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You can turn on free-play and credit feed your way through most of the arcade ports in your collection and maybe even get rewarded with a credits sequence and high score screen for it. You can also spend hours and hours practicing until you get that coveted 1CC run and become the talk of your favorite Discord server. You can also fall somewhere in the middle. And by somewhere, I mean just about anywhere because to get the most out of these kinds of games, I think it\u2019s important for players to set a goal for themselves of some sort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For genre enthusiasts, this usually means getting a 1CC, or one-credit clear, of a game. Old-school arcade games were designed to be quarter munchers. Fun enough to pull you in but difficult enough to part you with your precious quarters. Many console shooters of the time maintained this philosophy with games like Super Star Soldier<\/em> that would be right at home on a 90\u2019s arcade cabinet for their difficulty. These games were made to part players with their money by having them buy continues. This almost makes a 1CC run of a hard game an act of defiance against the gods. You developed the skills to hog a machine for 30 minutes while only spending a quarter. Is a 1CC the end goal, though? Can these games of mastery ever be considered beaten? If you can see the ending with a pocket full of change and continue to push your score well beyond a 1CC run, where do players draw the line? For many, myself included a lot of the time, a 1CC run is considered good enough. But sometimes you meet your match or don\u2019t want to push your skills to the degree necessary to get that 1CC. Combining this with the pride I think a lot of gamers have about not wanting to be bested by a game and it makes for a complicated feeling or relationship with a game. Will I continue to push for 1CC runs when playing everything from Soldier Blade<\/em> to Star Fox<\/em>? Probably. But I\u2019m also going to savor the 5 credit runs along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Between ports, retro revivals, indie games, and even an occasional release from big names like PlatinumGames, we gamers have tons of arcade and arcade-inspired games at our fingertips. These games tend to be short, but the game itself doesn\u2019t dictate the completion terms. You do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":13600,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_gspb_post_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-column"],"blocksy_meta":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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One example that comes to mind for me is Ikaruga<\/em>. The game is beautiful and brilliant but can be downright brutal. Yet it\u2019s still considered a landmark shmup that even those with no interest in the genre have heard about. It\u2019s a game that\u2019s proceeded by its reputation in a sense. We can see the brilliance of its design but most of us will never master its scoring system or get the 1CC. But does it need to be mastered or was it even intended to be? Is practicing until you get a clear in 5, 10, 20 credits good enough? I think so. It\u2019s the freedom afforded to us by maintaining the credit and continue system of old. It serves as a benchmark without being a barrier now that we don\u2019t have to worry about having change on hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n