Arcade Castle

Well, as much ritual as one could muster without any official rules on the subject. aaannd.....technically a card game vs. a board game..... Well, I suppose the short answer would be that I thought it would be funny to sacrifice a board game during the eclipse. But! Such events throughout our history are often laden with layers of symbolism and significance. From the more 'on-the-nose' sacrifices of the proverbial virgin into the volcano, to simply skipping a few meals, sacrifices have been made for any number of reasons. But the question here is more specific. Why did I sacrifice The Oregon Trail Card Game? Or, more accurately, why did I attempt to sacrifice it? Yes. It survived.  Well....for the most part.... Despite letting it burn itself out, I was surprised to see that the game was, to a large degree, still present in some form or fashion. The only thing to get fully obliterated was the D6 and the sides of the box. Even the top and bottom of the ...

In Episode 07, Arcade Castle plumbs the depths of early text-based adventure gaming as they play a modern adaptation of one of the earliest video games ever made: Adventure/ADVENT/The Colossal Cave Adventure. While Adventure has seen many adaptations and modifications since its creation by Will Crowther in 1975, does this board game adaptation from 2013 deserve a place in the Well House, or cast into the Bottomless Pit? In The Colossal Cave Adventure, players traverse the rooms and passages of The Colossal Cave and face the hazards and dangers therein in a quest for treasure. As players uncover mysterious items during their trek in The Colossal Cave, they will find these strange items are key to surviving the trials and tribulations they will face as well as finding the treasures housed within the cavernous passages and rooms of The Colossal Cave. As players acquire treasures, a race begins as players attempt to protect their treasures and deposit them in the Well House. The firs...

In this 'First Looks' video, Arcade Castle takes a peek at a Swedish Super Mario Board Game that, while officially licensed, relies upon bootleg Legos (I mean...Byggis Blocks) to get the world-building accomplished.

In this 'First Looks' video, CasualJohn takes a look at the board game adaptation of the...*counts*...9th Pokemon movie. Why do I get the feeling that Pokemon board games are largely unplumbed depths for Internet researchers? CasualJohn questions his investigation into this area of video game board games.

In this 'First Looks' Unboxening, Arcade Castle takes a quick look at the contents of the Pocket Monsters Family Pomjon Game from the early 2000s. Despite Omnicron's new edicts, CasualJohn still tinkers with how to present visuals to his audience.

In this Unboxening, Arcade Castle takes a look at what is possibly the earliest Super Mario World board game in existence! Plus, some sweet holofoil dice!

In Episode 06 (or Episode 01, Volume 02 if we are going by comic book rules), Arcade Castle tackle the high risk, high reward world of high finance and stock speculation in The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt. Buying stock in Mcdonald's, WoW, and more, Arcade Castle struggles to avoid bankruptcy and boredom in this financial tool ...game...for the Odyssey II from 1982! In The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt, each player, or team of players start with $100,000 dollars and attempt, over the course of five years, to go big, go home, or go broke. Throughout the Level 1 version of the game, players buy and sell stock, and  try to understand the cause and effect between stocks and world events that occur periodically throughout gameplay. Will Arcade Castle see $_$ ? or -_-? In this first episode of Season 2 of the Arcade Castle Podcast, CasualJohn and Patrick examine another entry in the Master Strategy Series that were released in the early 1980s on the Magnavox Odyssey II. After ...

In early April, 2017, USAopoly announced a new product in their Super Mario line. While USAopoly is perhaps somewhat notorious for its saturation of the market for over 20 years with countless re-skinnings of Monopoly..... (And that's just the video game versions currently in production...) Every now and again, USAopoly creates something a little more original than constantly pumping out variations on Yahtzee, Monopoly, and Risk. (The USAopoly factory) However, other than simply announcing the game, and posting pictures of the box art, USAopoly gives us little information on how the game is played or what the rules are. SO LETS LOOK AT THE BACK OF THE BOX!! Judging from the back of the box, it looks like it is more of a party game. This I get purely from the voting cards that everyone gets with a YES or NO vote. The game seems to imply that either overtly, or covertly, each player is trying to get a character, or set of characters to the top of ...

In this Unboxening, Arcade Castle takes a look at a set collecting card game from the Netherlands! We see the sun as painted by Bob Ross, and we learn why David Carradine isn't allowed to play card games anymore.

In early April, 2017 on Kickstarter, Trilobyte announced that they would be raising funds for a board game adaptation of The 7th Guest. Trilobyte is the developer who originally published The 7th Guest and its sequel, The 11th Hour. The 7th Guest is a notable entry in video game history for a number of reasons. It was one of the first computer video games to be released exclusively on CDROM, eschewing the older formats such as 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 floppy discs. This is in part due to the extensive amount of live action video clips played throughout the game as well as pre-rendered 3D graphics as well. The 7th Guest is also notable on the technological side. Given that FMV (you can hate full motion video all you want gamers, I still has a special spot in my heart) was a revolutionary technology at the time, and fully loaded CDROM games were all but unheard of, Trilobyte and The 7th Hour were on the cutting edge of early 1990s PC Gaming. They were inventing the technology along with the...

Ahh....Pacman. Perhaps nothing typifies the 80s arcade experience more than the three holy P's: Pizza, Pepsi, and Pacman. Dinner date for two? Heck yeah! Pacman is one of the elites of the arcade, pizza joint, bowling alley, bar, dive, and more as it is one of the most successful cabinets that has ever been made. Released in May of 1980, by the turn of the millenium is was estimated that more than 10 billion quarters had been slid into Pacman machines alone (not counting spinoffs such as Mrs. Pacman, Baby Pacman, Super Pacman, and Professor Pacman) netting an estimated $2.5 billion dollars in plays alone. Adjusting for inflation and adding in the sales of the physical units, software releases, and merchandise,  Pacman has netted an estimated $10 billion dollars for its parent company, Namco. The titular character, Pacman, was originally said to be designed after its creator, Iwatani, saw a pizza missing a slice, but that is only half-true, with the character de...