I'll second part of that
Andhaira said:
Oh I'll second that - I spent MANY 20c coins playing that in the timezone arcades as a kid, and many hours playing co-op on friends' consoles. BUT it is a very old game and I don't think modern games have anything to learn from it. It was one of the best of the 80s side-scrolling beat-em-ups, LOTS of fun at the time, but frankly I don't think one could go back to that kind of gameplay now and enjoy it the same way.
Like Double Dragon - only good for nostalgia, and barely good for that, by my god it rocked in 1987!!! I remember about 1989 or so arcade games and arcade beat-em-ups in particular started to suck mainly because they started to introduce ridiculous timelimits, unbalanced difficulty and other craptastic ways to milk more coins out of you. In their heyday you could put in a single 20c coin (40c later as prices went up) and - if you were good at the game, which took only a moderate amount of practice - you'd have a fair shot at making it all the way to the end for a solid half hour of arcade gaming. You'd spend quite a few credits getting good enough to do that, but the point was that if you died or ran out of time, it was because you made some identifiable mistake rather than inbuilt impossible timers or parts where losing at least one life is unavoidable.
Double Dragon 3 was the archetype of that kind of slide - playing co-op good players could beat DD1 on one credit, but then came the rip-off that was DD3. Not only were there impossible time limits and ridiculous 'must-lose-a-life-here' parts, but worst of all YOU HAD TO PAY EXTRA CREDITS TO GET ALL THE MOVES. That's right, an already by then pricey $1 to buy into the game, and then to get all the moves you'd have to spend another $3. And the game was designed so that even WITH the extra moves you couldn't really clock it affordably - without the extra moves it was just ridiculous.
Little wonder then that as the next gen of consoles hit households in the 90s, arcades went down the drain. Haha sucked in to all those grimey arcade merchants that ripped us off as kids for crap games that merely cashed in on our expectations from previous good games - that was truly an example of capitalist market karma
. Now if only the same thing could happen to Bethesda and the other companies who are doing the same thing as those old arcade fraudsters.