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Arqade

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  • 1
    I think you can add "lives, health, or restarting on the track after a crash" to the core elements too. Basically some mechanism which means your session doesn't immediately end from one bad decision. And you can probably also add "rapidly escalating difficulty", which in the arcades tends to get either a rapid turnover of players or the same player inserting more coins. Commented Jul 26, 2022 at 10:59
  • Good suggestions @Graham, I've added both of those to the list! Commented Jul 26, 2022 at 13:26
  • Score should be added as a core element since it's something commonly seen in arcade-style games. Commented Jul 26, 2022 at 17:19
  • 2
    IMHO lives are far less essential to the definition today than they were in the actual days of arcade cabinets. Some games still do it, but nowadays you're just as likely to see an arcade-style game continue from a recent checkpoint (e.g. Super Meat Boy, the Bit.Trip games, Celeste, etc.). What you probably won't see is manual saving and loading, or any save-related options aside from "delete save data" and perhaps multiple save slots ("multiple" is a word which here means "almost always three"). Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 7:47
  • I like the "simple controls" reason. I distinctly remember playing a tank game on PC in the mid-1990's that was so complex that it included almost a dozen "training" missions to teach all of the different control modes and movements. There were distinct commands for looking around, turning the turret, choosing a target, choosing which weapons to fire, and actually firing. On top of this, there were commands to start, stop, speed up, slow down, turn, and use the map. Fortunately, weapons reloaded automatically as long as ammo stores were not completely depleted. Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 15:23