Catch Up and Mustn't-Turd

 

After twenty agonizing years, Capcom
vs. SNK is finally back on the menu
for console gamers. No more digging out
your dusty Playstation 3 or your hacked
Dreamcast to play this classic!
(image by MobyGames)

 

Okay, so lots of stuff has happened since my last post. First and foremost is the announcement of Capcom Fighting Collection 2, a cornucopia of great versus fighters originally released for the Dreamcast. You're getting Capcom vs. SNK and its vastly superior sequel, both Power Stones, the sequel to Rival Schools, the insubstantial yet strangely entertaining Plasma Sword, and... well, nobody wants Capcom Fighting Evolution, but you're getting it anyway. Tech Romancer would have been a better choice, but one little stumble in the game selection isn't going to stop me from buying this giant leap for fighting game fan-kind. 

I just wish Capcom had plans to bring the game to Xbox. I never connect my Switch to a television set, and the only time I turn on my Playstation 4 is to watch DVDs. Sorry, I just like the Xbox interface and ecosystem better... and I don't think I should be punished for that preference. Capcom, are you listening to your fans? Or do they just not count if they own an Xbox?

Mass Market Mediocrity, courtesy
of My Arcade.
(image from Amazon)

What else? Well, I bought My Arcade's Data East classics mini-cabinet. Fresh out of the package, this thing is absolutely dreadful; inferior to the already flawed My Arcade Namco Museum cab with sketchy emulation and color banding that sticks out like a sore thumb if you're not looking directly at the screen. I'd say that Data East deserves better, but let's not kid ourselves. Aside from a handful of standouts like Burgertime and Bump 'n Jump, Data East was the RC Cola of 20th century game developers, and this is precisely the quality of product this company deserves.

("Then why'd you buy it?," you immediately respond. Because it was cheap, smartass. Shut up.)

My Arcade's Data East cabinet is pretty lousy, but like most of these products, the proper application of software hacks and power tools helps bring it up to "almost acceptable" status. The system runs on repurposed Android hardware, and even its dated Allwinner A23 processor can be coaxed to do a lot more if you can reach the micro SD port buried deep within its plastic case. Glen's Retro Show recommends that you heat the side panel stickers with a hair dryer and peel them away, then remove a zillion screws and pull the case apart to reach the port. I opted for a more violent option, drilling through the back and side of the case to reach the motherboard, then jabbing an on-the-go cable into one of the holes. Look, this cabinet blows. It's as much of a keepsake as a paper placemat from McDonald's. It doesn't deserve to be babied.

To be fair to those overly optimistic gamers
who thought Robocop would appear in this
cabinet, the Robocop film is as close to
being a video game as a film can get. Some
movies were just meant to be video games,
and Robocop was definitely one of them.
(image from Wikipedia)

Anyway... a few ADB commands later, the Data East cab became a great deal more versatile. It's still running on a prehistoric version of the Android OS (KitKat?! Gimme a break, indeed!), and the sluggish processor will prevent you from running more demanding games at full speed. However, there's just enough "oomph" in this machine to run early arcade titles; a whole lot more than you get by default. 

If you were disappointed that Robocop wasn't included in this cabinet, just load the game in MAME4Droid, then flip a double eagle to MGM, who owns the rights to the movie, and My Arcade, who was too cheap to pay the license. The cab even runs some games at full speed that the Namco Museum cabbie couldn't, although the fact that its screen is yoko while the Namco cab's is tate offsets that benefit somewhat. C'mon, any seasoned arcade goer knows that the best games from the early 1980s are vertically oriented! On the vertically oriented Namco cabinet, Burgertime and Bump 'n Jump look terrific! On its Data East counterpart, uh, not so much.

Honestly, while you can hack the Data East classics mini cabinet to play more arcade games, you could use a chainsaw to trim your nose hairs, and I don't recommend that either. You really ought to spend the extra duckets on a Sega Astro Mini or a Taito Egret II instead. That Astro Mini was just one hundred dollars during this year's Amazon Days sale. The Egret II is a bit most costly, but more than justifies the added cost with a screen you can flip on the fly, making it ideal for both tate and yoko games. It's one cabinet that does the work of two.

Unjustly panned by picky gamers.
Then again, I paid thirty dollars for mine,
so I'm a lot less picky than the gamers
who paid full price for it.
(image from Amazon)

Hell, even the Neo-Geo Mini- yes, the micro cabinet everyone hated that quickly plummeted to thirty dollars on Amazon- savagely beats the Data East cabinet in every respect. Sure, the joystick doesn't use micro switches, but it's not a damn plastic knob you screw into a D-pad, either. Sure, it just plays Neo-Geo games... but it plays a lot of Neo-Geo games, and the games you get are almost without exception vastly superior to what's on the Data East cabinet. (Bloody Wolf vs. Shock Troopers? Oh, puhleeeaze.) Sure, the screen's kind of small... but it's crisp, and there's none of the color banding that makes the Data East cabinet look like a raccoon's tail whenever you play shoot 'em ups.

Honestly, I forgot just how good the Neo-Geo Mini was in comparison to My Arcade's mass market monstrosity. That kind of shit flies when you're charging twenty dollars for a barely functional keychain at the Cracker Barrel, but the Data East cabinet retailed for ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS when it was first released. A whole C note, for this oversized Gachapon reject. You don't charge a hundred damn dollars for a cabinet that's barely fit to rest at the bottom of a really big box of Cap'n Crunch.

Sure, you could hack the Data East cab to make it do some things well, instead of almost no things, but why do that to yourself? You can't polish a turd, and hacking a turd with a USB cable isn't much better. You'll just dirty your hands, and a perfectly good USB cable.