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The first ever Macross Game


Tochiro

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A couple of months back I finally (quite by accident) came across a good-condition copy of the first Macross game ever made. No, not the Famicon/NES game, but rather Macross for the Bandai Arcadia.

'The what' you may ask? The Bandai Arcadia was the Japanese release of Emmerson's Arcadia 2001 home entertainment system. Japan received 4 exclusive games for the system, one of which was a Macross game. Originally released in 1983 (2 years before the Famicon game) for 3800yen, this game is the black history of Macross games - its pretty terrible! I paid just under 9000yen for it but since I've seen it go on online auctions for 30,000yen and upwards, i was pretty happy to grab it and add it to the Macross collection :-)

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Well I've only watched it played so far. I will be picking up a 2nd hand Arcadia (they arent that hard to come across here) a little later on to give it a proper spin. From all accounts its pretty horrible though! :-)

May do something someday but it depends. I'm not much of a fan of recording footage for people who dont even pony up the cash for the more available or more recent games. I also just terminated my old game podcast so am taking a break from that stuff for now.

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  • 4 months later...
  • 5 months later...

Closer to Intellivision, actually. Those controllers are almost exactly the same as the original version from Mattel. If I remember correctly, you could actually order the discs with the joystick on them.

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Poetic, even... :)

i actually had an INTELLIVISION, for a very short period,

in fact, it was a something of a hand me down from that same nephew

that gave me that ROBOTECH CHANGERS VEXAR, (IMAI 1/72 VF-1S FOCKER VARIABLE) starting my MACROSS bug.

it was mid-1990 or so, just months after my parents bought me my first VGC, a first U.S. release SEGA GENESIS,

and had also that year gotten me a second-hand NINTENDO NES with a ton of games and accs. to take care of my budding MARIO fetish.

we were having a yard sale that day, when my grandma brought over a bunch of crap (including that INTELLIVISION)

to add to the sale, and me and my mom gave the COLECO a spin, considering retaining it. we quickly decided to put it back into the sale, however,

being rather spoiled by our recently-acquired 8 and 16bit wonders, as one might have been, back in the early 1990's... :)

Edited by Shaorin
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wow! a deep & dark era of computer gaming I happily avoided.. even back then when it was all in its infancy I thought it was all pretty terrible stuff.. I walked away and made a return in the early to mid 90's and found not a lot had changed..

still kinda cool though to see it all again! B))

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  • 2 weeks later...

Poor Arcadia... it's not the WORST system(that honor goes to the RCA Studio II), but it's still more than a bit of a lame dog.

By the time it came out, it was hopelessly dated, and it would've had an uphill fight even if Atari DIDN'T have name recognition, a superior distribution network, and possibly shady anti-competitive practices(there are anecdotes of them saying they'd stop doing business with anyone that carried the Vectrex, which led to many distributors being unwilling to carry the Vectrex).

That Atari ALSO had superior hardware was just one more nail in the coffin. And truly damning given that Emerson launched the Arcadia in 1982 and the VCS was VERY dated at that time. The chipset the Atari 5200 used when it launched in that same year was ALSO somewhat dated.

The Arcadia could've... SHOULD'VE been very similar to the ColecoVision it launched alongside*.

Emerson tried to get away with making cheaper hardware, and they got what they paid for.

The Arcadia and ColecoVision both launched at two hundred bucks, so it wasn't even a case of offering a cheaper alternative. It was sheer greed, and it came back to bite them HARD.

Anyways, I've emulated the Arcadia Macross game. It is... uninspiring.

*The TI sound and graphics chips that Coleco used were at a price/performance sweet spot that made them VERY popular, and they wound up in a LOT of machines. The most notable of these are the MSX1 computer standard and the Sega SG-1000, AKA Sega's first game console. The latter wound up leaving TI's fingerprints on every ROM-based system Sega every made, with the Sega Master System being SG1k-compatible and the Genesis and Game Gear both being SMS-compatible.

There's also evidence that the graphics chip in the NES was "heavily inspired by" the TMS9918. It operates in a very TI manner.

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