I had some arcade shooters for the sega saturn in the late 90s that had a sideways option so it could fill the whole screen. I was still using my old Amiga monitor back then and would occasionally turn out on its side. the box was mostly square so it worked and wasn't huge like today's monitors.
MAME has definitely had that as an option as well since, well, forever.
Excellent early console pinball game (though quite a bit later than the one featured in TFA—actually, the machine it was based on didn't even exist yet then): High Speed on the NES. 1991 release.
Plays great, considering the platform. You can learn the real machine decently well with the NES game. Like, if you've gotten OK at the NES game, you can walk up to a real High Speed cabinet for the first time and basically know what you're doing. It even feels pretty close as far as ball movement and flipper handling, aside from some (excellent) extra digital-only elements & bonus games they added (the video game is, remarkably, much closer to a 1991 pinball machine in features and "story" progression than its 1986 parent game is, without ruining the core gameplay of the machine). That's a hell of an achievement.
[EDIT] oh, do take care if you try it via emulation: it's a game that becomes nearly unplayable, even for someone who's very good at it, with very low levels of added input lag over the about-as-close-to-zero-as-it-gets of an NES hooked up to a CRT. The timing elements on the (video game version only) pauses during the ramp shot for multi ball are brutal with a tiny bit of extra lag, but even just keeping the ball alive becomes hard with much more than that.
Ah! I had that game as a kid, loved it! The actual paddle buttons on the side made it much better than a 2600 for that type of game. Don't remember what happened to it - maybe it died and that's why we got a 2600.
4 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 19.5 ms ] threadPlays great, considering the platform. You can learn the real machine decently well with the NES game. Like, if you've gotten OK at the NES game, you can walk up to a real High Speed cabinet for the first time and basically know what you're doing. It even feels pretty close as far as ball movement and flipper handling, aside from some (excellent) extra digital-only elements & bonus games they added (the video game is, remarkably, much closer to a 1991 pinball machine in features and "story" progression than its 1986 parent game is, without ruining the core gameplay of the machine). That's a hell of an achievement.
[EDIT] oh, do take care if you try it via emulation: it's a game that becomes nearly unplayable, even for someone who's very good at it, with very low levels of added input lag over the about-as-close-to-zero-as-it-gets of an NES hooked up to a CRT. The timing elements on the (video game version only) pauses during the ramp shot for multi ball are brutal with a tiny bit of extra lag, but even just keeping the ball alive becomes hard with much more than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_(company)