Nicole Express: Vintage Pachinko

The always excellent Nicole Express has a great post on the Japanese gambling game Pachinko, especially the imported machines that made it to the U.S. when for a brief time we liked it too. It contains the fact that we probably got video pachinko before Japan did, through the Odyssey2 game Pachinko! (The exclamation point there is part of the game’s title, as it is with all Magnavox-produced Odyssey2 games. While I enjoy that bit of trivia, I am not actually hugely excited about it.)

“Thunderbird,” one of several machines in Nicole’s post, and in her collection!

Physical slot machines were, and maybe still are, illegal in Japan, so all the ridiculous graphic and sound flourishes those demonic entities bear in North America are instead put in the service of the Tiny Silver Balls. I’ve always shied away from these forms of gaming for the same reason I never got into Magic: The Gathering: by tying profitability to gameplay, they feel to me like they’re more business model than game, really. I might not be able to earn my quarter back at Pac-Man, but at least there isn’t someone figuring out how to work those odds against me.

Nicole Express: Vintage Pachinko: Going Back And Forth Across The Pacific

Nicole Express: The Many Ways the PC Engine Saved Games

We love Nicole Express! She regularly covers the most interesting, and often obscure to U.S. audiences, gaming topics. This time out, she relates the many ways that the PC Engine saved game data. Just about every possible way the system could do saving, it did, from simple passwords to on-cart battery-backed RAM to expansion port peripherals with batteries or capacitors, even to a device that plugged into the controller port. Great information as always from Nicole Branagan!

Image from Nicole Express

Nicole Express: Tennokoe, or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Save the Game

Nicole Express Presents: The World’s Most Popular Arcade Board?

Awesome retro gaming blog Nicole Express wonders, what is the best-selling arcade board of all time? It’s gotta be Pac-Man, right? It sold over 100,000 units back in the day, and every Ms. Pac-Man machine contains it inside it. But Nicole offers that it may actually be a bootleg board called the 60-in-1.

Image from Nicole Express

The 60-in-1 is often recognizable by its distinctive menu system, but it can actually be set to play one of its games in a stand-alone mode, in which case its menu never appears. It’s actually an ARM board running MAME, which means its games have distinctive quirks. All the information is there, so go acquaint yourself with ubiquitous gray-market arcade hardware!

Link: The World’s Most Popular Arcade Board?