Capcom Home Arcade Brings Classic Arcade Gaming To Your Living Room

ENTERTAINMENTGADGETS

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A short while back, Sega announced their plans to release a miniature version of the Genesis, giving retro gaming fans another console to spend their money on. So yeah, Nintendo started a trend that’s not ending anytime soon, with even more ghosts of gaming’s past likely to try to grab their share of the pie. The Capcom Home Arcade is the latest of the bunch, giving gamers a way to bring the classic two-player arcade feel into their living rooms.

No, this isn’t your traditional home console that you plug into a TV and plug a pair of gamepads into. Instead, the darn thing looks like a darn CAPCOM signage that you can hang in your bedroom to celebrate your lifelong love affair with arcade fighting games. Except, the signage actually houses a full set of electronics that allow you to play some of the outfit’s most memorable titles from gaming’s nascent years.

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The Capcom Home Arcade puts two sets of arcade controls across the console’s width (one joystick, six action buttons, and two system buttons on each side), allowing you to play side-by-side with an opponent just like kids used to do back when arcades were hot fire. Yes, all those kids are now middle-aged folks who may or may not buy this out of nostalgia. Either way, that classic design means you’re not supposed to play this while comfortably plopped down on the couch. Instead, you’re likely setting this down on the coffee table and mashing buttons while staring at the TV with your upper body leaning forward. Yeah, good luck middle-aged folks with back problems.

It uses competition-grade Sanwa JLF-TP-8YT joysticks, which boast eight-way GT-Y directional gates, and OBSF buttons, ensuring it delivers the best arcade experience. Seriously, if you value precision, response time, and longevity with your arcade setup, these control elements will definitely deliver.

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The Capcom Home Arcade is completely plug-and-play, so you just hook it up to your TV’s HDMI slot to start playing any of the included games. Yes, you can totally set this up in a custom arcade cabinet, too, making it possibly the simplest way to build one of your own, provided you actually have the skills to build a cabinet (or, at least, know someone who does). A total of 16 games are onboard, namely Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, Giga Wing, Mega Man: The Power Battle, Alien vs Predator, Armored Warriors, 1944: The Loop Master, Strider, Capcom Sports Club, Captain Commando, Cyberbots, Darkstalkers, Ecofighters, Final Fight, Ghouls n’ Ghosts, Progear, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo.

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All the 16 games use the original Capcom CPS1 and CPS2 ROMs, which is emulated using software from FB Alpha. According to the outfit, it delivers an “authentic and accurate arcade experience,” so folks who enjoy playing with joysticks and large mashing-friendly buttons should have plenty of fun. As with the old arcade games, it saves a leaderboards of in-game performance, except this time, there’s the option to store it online, allowing you to compare how good you are at Giga Wing compared to the other retro gaming diehards out there.

The Capcom Home Arcade launches October 25, with European pricing set at €229.99.

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5 Responses

  1. Nintendo actually didn’t start the trend. There was a demand for the smaller systems way before Nintendo came out with their Mini retro NES. People were programming Raspberry Pi’s and putting old games on to it to play. Various plans and programs were released which made it easy for anybody to hack a Raspberry Pi and be able to play retro games on it. It became so easy to do with the step-by-step plans that anybody could do it, even if they were tech illiterate.

    Nintendo saw how popular these homemade retro systems were and decided they could make some money with it. I am glad Nintendo brought their mini system to the market, but they probably never would have without the success of the underground Raspberry Pi hackers.

    I have a Raspberry Pi that my friend programmed for me and I can play not only a handful of retro NES and Sega games, but I also have some Commodore 64 clone games such as Montezuma’s Revenge and Lodestar!

    The Capcom Home Arcade will have a hard time competing with the homemade Raspberry Pi’s that can already play any of the Capcom games that you want to put on. Literally, every single Capcom game has been emulated and is easy to find and place onto a Raspberry Pi.
    I love the styling of the Capcom Home Arcade, but the pricing is too steep, especially when you see that you only get 16 games with it. Any parent who is looking for a retro system as a gift will lean towards the NES or Sega, they are a much better value.

    1. I haven’t played Lodestar for years! I used to love that game. We would play it constantly and then my father copied Lodestar Challenger onto a disc from a friend of his and brought it home for us to play. It was the best gift ever!

  2. That’s $300 in American money. Wow, Capcom has gone off the deep end with their pricing. I won’t be picking one up because this is way too pricey for what you are getting, but I hope it is successful. If Amazon eventually gets these and discounts them down then I would consider it.

  3. It only includes 15 games but it’s just a matter of time until it is jailbroken and then you’ll be able to add any games you want to it, even f they are not Capcom games.

    Not sure why they emblazoned the logo so dang large. It seems like a weird design choice.

  4. The design is awful. The buttons are hard to distinguish from each other. They should make the buttons stand out more and each one a different color. The huge Capcom logo needs to be gone. Why they chose the shape they did I will never understand. They should have designed this so it was a real rectangle and not shaped like the Capcom name. I also wish they’d designed it so the controls could be separated from each other. If I want to sit on my couch and play this solo I will have to have the whole thing in my lap and it won’t be able to balance properly.

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