Whether you have a VR headset or not, Digital Cybercherries’ recreational arcade simulator, New Retro Arcade, just received a playable demo. You can download it right now from over on the Steam store.
The demo comes ahead of the simulator’s full release, which is set to arrive “soon”.
You can basically scope out an arcade room with customizable cabinets, music, and mini-games. According to Joe the community manager, he mentions in a quick update on Steam that the demo is just a small taste of what’s to come for the full version, writing…
“It gives a glimpse into what the full game will have to offer and provides the same amount of content as the previous free versions of New Retro Arcade.”
The room is setup to be a hub for gamers with a large library of arcade ROMs, both for home consoles and the old-school cabinets. It’s designed to take advantage of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift’s 3D motion controllers, but you can also use an Xbox 360, Xbox One or Steam Controller to supplement the experience. You can get a taste of what the New Retro Arcade demo looks like with the promotional video below.
I love the look and design of this sim. The scale is almost pitch perfect. It literally looks like those old smokey arcade hang-outs from back in the day. The only thing it’s missing is the smell of the manager’s cigarettes, some crumpled napkins on the ground, the faint whiff of Cheetos from a bag that didn’t quite make it into the trash bin, and a bunch of pubescent boys (and maybe a tomboyish girl or two, along with a few cheerleaders hanging off the arms of high-school jocks) and it would be a perfect reincarnation of the arcade halls from the 1980s and early 1990s.
Someone needs to get to work on a smell-o-sensor so we can experience the full recreation of that era!
But back to New Retro Arcade… the simulator allows gamers to import their ROMs into the virtual cabinets and play to their heart’s content. It supports multiplayer so it’s totally possible to play with your friends online, and there are 10 different non-arcade mini-games that you can try out, including air hockey, skeeball and whack-a-mole to name but a few.
You can grab the demo for New Retro Arcade right now from the Steam store.
If you need help installing MAME, SNES or Sega Genesis ROMs into Digital Cybercherries’ VR arcade sim, Reddit user mediumjordie offers a handy multi-step guide to getting the ROMs to work. You’ll first need to grab the 300 GamePack1 file and then do a little xml editing to make everything work as intended. Once you copy and cpaste the proper contents into xml, you’ll need to grab the emulator library dlls (linked in the Reddit post), and then open up the New Retro Arcade exe and assign the proper emulators to their proper file types. It’s really just that easy.
Also, even if you don’t have an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, you can still play the game in the non-VR mode.
