Friday, December 14, 2012

Crossed Swords

So, I was just doing some catchup on the blog.  I've been busy and stressed out, and haven't been reading or posting much.  I just got to the post about Skyrim, and Jac made a reference to a first-person hack and slash game for arcade that maybe was on NeoGeo, but he can't seem to find it anywhere...

Was this the game you were talking about?




Crossed Swords.  Fucking Badass.  Oh man, this game was so damned cool!  At a time when it was really tough to find awesome high-fantasy action, even in video games, this game came in an slashed and hacked it's way to glory and into my heart.  It was tough, but if you mashed the buttons, you could do some great repeating slashes that would  mess up the opponent good.  You could also block with your shield, which for some reason seemed really novel at the time.  Oh, and did I mention that it is two-player co-op?

This game falls firmly into one of my favorite games that I never really got to play that much, and always wished I could have spent more time with.  A fleeting love affair.  Crossed Swords was one of those elusive arcade games.  The kind that was in a local pizza place (I believe Round Table pizza in Woodland- is that place still there?)  For about two months.  Then you might find it on an out-of-town trip to Scandia or something.  Or like, on vacation with your family and you stop at a diner and there's like two arcade games and one of them is this crazy game that you so rarely come across!  

That was crossed swords.  The video game equivalent of a summer love, like an episode of the Wonder Years.  We both had great passion, but our lives were just out-of-sync.  Perhaps it was never meant to be.  But I have this nostalgia for something that never was,  that I would be 13, and have twenty dollars worth in quarters to dump into Crossed Swords, and I'd really find out what this game was all about.  


-D

2 comments:

  1. Yes!!

    I remember only being able to play this game during one summer and I think it was at Roundtable. And that one time, I remember we got a fair ways into the game and got maybe 30 minutes in (based on this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H485or8VOC8). That was a fun game, although I'm not sure I want to know how much money we plugged into it.

    And this was before I knew/understood that Neo Geo cabinets had different games so I got excited anytime I saw a Neo Geo cabinet, but was always disspointed that "Crossed Swords" wasn't available.

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  2. 30 minutes in, are you sure? I do remember making progress and having enough money to do it, at least once. But I was looking at 10 minutes and thinking that was as far as we got. This game was tough, and I died a lot.

    Neo Geo was such an interesting thing. Always sort of exotic, in a way. Not a part of the console wars, just doing their own thing in the arcade, and supposedly a super-expensive home system.

    The Multiple-games in one cabinet thing was definitely adopted at the Cooperative Gaming Co-Op, and even specifically for the Winnitron, which I will get to in a post soon.

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