a modern arcade

...or: playing Dreamcast in my bedroom

I keep the Dreamcast by my bed, connected over VGA and plugged into an upscaler, so I can play it on a flatscreen monitor. When I wake up in the morning, it greets me with its bright white shell and cheery multicolor buttons on the controller, which is pretty nice, as objects to look at while bleary-eyed and glasses-less in the morning go.

There’s a whole post waiting inside me, explaining what I’ve done to this Dreamcast over the years since I found it with a “not working” post it note attached to the CD tray, at a neighbor’s garage sale, circa 2003, but that’s not what I want to write about today. Instead, I want to talk about something I noticed when I was bundled in my comforter, playing Mr. Driller last week. If you’re unfamiliar, Mr. Driller is a sort of pseudo-sequel to Dig Dug, where the eponymous main character, Mr. Driller himself, is a child (young adult? forever-young femboy twink? honestly, I have no idea of his canonical age and I refuse to look it up) whose sole goal is to drill underground to a predetermined depth without asphyxiating or being crushed in a cave in. Dig Dug, in the Mr. Driller extended lore, is his father, so I’m sure he picked up a few tips about avoiding collapsing tunnels in his (likely deeply bizarre) youth.

But even THEN I’m finding myself get sidetracked, because I don’t want to talk about Mr. Driller’s parents’ break-up (yes, divorced Dig Dug is, strangely enough, canon), but rather a single option on the main menu when the game starts. Before kicking off this drilling adventure, we’re asked to choose between Survival Mode, Time Attack, and Arcade Mode. And it’s that last option that struck me when I was playing the game the other night.

Crazy Taxi has an Arcade Mode too. So does Marvel vs. Capcom 2. A ton of Dreamcast games do. And there was a time, in the mid-90s, when this wasn’t as rare. Sega was always known for their arcade machines, so a ton of their home console games were straight ports from their larger, bulkier siblings. There are plenty of ads for the Genesis or 32x that focused on these consoles’ ability to bring the arcade experience home. But by 2000, consoles had begun to move away from reproducing arcade experiences and instead towards the particular strengths and longer play durations of consoles tucked away in a home. This is just a passive observation, not one based on any sort of data, but you can look at Goldeneye, Ocarina Of Time, Final Fantasy VII (and VIII, and IX), and other popular games from the late 90s to see which way the winds were blowing.

But Sega stuck to arcade games. The Dreamcast, their last console before the company stopped investing in home console hardware altogether and just became another third-party developer, was the swan song of Arcade Mode. Each game promised to reproduce the experience of popping a few quarters into a Sega machine, ensuring anywhere between five minutes and (if you’re very good, which I am not) half an hour of playtime.

In my experience as a 32 year old woman with a 9-to-5 job,this is the perfect session timing. It’s enough time to sit down, practice a few rounds, hone some of my digging, driving, or fighting skills, then put the controller down and move on with my life. I wish I had more time to play games, I really do, but I’ve got a million hobbies and projects, friends I want to chat with, chores around the house. And in that busy world I live in, I’ve found a refuge in Arcade Mode. Enough time to not feel guilty about a lack of productivity, but also enough to let the world melt away and drill down through some multicolored blocks and challenge my previous high score.

Certain indie games have these sorts of mechanics, I’m sure, but there’s something special and unique about laying down in bed, powering up a machine whose sole purpose is brief, arcade experiences, and turning it off again after 45 minutes. It’s simple. It never asks me to update the firmware. I never have to spend an extra hour on the game looking for a save point.

It just fits into my life, as busy and hectic as that life might be.

Upcoming Posts??

aka things I might write about soon!

 - My Sega Saturn optical disc emulator just arrived! Installation was a snap. These types of devices are getting way more commonplace and they’re a very cool way of future-proofing old hardware. Plus, they’re making new ports possible.

 - I’ve written a small piece of software designed to drastically simplify connecting to Telnet BBSs on old computers over serial. There’s still a surprising number of these BBSs around these days, often running on old hardware and actual honest-to-god telephone lines.

 - With a few parts for a Game Boy Color restoration on the way, I’ve been lurking on the r/gameboy reddit, and some of the case mods on there are absolutely gorgeous. The GameBoy Advance SP with the all-metal hingeless case seems especially cool. Mine won’t be anywhere near that nice, but some of these things are art objects in and of themselves.

Let me know what you want to hear about next!

Till then,

-Cara