Introduction: For Chinese Gundam players, the "Gundam EXVS" series has become the last Jerusalem of arcade games in this era.
With the release of the PS4 version of "Gundam EXVS MBON" transplanted from the arcade platform on July 30, the resentment between Chinese Gundam gamers and Consortium B for a generation of consoles has finally been resolved. Although the author claims to be "the first batch of domestic players who have been exposed to the "Gundam VS" series since the founding of the People's Republic of China", I have no intention of occupying the page to dedicate this hard-core battle dubbed "The Butcher and the Meat" to everyone, young and old. Instead, we want to re-extract the seemingly outdated concept of " arcade and transplanted games", and look at the efforts manufacturers have made in the history of home console development to realize the simple wish of "playing arcade at home". , Therefore, among the countless software and hardware born, how many are overlords, and how many are excessive and crazy.
1. The Vanguard of the Empire - "Yoshigo Mori"
Today historians are talking about the "Holy Roman Empire", saying that it is "neither holy nor Roman nor an empire". And when we are used to calling Nintendo "the ruler of the world", if we turn back the time 40 years and coordinate the United States, for Minoru Arakawa, who was just sent to the United States by Hiroshi Yamauchi to work hard for Nintendo, the father-in-law is sitting on This company is far from being a "world master", but when Arakawa spends his days in American bars observing and recording young players who are keen on arcades for field research, the players who are irritated by his attention sometimes turn around Come to greet him and say: "Sir, are you sick!"
The arcade version of "Koshigo Mori" that gave Nintendo a firm foothold in the North American market↑↑
Until Shigeru Miyamoto came down with a "miracle", "Koshigo Mori" " became Nintendo's "Normandy" landing in the United States. Different from the unshakable exclusive strategy of Nintendo's first-party games today, in order to expand sales, Arakawa tried to sell "Mori Yoshigo" to many American manufacturers including Atari with a product licensing agreement. However, with the famous copyright lawsuit initiated by Universal Corporation and the arrival of the more famous "Atari Shock", various American companies have turned into mud bodhisattvas crossing the river and turned into sand in the river of history. The matter of transplanting the home computer had to press the pause button.
However, what should come is still coming, Atari byebye, NES (that is, the American version of FC) has also entered the stage of history, it can be said that home consoles in this period were largely regarded as "playing at home "Arcade" for publicity and distribution, as the saying goes, "Whatever game is popular, we must find ways to transplant what game", "Mori Yoshigo" is no problem.
After FC entered a mature stage, many popular arcade games such as "1942", "Bingfeng", " Double Dragon " have lowered their configuration and transplanted one after another. After this good night, the door of the times opened slowly in front of our eyes, and it was out of control.
2. Who is the real "Street Fighter"—"Street Fighter 2"
When "Street Fighter 2" set off a PVP tide in the arcade market in the early 1990s, in the home machine market, Sega and Nintendo directly competed It has been put on the table (at least in the North American retail market and my country's parallel import market, while in Japan, Sega can be said to have never achieved even a little advantage), as a way of competition visible to the naked eye, "comparison of arcade transplantation effects "Become an important reference for the "host camp battle" in that era.
Just because "Street Fighter 2" was so popular that year, both Sega and Nintendo are bound to let their hosts have the author's computer version. Compared with arcade machines with the same picture shrinkage, SFC is superior in terms of picture performance and sound output by virtue of its functional advantages, while the MD version is close to the original key positions of arcade machines with its circular direction keys and six-button handle design , to get a better feel and operating experience, including the later Sega Saturn mainframe continued this handle design language, which is also for the convenience of players to "fight".
"Street Fighter 2" bundled version of the SFC host ↑
Since "literature is first, martial arts is second", the transplanted fighting game is naturally a deathmatch of literary combat + martial arts. When "Super Street Fighter 2" (commonly known as "Street Fighter 16") was launched for home consoles, although the actual performance of arcade machines still crushed home consoles, Sega released a large capacity of 40MB in order to compete with Nintendo. The cassette corresponds to it (this is also the maximum capacity of the MD cassette, and very few games enjoy such treatment in the entire console life cycle).
In the 1990s, the average price of this card in the Chinese market remained at 400 yuan for a long time-because I wanted this card so much back then, so I kept paying attention to the price, but I couldn't afford it. With "Super Street Fighter 2" as the symbol, the fighting genre has become a battleground for arcade transplant games.
A set of magic cards from the Sega MD host ↑↑
3. Transplant a wool! Wouldn't it be nice to just bring the arcade machine home? ——NEO·GEO series mainframe
What is direct pain point? What does it mean to meet user needs at all costs? What is a profession?
Since we all admit that the ultimate form of arcade porting games is to bring arcade games to the home in a content-free manner, then the NEO·GEO AES console, as the most representative crazy move of SNK at its peak, is made by itself. Isn't that a very reasonable thing for a home machine designed and produced directly according to the arcade hardware specifications?
was first released in the 1990s and entered my country in a small amount. According to the income level of the residents at that time, the price was almost as high as road robbery↑↑↑
This host has original lossless screen performance, zero disk reading time and its own dedicated arcade console style The joystick has three major selling points in one, highlighting how obsessed SNK has become in order to achieve "perfect transplantation". Such a high configuration regardless of cost caused the price of its software and hardware to break through the sky (the price was 5 to 10 times that of other consoles and games on the market at that time), and the sales volume was naturally a complete failure. The big pit under it.
's later iteration product NEG GEO CD changed the cassette to CD media, and the joystick was replaced with a normal-sized handle, which slightly lowered the price, but it was still too expensive. In the Chinese market, the host has directly won the title of "Machine Emperor". Time has passed, and after SNK has lost count of how many times it has been "reborn", the low output of NEO GEO hosts and the hardware design with a clear brand of the times make it still maintain the status of "machine king" in the middle ages market.
4. Perfect transplantation, nonexistent——"VR Warrior 2"
MD, SS and DC, the three generations of Sega hosts, through their own fate, as well as the Chinese game media in the 1990s (needless to say, mainly " video game software ") Magazine)’s subjective publicity attitude, and finally changed from a “game console that only older children can play” to a “tragic character in the industry” in today’s memory.
Later, when practitioners in the industry reviewed why the SS and the once-strong performance of the DC failed repeatedly, they all mentioned that Sega’s internal home machine department and arcade machine department were constrained by each other, which led to the failure of the mainframe hardware architecture to achieve 100 %arcade porting effect, this is undoubtedly a satellite for the family that once owned a large number of popular arcade IPs and promised hardcore players to "play arcade at home" to strive for console sales.
In addition to "VR Warrior", the AM2 development team also has a number of 3D games designed with the same technology. The hunger of the game has made this game a good sales, but compared to arcade machines, the console version has shrunk significantly because the hardware architecture of the Saturn console is stronger in 2D than 3D. Especially when 3DFTG became a hot trend, various manufacturers entered the game one after another, and after the strong opponent " Tekken " appeared, Sega, which clearly had an advantage in arcades, had to accept the reality that home machines were gradually overtaken by the opponent.
compared to "VR Warrior" until the PS3 version"VR Warrior 5 Final Edition" can also shrink the "consistent" screen. Namco's "Tekken" has played the slogan "120% transplant" since the PS version of "Tekken 3". The reason behind it lies in the Sega arcade Partly due to arrogance and reluctance to fully cooperate with home consoles, the arcade base version has always been significantly higher than home consoles in terms of function, and shrinkage is inevitable.
And since the first generation of "Tekken", Namco has chosen to use the PS mainframe interchange to basically carry out the underlying development, and on this basis, it has been continuously upgraded with the iteration of the PS mainframe, and has become the lonely watcher of 3DFTG in this era (Warner's Although the "Injustice" series is 3D scenes + 3D character modeling, the rules of the game are the original 2DFTG).
Starting from "Tekken 3", 120% transplantation has become a trump card of Namco ↑↑
Fifth, the first generation of weight loss games - "DDR"
In the 1990s, major Japanese manufacturers invested in the arcade industry Sparing no effort, when KONAMI saw Sega, Namco, SNK, Capcom and other manufacturers firmly occupying the market with their strong technical force and high popularity works, they found another way, drawing creative inspiration from street pop music, and founded "Guitar Freaks, "Drummania", "Beatmania", "Pop'music" and "Dance Dance Revolution" are five major series that make up the BEMANI label. The five works not only include the five human civilizations of violin, drumming, disc playing, key rubbing and awkward dancing. It is a common sacrificial form in the game, and since it was born in the arcade environment, naturally each game also has a supporting special frame equipment, while the sense of substitution and operation feel are maximized, the freestyle fancy performances of high-level players are even more unique. The madness and force of "mad max".
konami audio game product matrix, until today is still stable output of new works↑↑
When kanami transplanted this many audio games to home machines, the most impressive ones are those 1:1 arcade controllers, ordinarily This kind of price is high, the quantity is small, and the sales volume of its peripherals serving fan players is usually not very good. However, one of the dancers - "DDR", has become FC and DDR because of the appearance of "Dancing Mat". After the Tetris counterfeit handheld, it is another video game product that has gone out of the circle in my country.
The cheap production cost coupled with the strong localization transformation and channel distribution capabilities of copycat manufacturers made "DDR", which was originally only used as street trend culture in arcade halls, fly into the homes of ordinary people, especially after various revisions (corresponding to PS consoles, PCs, and direct-plug TVs) the dance mat has become a biblical chanting marketing of "weight loss games". Until the Wii became popular in my country, it was still a physical store like us that was willing to recommend it to general consumers. Peripherals of buyers—after all, thanks to the boom of the year, there is no need to make additional introductions, and the transaction rate is astonishingly high.
Until today, Ubisoft's new year masterpiece "Just Dance" is still regarded by many consumers as the spiritual sequel of "DDR", which shows the continuous cultural influence of the latter.
later relied on the redoctane of "Guitar Hero", and was originally an audio game peripheral manufacturer in North America. Probability is also the last popular arcade transplant game of this generation - "Gundam EXVS MBON".
"GVG" is the abbreviation of Chinese players for the "Gundam VS Gundam" series (the predecessor of the "Gundam VSEX" series). Change the board, so the game's first appearance on the home console is to land on DC). Since the first generation of "Gundam VS Federation vs. Zeon", it has established two absolute advantage selling points, one is the deep fan-oriented body movement design and the degree of restoration of the original work, and the other is that killing the consortium B will also do it.Unbeatable fighting feel - the first generation of the series, which laid a solid foundation, was authorized by capcom to produce according to the standard of this action battle game.
Later, this series not only became the top of the pyramid in all Gundam games (this pyramid has almost no tower body, only a lot of Tiancan Gundam games and the high-level GVG series at the bottom of the tower), but Consortium B also formulated "As long as the arcade is not cool The charity-type strategy of "transparent, I will never transplant" has made us players outside of Japan suffer from waiting.
Consortium B used it on PSV as a work to attract fans ↑↑
"Gundam EXVS MBON" has a high coin rate in Japan, and Consortium B not only did not transplant the deity before, but also came up with a so-called sequel for PS4 The behavior of disgusting players in "Gundam VS" made "Gundam EXVS MBON" once become the Jerusalem of Chinese Gundam players-it is really only a trip to Japan to enjoy it. This time, it was finally transplanted before the PS4 was about to retire. Although it was late but arrived, the merits and deeds were consummated.
Conclusion: Compared with the past 30 years, the function gap between home consoles and arcade machines has now been reversed. "Street Fighter" not only needs to be released first for home consoles, but also for arcades. Even EVO has replaced fighting dramas as fighting games. After the game integrated large-scale competitions, the competition equipment also changed from a commercial arcade frame to a home computer with players bringing their own handles to compete. In the future, apart from the new arcade game "Gundam EXVS" that has already started operating in Japan, when it comes to transplanting arcade games, players probably have nothing to look forward to.
