Ventura County Community College Spotlight: Moorpark College

Here's the Moorpark College arcade as previously noted, brought to you in gloriously crappy Ipone-o-vision.

The arcade, compared to others at community and (gasp!) UC colleges, isn't too shabby. Granted a lot of the cabinets are in less than ideal condition and one of the games, Marines Training, is not only cheesy as hell but also completely borked.

There are seven machines total, with two of them being devoted to the digital fighting arts and the rest what you would expect in this kind of establishment.

They are Street Fighter Third Strike, Marvel v. Capcom 2, the shittacular Marines Training, a cabinet that has a wide variety of games loaded onto the motherboard, an SNK machine that a few of their finest offerings, and lastly a Blitz machine.

It also has a relatively new trackball bowling game, but that bastard replaced the cheesey brilliance that is Area 51, so I'm not a big fan of that particular one.

Also, this arcade wins and makes most nerds salivate for Third Strike.


For those backwards mouth breathers who aren't familiar with Third Strike, I have nothing but sympathy. Because ironically anyone who hasn't heard of the brilliance that is Street Fighter: Third Strike will probably remain a virgin forever.

Thankfully this person doesn't exist, and everyone knows that Third Strike is the greatest fighting game of all time.

Sadly this machine has seen better days, with most of the buttons having an unidentifiable grime around them and a few of the buttons replaced with convex ones, as opposed to the western standard of concave.

The sticks also don't work quite as well as they should, with stiffness that can make it hard to pull off a semi circle move and a serious lag in responsiveness.

The Capcom v. Marvel 2 machine has the same problem, except to a much lesser degree. And of course the entire machine has a coat of that wonderful grime.

The rest of the cabinets work as expected, with the SNK machine being particularly noteworthy. The sticks and buttons all have a tight responsivness to them, making Metal Slug 3 just a little bit less hellish.

The arcade, as a whole, is in better shape then other places, with most of the machines in working order. The Third Strike and Capcom machines are too beat up for serious competitive play, but that's to be expected considering the kind of sweaty attention these two gems get.