I paid a visit to Laaaaahndaaaan earlier in the week, specifically to engage in a bit of retail therapy (there was a Robosen Transformers pop up event at Harrods I wanted to see) and to check out a couple of arcades whilst I was up there.
One of these was Funland Arcade, located in the Brunswick shopping centre in London, mainly because I knew they had a twin Daytona cabinet there. In recent years, I've found an upright Daytona cabinet in an arcade bar near me, that had knackered steering and a Twin Sega Racing Classics cabinet at a bowling alley, that had really stiff gears, but this is the first proper Daytona sit-down cabinet I've seen in probably about 25 years.
And using this cabinet, I finally managed to get a 1st place on the Advanced course, Dinosaur Canyon, using real arcade hardware. The steering was behaving as it was supposed to here and the gears felt fine, but unfortunately there was no force feedback, and the CRTs had been swapped out for what looked like incorrect aspect ration 16:9 LCD monitors (although, TBH, I stopped noticing that after a few goes).
Anyway, very pleased with this result! Worth the trip to London just for this, but those of you who follow me on Twitter, will know I found something just as awesome, if not maybe even better, in the next arcade bar I went to after this... A video upload on that will be incoming soon!
#daytona #sega #retrogaming