Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 20 hours ago
The Golden Age Of Arcades was a time of innovation and hardware dominance for arcade gaming. Some games from this era went a bit more under the radar than others, but Alpine Ski might be the most underrated arcade game of them all from this time period. So in this video, I discuss why I keep coming back to this one and why it holds up pretty well even to this day. This might also be the most underrated Taito arcade game, which is saying a lot considering their long history.
00:00 Intro
01:28 Simple But Effective Gameplay
03:32 Clever Use Of RNG
04:52 Scoring Is Awesome
10:35 The Flaws
13:01 How To Play It At Home
Arcade Archives and Taito Milestones releases:
nintendo.com/us/store/products/arcade-archives-alpine-ski-switch
store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0571-CUSA15874_00-HAMPRDC000000001
nintendo.com/us/store/products/taito-milestones-switch
GameFAQs page for the game:
gamefaqs.gamespot.com/arcade/584095-alpine-ski
Taito SJ MiSTER FPGA core that supports Alpine Ski:
github.com/MiSTer-devel/Arcade-TaitoSystemSJ_MiSTer
StrategyWiki page:
strategywiki.org/wiki/Alpine_Ski
The Golden Age Of Arcades was a time of innovation and hardware dominance for arcade gaming. Some games from this era went a bit more under the radar than others, but Alpine Ski might be the most underrated arcade game of them all from this time period. So in this video, I discuss why I keep coming back to this one and why it holds up pretty well even to this day. This might also be the most underrated Taito arcade game, which is saying a lot considering their long history.
00:00 Intro
01:28 Simple But Effective Gameplay
03:32 Clever Use Of RNG
04:52 Scoring Is Awesome
10:35 The Flaws
13:01 How To Play It At Home
Arcade Archives and Taito Milestones releases:
nintendo.com/us/store/products/arcade-archives-alpine-ski-switch
store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0571-CUSA15874_00-HAMPRDC000000001
nintendo.com/us/store/products/taito-milestones-switch
GameFAQs page for the game:
gamefaqs.gamespot.com/arcade/584095-alpine-ski
Taito SJ MiSTER FPGA core that supports Alpine Ski:
github.com/MiSTer-devel/Arcade-TaitoSystemSJ_MiSTer
StrategyWiki page:
strategywiki.org/wiki/Alpine_Ski
![Paperboy [Atari Lynx] - Middle Road 1CC Playthrough 208,600 pts](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NxHetDRz6hQ/mqdefault.jpg "Paperboy [Atari Lynx] - Middle Road 1CC Playthrough 208,600 pts
The Atari Lynx was home to plenty of ports of 80s arcade games, especially those from Atari Games, and Paperboy got a port to the handheld in 1990. For those who are not familiar with the original game, you play as a paperboy delivering newspapers on your bicycle, while trying to avoid tons of hazards ranging from people and objects rolling around to even the absurd like the Grim Reaper. The arcade cabinet is known for its unique handlebar controls, which home ports did not even try to replicate for good reason.
The Lynx version of this game is pretty solid. Its not the best arcade port on the Lynx but it could have been a lot worse at the same time. The graphics, albeit heavily pixeled, capture the look of the original pretty well in terms of the neighborhoods and the color scheme. It does run as a lower frame rate than its arcade counterpart, but thats not too unexpected for the Lynx and doesnt hurt this port much.
The developers did a great job here with the controls. Using up and down on the D-pad to speed up and slow down respectively works surprisingly well here because you dont have to keep holding down said direction once you happy with a particular speed. Steering is digital instead of analog but feels responsive. Throwing newspaper is done with either B or A, and its pretty easy to hit the mailboxes, easier than in the original.
Just like the arcade version, it has three different difficulty levels divided into roads: Easy Street, Middle Road, and Hard Way. Overall, the difficulty here is toned down compared to the arcade original. One, the bees dont really chase you here unless youre going as slow as possible for a little while. Two, you start off with one more life than the original. Three, the slower speed makes it a bit easier to time your newspaper throws, which are already a bit easier to time though it does feel a bit different here. Between that and the hitboxes for either the paper or the mailbox being pretty generous, it should be easy to get the papers into the mailbox instead of the front door for bonus points.
I did run into a glitch where the hitbox on the last fire hydrant in the second half of the route seems to have a much bigger hitbox than the other one, but that one is easy to avoid as my run illustrates. You just need to go onto the road. It is possible to go to the left of that one if youre extremely precise, but the maneuvering is much tougher than it should be.
The biggest weakness of this port is surprisingly the music. The sound effects arent bad, but the music is not a great rendition of the original tracks. The Lynx is capable of better than this.
My run itself went quite well. I managed to finish with a couple of lives to spare, but I could have finished with more had I not gotten a bit sloppy on Sunday, the last day.
00:00 Intro
00:23 Monday
03:04 Tuesday
05:36 Wednesday
08:27 Thursday
11:09 Friday
13:41 Saturday
16:04 Sunday
#paperboy #atarilynx #atari #gameplay #playthrough #1cc #retrogaming #classicgaming #newspaper #delivery")
![Outrun 2006 Coast 2 Coast [PC] - Heart Attack Mode Full Run (Goal B)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OSeE-tamLbI/mqdefault.jpg "Outrun 2006 Coast 2 Coast [PC] - Heart Attack Mode Full Run (Goal B)
Outrun 2006 Coast 2 Coast is an amazing racer that Ive been coming back to on and off this year thanks to the Outrun 2006 Tweaks mod. I decided to go back and play the Heart Attack mode of this game on the original Outrun 2 tracks. The purpose of this mode is to complete specific objectives, which reward you with hearts depending on how well you execute them.
I had a very good run for the most part. There were some smaller mistakes that kept me from getting the AAA rank overall, but there were no wrecks or serious mistakes on my part either.
Also, I am working on a larger discussion video at the moment, which I hope to have finished soon.
00:00 Intro
00:41 Race
05:27 Final Results and Credits")
![Sonic Wings [SFC/SNES] - First Loop 1CC 626,500 pts](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OWxW0ZKDSEw/mqdefault.jpg "Sonic Wings [SFC/SNES] - First Loop 1CC 626,500 pts
Sonic Wings, known as Aero Fighters in the West, is a shoot em up released by Video Systems for the Super Famicom in 1993. It is a port of the arcade shooter Sonic Wings, originally released in arcades in Japan in 1992. The SNES version is known for being one of the rarest games on the system as it was released in extremely limited quantities. The Japanese version is much more common.
This game is notable for being developed by many of the programmers that went on to found Psikyo, famous for the Gunbird and Strikers 1945 games. In fact, the gameplay here is very similar to the earliest Psikyo shmups, particularly Samurai Aces and the original Gunbird. The stages are short but intense and the trademark Psikyo fast bullets and patterns are here in their infancy. You also have a decent amount of ships, as you get a total of 8 between both P1 and P2 sides. Each side gets a different selection, which is a bit strange for console gamers but not too unusual by arcade standards.
Another similarity between this and later Psikyo games is how your runs are structured. The first three stages here are randomized in terms of order, though a particular character will always get those particular stages to start. After that, the order of the stages is set in stone. Also, you have two loops in the arcade original as well as the Super Famicom version, another Psikyo tradition. However, the SNES version lacks the second loop because that release used a smaller cartridge as a cost-cutting measure.
As far as difficulty goes, it is believed by some that this version is actually harder than the arcade original. Ive seen multiple shmup players more skilled than me point this out elsewhere. While I still havent played the arcade original yet, the one thing that definitely has an impact on difficulty is the rank system. The longer you live, the nastier it gets in terms of bullet speeds, and it gets nasty by Stage 5 unless you die prior to that. I decided to suicide before the Stage 4 boss because of that. Also, while the first four stages arent very hard, you do need to route more by the time you get to Stage 5.
The final stage of each loop is by far the hardest. Not only are the bullets fast by this point, the mini-boss is harder than any of the stage bosses prior and you have a possibility of two last bosses. You either get a skull named Pandora after fighting multiple phases of the space shuttle/golden capsule or you get the more difficult Osaru, a giant ape who also appears in later Sonic Wings games. Osaru is by far the harder fight and that is the one I got. After hours of practice, Im pretty sure that the last boss is determined at random, but I could be wrong.
I did not last long into the second loop, but the second loop seems much more fair than a Psikyo second loop from the limited time Ive spent playing it.
Overall, this is definitely worth playing if you want a great vertical shmup for the Super Famicom/SNES. Its also pretty faithful to the arcade original despite the 4:3 aspect ratio.
#sonicwings #superfamicom #shmups #retrogaming #1cc
00:00 Intro
00:32 Stage 1
02:20 Stage 2
03:49 Stage 3
06:18 Stage 4
08:21 Stage 5
10:03 Stage 6
12:18 Stage 7
14:42 Loop 2")
![Flicky [Sega Genesis] - First Loop 1CC Playthrough 966,460 pts](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/P44GirVGaY0/mqdefault.jpg "Flicky [Sega Genesis] - First Loop 1CC Playthrough 966,460 pts
Before Flicky became known for appearances in many different Sonic games, most notably Sonic 3D Blast, Flicky had her own arcade platformer back in 1983. That game eventually got a port to the Sega Genesis and Mega Drive in 1991, the same year that Sonic The Hedgehog made the Sega Genesis a serious threat to Nintendo. This port is probably more common than the arcade version at this point.
The purpose of Flicky is to control Flicky, a blue bird, through a small area in order to collect several chicks known as Chirps and bring them to the exit. Your big threats are the cats that roam the stage as well as the tiny green bugs that move quickly up the ceilings and on the floor. This is a simple concept that is similar to Namcos Mappy, which this game was supposed to be Segas response to, except that youre collecting these Chirps instead of valuable items. Also, while Mappy is probably inspired by Tom & Jerry, this game is more like the Looney Tunes shorts with Sylvester and Tweety in terms of cartoon inspirations.
Whenever you grab a Chirp, it starts a chain of Chirps that follow you until you go to the exit. This chaining is what a large portion of your scoring each stage is based upon because the more you bring back to the exit at a time, the more each Chirp is worth in the chain. If you bring back all of them at once, you get a large amount of points. However, this can be difficult to do in later stages as the enemy cats can break up your chain by making contact with it, forcing you to go back and reclaim your Chirps. If you get touched, you die in one hit.
Speaking of scoring, your score comes down to bringing back chains of Chirps as long as possible, as quickly as possible, and the bonus rounds. The bonus rounds require you to grab as many of the Chirps falling from the sky as you can. Perfect bonus rounds fetch a nice bonus.
Part of the challenge has to do with Flicky herself. Her movement is a bit touchy with a little bit of slidey inertia. She also has a tendency to bounce off a wall if you jump against them, making her easy prey for the cats that roam the stages. Also, you have no control over how high she jumps.
However, Flicky goes have two things going for her. One, her movement speed is pretty good so youre not as a dramatic speed disadvantage. Two, her jump, though it only has one mode, is higher than the cats, so you can jump up to safety in certain situations. This along with the generous collision detection on ledges also allows to make some longer jumps than youd expect at first.
The two main keys to beating this game comes down to learning the movement and having routes for the harder stages. Some stages dont need much routing while others require strict routing like in a shmup. Plus, the enemies spawn in the same places so you need to learn these spawn points for certain stages. If your timing is slightly off, that can cause you to hit a green bug and die unexpectedly instead of being safe. Another thing you can leverage is the fact that the stages scroll infinitely from side to side despite being tiny, so you can get back to the other side of the stage very quickly.
Even though the stages are small and short, there are 48 of them to beat in order to get to the ending screen, which the arcade original lacked. After that, the second loop begins. It is a lot of stages to learn, but the first loop is still less than 30 minutes. From my experiences, the hardest stages of the first loop are rounds 16, 25, 28, 32, 36, and 42. Another thing is that later on in the loop, I played more for survival, taking less chances by making more than one run to the exit in order to collect the Chirps safely, and I had issues pulling that off at times. I got all the way to Round 58 in the second loop before I hit Game Over, and you dont get continues to begin with so a 1CC is the only way to beat this game.
00:00 Intro
00:26 Rounds 1-3
01:31 Rounds 4-7
02:59 Rounds 8-11
04:43 Rounds 12-15
06:28 Rounds 16-19
08:19 Rounds 20-23
10:36 Rounds 24-27
12:48 Rounds 28-31
15:52 Rounds 32-35
18:07 Rounds 36-39
20:49 Rounds 40-43
23:57 Rounds 44-47
26:24 Round 48 + Ending
27:44 Loop 2
#flicky #segagenesis #segamegadrive #retrogaming #classicgaming #sega #segaclassics")
![Pole Position II [Gamecube/Arcade] - Fuji/Namco 1CC with Commentary (Namco Museum)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/P8nEMOKPRew/mqdefault.jpg "Pole Position II [Gamecube/Arcade] - Fuji/Namco 1CC with Commentary (Namco Museum)
0:00. Intro
0:53. Qualifying
1:49. Race
As I stated in the 1 Year Anniversary video, I have a goal of finishing every single Pole Position II course. Ive done Suzuka, Test, and now Fuji aka Namco Circuit if youre playing Namco Museum. For this run, I decided to piece together some commentary for qualifying and the full race. I may do the same thing if I clear Seaside in the future.
Also, special thanks to everyone who watched my previous video and especially those of you who subscribed recently. I have been blown away by the influx of views and new subscribers. I appreciate the feedback as well. In fact, I made sure the audio levels were good for the background music and sound effects and not drowning out the commentary.
Music: GROOVE-FM - これ大好きCITY
#poleposition #namco #namcomuseum #retrogaming #arcadegames #arcade #arcadegame")
![Marble Madness [Gamecube/Arcade] - First 1CC 78,170 pts (Midway Arcade Treasures)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PFa013kgGjI/mqdefault.jpg "Marble Madness [Gamecube/Arcade] - First 1CC 78,170 pts (Midway Arcade Treasures)
Played on Dolphin via Midway Arcade Treasures using a Hori Fighting Commander (Switch version).
This is an important milestone for me because this is my first 1CC of a Western arcade game. This means a lot to me because Ive been playing this game on and off for over 18 years since I first got Midway Arcade Treasures for my Gamecube, and I used to be done by the end of the third stage or halfway through the fourth one.
It may be a short 1CC, but it is an intense one as you have to be fast and precise while navigating some ridiculous mazes, with the hardest being the last stage. I played this on a Hori Fighting Commander, which has an excellent D-pad but still does not perfectly replicate the original trackball controls that this game had in the arcades.
I died a lot, which hurt my score at the end, but Im proud of how clutch I was during the last stretch of the final stage. Also, I got the harder left route in the beginning of that stage thanks to RNG, but I still got through it!
Last, Marble Madness is a good example of why Atari Games were brilliant. They made plenty of influential and original games like this, Paperboy, Roadblasters, the Rush series, and Rampart just to name a few that I would recommend to anyone.")
![Cherry Bomb [PICO-8] - ALL Clear 69100 pts (Basic Shmup Showcase)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/P_J3B2UEW9g/mqdefault.jpg "Cherry Bomb [PICO-8] - ALL Clear 69100 pts (Basic Shmup Showcase)
Link to game: https://krystman.itch.io/cherrybomb
Cherry Bomb is a fixed screen wave shmup for the PICO-8 created by Krystman as a submission for his own Basic Shmup Showcase thats he hosting on itch.io, which you can learn more about here: https://itch.io/jam/basic-shmup
This is a wave shooter reminiscent of Galaxian and Galaga with some modern touches like bombs, which are really more like a limited use spread shot, increased bullet count getting it close to bullet hell at times, and some extra scoring bonuses for killing enemies that are moving. Its a fun but simple wave shooter thats pretty well-polished without any major issues.")
