips for having people over to play my arcade machine and see if anybody else has any tips to offer that I might pick up. Unfortunately most of this is from experience and I learned these the hard way
1) Make sure you turn the machine on about an hour or so before people show up. This removes the possibility of it not working at the last second and making you look stupid. An hour usually gives me enough time to sort out any minor problems and do some trouble shooting incase something isn’t right.
2) Keep a spare hard drive at the ready that is a plug and play replacement of the one in the machine now. I’ve had it happen before where something stupid happens (corrupt boot sector, etc) that renders the machine useless and takes too much time to repair while there are people waiting. With hard drives being dirt cheap and most people having spares around anyways why not set it up and just leave it in the machine ready to plug in if need be.
3) Remove any easy ways to exit out of your front end. When I first setup my machine it happened a few times where I would go to the arcade room to find it sitting at the windows desktop and people frantically pushing buttons and clicking things. Hyperspin has a nice feature that allows 3 different keys be pressed at the same time in order to exit. Definitely a huge help and now only I know which buttons to press to exit.
4) Make sure all the admin buttons are well hidden. People get trigger happy with the button pushing when they don’t know what’s going on and before you know it mame controls are reprogramed. I’ll add favorites and genre lists (hyperspin) to this as well because I can’t count the number of times people have ended up in there and cant get out.
5) Keep the escape key away from where people lean…. I had mine at the top left of my cabinet thinking I will never accidently hit that while I’m playing a game…. Until I had people over and the natural place for people crowded around the machine to lean is with their hands at the top left and right corners of the machine (Doh)
6) Keep a huge list of games around. At first I only had a few games that I knew I would play and removed any of the ones that looked crappy. Turns out a bunch of the games that looked crappy were some of the most played and games that people loved the most. I have to admit I would have never played Atari RBI baseball had it not been for my cousin saying its his favorite game and now that I have it’s pretty damn fun.
7) Make sure you have lots of alcohol, and places to put that alcohol such as tables around the arcade machine which helps prevent alcohol being ON the arcade machine.
That’s just about all I can think of right now that I go through before people come over. Any other helpful tips?
eds1275:
Have a plan - for example, friends and I were sitting around the other day [drinking of course] and I exclaimed "I challenge you to Super Bishi Bashi!" to which he replied "Are you asking for a challenge?" At which point someone else who had no clue what was going on screamed "20xt6!" Having the machine on is good but having ways to get people to play something for longer than a minute as they try them all out is frustrating.
I keep all my games in lists. Lists by genre, I have my own favourites, my fiance has her favourites - and then I hide the master list with all games. It can be too daunting even though I have thinned it out a bunch.
4 player games if you can! If not, tournament style games for example UMK3 has a tournament mode. Or there's always fighting games where you choose more than one player, just play in teams and when one person switches then trade off players.
NBA Jam!
Have the guys bring their wives/girlfriends now and then - then they get some "girl time" and if they hit it off it might mean more quality game nights. Of course, if your lady is into games as well you might get some of the other girls into it.
shateredsoul1979:
From my 80s party last Halloween I learned
1. Button mash player 1 and 2 buttons to make sure some combination of those buttons don't force exit or something, in testing you probably didn't do that
2. Avoid having extra features, I had an option to show the controller configuration before launching a game.. man button mashers would mash while it showed that screen and then weird stuff happened
3. Leave out any untested system, I would even go as far as to suggest only having one list available (i.e. mame, or nes)
4. People love Nintendo more than arcade games, I swear people always go back to that list of games, they didn't care about the controller . Everyone and their mother played nintendo, not everyone played arcade games as much. At my party I couldn't get mame working so I switched to only NES, people were excited as hell to play.
5. Take out games your arcade can't play, if you don't have a gun, then remove duck hunt, and all shooters.
6. Most people will button mash :(, so be prepared to be strong as they smash those buttons
yotsuya:
These are all good. I would add to this to keep your coin door lock keys on hand if you use tokens, as someone will inevitably jam your mechs.
brad808:
--- Quote from: eds1275 on July 14, 2011, 06:23:37 pm ---
Have the guys bring their wives/girlfriends now and then - then they get some "girl time" and if they hit it off it might mean more quality game nights. Of course, if your lady is into games as well you might get some of the other girls into it.
--- End quote ---
That actually reminds me to make sure there are lots of non-gamer friendly games around that girlfriends, and other folks not into gaming at all can easily pick up and join in the fun. Games like bubble bobble where they are still 2 player vs but don't take a genius to figure out how to play it.
Try and avoid "continue" games as much as possible and keep it player vs player. As much as some people want to play Battle toads or Golden axe all the way through the hype around the machine quickly dies down as its simply two people feeding tons of credits in the machine without any real challenge or way to lose.
Yes tournament style games are also a huge hit, UMK3 gets played a lot because of that feature. I haven't really found to many other games with a tournament mode though. Am I missing some?