 S... ...Sdrunk? Welcome! Every once in a while, I get the itch to explore some arcade games, there's a ton out there that I've never seen cabinets for in the wild, and even if you have every ROM of every arcade game from the 80s and 90s, it would still take forever to sort through all of those, so that's why I started this series about arcade games that the Super Nintendo missed out on. That's not necessarily to say that these games could run as is on Super Nintendo hardware, That'd be pretty stupid, in many cases, that's just not possible. The title is just a way of saying, hey, while you were in a basement cave playing Star Fox and Sim City on Super Nintendo, like me, here's some stuff in the arcades that you might have missed out on. Starting with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I've done six of these arcade compilation videos already, and somehow I had completely missed out on this one. It's an older game made in 1985 by Atari, but if any movie franchise lends itself perfectly to video games, it's Indiana Jones. One token gives you three lives, and you go around rescuing children kept in these cages, and the start of each level tells you how many you've gotta find. This game is pretty limited, as you can see, especially compared to the other games in this video, but I still enjoyed it. This one also has difficulty settings, which is kind of unusual for the time, but no matter which one you select, you're still just going around whipping dudes or whipping gas barrels. Why are you keeping gas barrels inside of volcano? That's real smart. There's other levels here, like these mine cart stages, and there's even the scene with Indy hanging from the rope bridge. This is a very simple but solid title that does a nice job with the Indiana Jones license. Here's one from Konami made in 1990 called Surprise Attack. You got a terrorist organization taking over a moon base and an orbiting space station. A guy named Red Thunderbolt has to single-handedly go and stop them. You're shooting everything that moves and doing these cool lightning special attacks. The game ranks pretty highly on the 90s scale. The structure here is very similar to Rolling Thunder, where you pretty much have two surfaces you can jump between to take out bad guys. There's six levels here, divided up into two or three stages each, plus a boss fight. So there's actually quite a bit of content here for an arcade game. This one can get pretty creative with the level design, as you can see, and in addition to that, you get to play a trivia game in between levels where you get asked questions like, what's the chemical symbol for silver? Or what's the speed of sound in the air at 20 degrees Celsius? How the heck am I supposed to know that? What's that got to do with the game? Well, I'll give them points for trying, I guess. This is a pretty fun game that's worth checking out. Let's go from outer space to ninjas with Kengo, also known as Lightning Swords, made in 1991 by Irem. You go on a rampage searching for vengeance after your partner is killed in battle. And evidently, this guy is Tim Allen in a ninja costume based on that noise he just made. This one's just good old-fashioned chaos, the type of game that allows you to get super overpowered with all sorts of power-ups for your sword, so you can just annihilate anything that gets in your way. One token gives you a health meter and two lives, so this is pretty dang forgiving for an arcade game, and you can likely finish this one in like 20 minutes or so. And that's time well spent. I mean, just check out some of the bosses here, like this rock monster, or this guy who teleports around and changes colors based on what attack he'll use. It's a good time. Moving on, when I see a title like Spinal Breakers, you know I have to play it and tell people about it. You'd expect this to be a one-on-one fighting game, but instead it's an over-the-shoulder gallery shooter where you break people's spines with bullets, I guess. This one was made by Video System in 1990, the same folks behind shoot-em-ups like Arrow Fighters and racing games like F1 World Grand Prix. Yeah, this isn't the smoothest game out there, and it's not the best, but come on, the title is Spinal Breakers. You gotta love that. I actually kind of enjoy how slowly this guy moves. I mean, how incompetent are these bad guys? Why can't you hit the slow-moving white thing tiptoeing across the screen? I still had fun with this one, though. I mean, you inexplicably fight dinosaurs. You go back to ancient Greece and ancient Egypt. Oh, yeah, when I think ancient Egypt, I think of bizarre, skinless aliens that shoot plasma balls at you. If you can tolerate the slower pace of this one, I think it's worth checking out. I mean, look at this insane final boss. You can't beat that. We go from Spinal Breakers to Karate Blazers, another one made by Video System, this one in 1991. Sadly, the Karate dudes in this game aren't decked out in Blazers, but this is a really impressive, fast-paced beat-em-up that really notches up the intensity. What stands out about this one is the performance. The sprites move very smoothly, there's a gazillion enemies on screen at once, the special moves are easy to execute, and everything is really fast-paced with zero slowdown. You've even got bulldozers plowing through warehouses, trying to run you over. That's awesome. All the usual beat-em-up tropes are here, so this game isn't gonna win any points for originality, but so what? This is just a really well-executed game. It's five long levels split up into two or three stages each, and this one can get pretty long for a beat-em-up, but it's a good time throughout. Here's a weird one made by Sega AM2 in 1992 called Arabian Fight, and right away you can see this game just looks a lot different than any other beat-em-up for the time. There's all sorts of bizarre sprite scaling, there's foreground effects and parallax scrolling in the background. This may have been one of the most technically advanced arcade games for its time based on all the stuff going on here, and even more than that, this game is up to four player compatible with four different characters to choose from. This is another long game with seven levels to get through, and one token gives you a health meter with two lives, but it'll take you close to 45 minutes to beat this one, and even more than that with one player. Still, this is a fascinating game to look at, and to play, if only to see what was considered cutting edge at this particular time. I know that if I ever saw this cabinet in person as a kid, my head would have exploded. Playing it now isn't gonna have that same effect, obviously, but it's still an interesting playthrough. Cyberbot's Full Metal Madness is another game with an awesome title. I mean, it's just about impossible to have a lousy game with a title like Cyberbot's Full Metal Madness. This is a spin-off of Armored Warriors, which was one of the best beat-em-ups of the 90s, only this game is a one-on-one fighting game made by Capcom in 1995. Games like this almost leave me speechless. The size and detail of the sprites, the smoothness of the gameplay, all the crazy weapons you can use is just complete chaos in the best possible way. There's six different characters you can fight as and four different robot types, like this guy here with a shoulder-mounted flamethrower, this woman here whose robot has all sorts of lasers that slice up buildings in the background, this dude with a grappling arm and tentacles that come out of his head, and then you have the final boss here who can turn into a helicopter. It's one thing to have an imagination to come up with cool stuff like this, but it's another to do such an amazing job putting it into practice. This game is really tough, but it's well worth checking out. Another solid fighting game made around the same time from Konami is Dragoon Might. This is a weapon-based fighting game with 12 fighters to choose from. You've got your typical guy with a samurai sword, a guy with a staff, but then you've got a guy who's wearing swords for shoes. And this dude is crazy to fight, flying all around the screen, which really shows off the sprite scaling here. You also have this character who apparently borrowed Guts's sword from Berserk, this fighter with these crazy red claws, and this guy who fights you with a necklace, I guess. His strength is magic. In fact, this game does a really nice job balancing each fighter, as well as balancing the difficulty throughout the single-player campaign. Again, this one does an incredible job with the visuals, really getting into some details like the reflections in the water, the animated backgrounds, the aforementioned sprite scaling, and the different character expressions and movements. If you're really into fighting games and you haven't played this one, you'll have a good time. Let's dial it back a notch and look at a simple top-down puzzle game called Exvania made in 1992 by Namco. It's kind of like Medieval Bomberman. You bash apart treasure chests looking for bombs and power-ups, setting up traps for your opponents, and when a character is taken out, all their stuff scatters for anyone to claim it. You also get dragons that wander around aimlessly, getting in your way, slimes that can slow you down, and there's eight different castles in this game which have four or five different mazes in each. Get the most points and be the last person standing to claim each castle, and the player that claims the most castles will at the end of the game win. This one is tough to get any good at, the same as Bomberman, but I appreciate it for sticking out as something different in the early 90s arcade landscape. Finally, we have Slipstream, made by Capcom in 1995, and this one isn't just great for the jaw-dropping visuals, but it's also the rare arcade cabinet that wasn't released in Japan or the US, but in Latin American countries like Brazil and Chile, so a lot of people have never even heard of this one. There's three game modes, a time trial, a grand prix, and an endurance mode, and you've got eight cars to choose from, all with varying handling, acceleration, maximum speed, and tire grip settings. I've said for years the most important thing a retro racing game has to get right is a sense of speed, and this game feels insanely fast, it's great, and it gives it an addictive quality. It's easy to just zone out and play this one, and it helps that the controls are exactly as they should be for a game like this. It would be so awesome to be able to play this on a real cabinet, or even in a sit-down cabinet, but alas, we can only play Slipstream any way we can. All right, that's all for now. I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.