I’ve known about this game for quite some time, and when I originally purchased the game I sort of dropped it for the learning curve of getting working. Recently, because of a winter storm in my area, I decided to finally get it going. Now that I have got it fully customized and put some hours into it I wanted to give a review for anyone else wanting to jump into it.
While I will go over the Pros and cons I do want to point out a few things. Game is very resource heavy despite the requirements, my rig meets or goes over the recommended specs (besides RAM cause I am too cheap to buy more) and at full settings in VR will run games choppy, and I mean unplayably choppy. It's not a deal breaker for me, cause I can turn down most settings, but it's something to take into consideration.
PROS
Not nearly as hard to setup as it seems:
While the game seems like a nightmare to set up, once you find a decent tutorial and you use the Arcade Manager (which has everything but roms) it's actually quite easy to get the game going with working roms.
Fun experience to play emulators on:
The game has a great atmosphere and it is really enjoyable to play the games this way. If you’re wanting an arcade experience at home it's a pretty decent attempt at replicating it (in VR).
Non-Emulator experiences built into the game:
Besides the emulator based stuff the game also comes preloaded with a handful of things. You have two bowling lanes, basketball machines, whack-a-mole clones, a punching bag, a movie theater and radio (have to add your own files), a shooting game, and darts. Honestly the Movie theater alone helps sells it for me, as it makes watching videos in VR more entertaining, and actually adds benefit to playing Co-Op (if configured on both ends)
Tons of things to interact with:
The Arcade floor is littered with random items that build onto the atmosphere of the game. You can find an etch a-sketch and draw, mess with an omnibot that moves around the floor, pick up and throw food items. Just small things that add to the experience beside the main stuff.
CONS
Almost all the Arcade Cabinets have horizontally mounted monitors:
This might not be an issue for most people, but if you plan to mainly fill your arcade with classic early 80s titles you’re going to run into this issue. You only get 4 vertical monitor cabinets, all the others are horizontal. While you can put any game on any cabinet, there really isn’t a way to make a game like (Dig Dug) look good on the monitor.
Some games seem to not work period despite using the correct versions:
(I’ll preface by saying this negative might be an entirely me thing but I did do some testing to lead me to believe it isn’t).I thought it would be cool to add a LaserDisc game to the arcade, M.A.M.E supports a very small amount and while it shows up into the arcade, as soon as you go to boot it the game crashes. I turned down all the resource settings, I verified the roms worked on the version of M.A.M.E, but it just crashes.
You’re kinda forced to play standing up (In VR):
To my knowledge there is no setting at all to allow a (Sit Down) VR experience. While there are some aspects of the game that would work very poorly with sitting down, such as bowling, it's kind of annoying if you're only booting it to play a couple games or watch something in VR.
The Oculus App/Oculus Headset turns on even when not booted into VR Mode:
While this isn’t to big of a deal, especially cause the main selling point of this game is the VR mode and you really won’t play non-vr mode much, its annoying when you only want to test something (see if a machine crashes the game, if it showed up in the arcade, if your customization worked, ETC) and every time you do so the screen immediately minimizes and the oculus turns on. None of my other games with both Non-VR and VR modes do this.
No way to speed up or skip boot sequences for Arcades:
Many early 80s games had long bootup screens which makes the game very annoying to play in NRAN because some games might be 2 seconds, another might be 30-50 seconds. And you have to go through it every time you step away from the machine. I know in M.A.M.E you can press something like F10 and speed up, but I don’t know an easy way to do it here.
There are some things you might find issue with that I wouldn’t consider a Con but to just list a few.
Co-Op is kind of dumb (players can’t see or play each others games besides built in games, and if movies theaters are configured correctly)
Due to it working best with outdated M.A.M.E Cores, finding roms for specific games can be more challenging.
From reading posts when I was getting it working it seems the game is kind’ve abandoned and the community has fizzled out.
Compared to playing on a real machine the oculus controllers are just OK, not good, not bad, but OK.
All in all if you’re really wanting an experience like this I recommend picking up the game, it's fun to mess around in, it makes playing games on M.A.M.E more fun (for me anyways), I prefer watching videos on it, and if you enjoy the demo I think the full price is worth it. If none of what I said appeals to you and you didn’t like the demo I’d pass, I’ve never seen it go on sale either so I wouldn’t wait for it to get lower either.
