My roommate is awesome. One day he decided to build himself a proper controller to play some of his favorite not-emulated arcade games. After a few dollars, a bit of research and some help from yours truly, we have the basic board made.

GENTLEMEN (also ladies) BEHOLD!

Full frontal (NSFW).



The backdoor special (zomg hawt).



Lying splayed out, ready to go... sexy.



Now I'm sure some of you are thinking "Wow, that's a jalopy piece of shit. Where's the molding? Why does it have a solid black top that looks like it's made out of construction paper? Fail."

Well you've got some nerve there mister (or miss).

My roomy has the molding, which we weren't able to put on quite yet as the board needs to have a groove cut in it, and the plan is to decorate the current top with chalk drawings (of what we're not quite sure yet) and then put plexiglass on top to keep it sexy forever. Mr. Roommate also bought a board capable of going 4 player, so eventually he'll get around to cutting a board that we'll be able to wire up and play some quadtastic arcade style Simpsons and TMNT on.

The other part of this post is about what happened after we connected the board to the arcade cabinet, which we purchased legally. But first some back story: I grew up near an arcade, so I have many happy childhood memories of spending hours and hours playing all sorts of games, but I was never able to get into shmups. Oh sure I played them every once in a while, but I was never able to while away nearly as much time on them as I did on the other games. Later in life I tried to get into shmups on the home consoles, but I still didn't feel the magic.

That is until last night.

My roommate and I inserted our totally legit copy of DoDonPachi and I was blown away. The control felt so good that, for the first time ever, I was able to really lose myself in a shmup. We played a bunch of great games last night but there's no question in mind mind: the shmups, DoDonPachi in particular, were the best. I plan on spending some serious quality time with all the shmups that I can get my hands on. We also ordered both a PS2 and Gamecube connectors for the board, so I'm going to have quite a few titles to choose from :D (can't wait to try Ikaruga). I just thought that it was crazy how the arcade controls made such a big difference for me. It was like some kind of gaming epiphany.

But of course SS or it didn't happen ;)

My new best friend.




Zomg! It's Bub and Bob!



This is just pure unadulterated awesome. Engrish FTW.



One more thing: feel free to toss out suggestions for what we should draw on the top. I'll post pics once it's done.

Random quote... EXECUTE!

"The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer is: No."

- The Simpsons (Possibly Leonard Nimoy in a guest appearance? I can't remember)