YouTube video I did of a cool broken Street Fighter II arcade machine

This video isn't comic related, but it is on my YouTube Channel so I thought I'd mention it.

I stumbled on this particular Street Fighter II arcade cabinet at a discount movie theatre in Greensboro. The game was extremely broken. The graphics have turned into glowing black and white lines with occasional flashes or touches of color. It looks like a cross between old school Tron and a photographic negative. Despite that, people were still playing it.

And I can see the draw. Suddenly a background you've literally seen thousands of times before has glowing water dripping from the ceiling or flashing neon lights on the elephant's dressing. It made them fresh, like a new edition of the game. I wanted to stand there and see what the next opponent would look like or how the next stage would be transformed.

What struck was me that people weren't playing this game in spite of it being broken. They were playing because it was broken. And there's something beautiful about that.

Social Media on Parade: The Arcade Guys on Google+

Hey, looks like those guys from page seven took the Space Chicken Massacre game right past the claw machine in my Google+ image. This is my first update on that image. Like I said, I'll have some dolls getting plucked up in there from time to time. Hopefully, it'll be something different every month, so stay tuned! 

Page Seven Complete!

So at long last page seven is done.

Stickboy and Psychoboy head to the mall and end up at the arcade. The arcade is modeled off vague memories of Aladdin's Castle arcade, which was my real life first stop anytime I went to the mall in the 80's or 90's. I seem to remember the walls were a bright warm color, probably red, and employees wore red vests. The older gentlemen is based on the manager there (doesn't he just look like an arcade manager?) and he'd always have a younger guy there assisting him or watching the place if he wasn't there.

So another in-story brand I created was the arcade game Stick's fawning over: Space Chicken Massacre! It's a light gun game where you shoot killer mutant space chickens. I loved the concept because it was the one thing I could think of that was so absurd that no one would make a game of it. If I eventually do some of the longer stories for the series, Stick and the gang will go see Space Chicken Massacre the Movie at some point (think Aliens, but with killer chickens).

I took some artist license here with the military using videogames in its training. It's actually first person shooters they used, but an arcade game was much more visual, so I went with that. There were real calls for videogame censorship and, of course, this page imagines it as reality.

Ironically, a lot of modern arcades look like the one shown here, not out of censorship, but simply because arcade videogames declined as home consoles became more powerful and more popular. You might find a four-token racing game, a couple light gun games or a Pac-Man/Galaga cabinet in them but that's usually it as far as the videogames go.

And in the inside joke category, check out the claw machine with several Pokémon and Digimon in there. I told you there would be more 90's references than you can shake a stick at!

Next up is page eight when our heroes meet...Dante from Clerks?!?