Question Of The Week [July 16th 2025]

Q: What Was Your Pizza Parlor Game?

A: Back in the 1990’s Pizza Parlors were such a big part of my childhood weekend, along with a trip to BlockBuster to rent a game for the weekend, we’d usually end up at our local Pizza Parlor. Back when you’d actually go sit down with friends and family and grab a couple pizzas for a Friday night dinner. We had a place called “BallPark Pizza” that had some of the best greasiest pepperoni pizza imaginable. Great stringy melted mozzarella piled on top, with a dash of table kept Parmesan, and washed down with a coke in those little red cups every pizza place had.

But we aren’t here for “What’s your favorite Pizza?” We are here for games! So in our Ballpark, we had a small little side room where a couple arcade cabinets and a lone Pinball table was. The Pinball table was Terminator 2, which I’ve played plenty of on the streams over the last couple years, but my favorite arcade cabinet that they had was a Neo Geo Cabinet with a couple titles, Sengoku, World Heroes and Samurai Shodown. Both of these titles are very rarely ever talked about, and with all early Neo Geo games, they weren’t the best, but I loved them anyway.

Sengoku is a brawler taking place in Japan, where as you progress and level up, you actually ascend into a heaven like place in the clouds and transform into a Japanese warrior and battle some of your ancestors. It was always a difficult game and I never got very far… maybe we should do an Arcade stream where I beat it?

The other was World Heroes, a very basic fighting game that was clearly a knock off of Street Fighter. There is a character that looks suspiciously like M. Bison, who also has stretching limbs like Dhalsim (although in World Heroes, he is a cyborg), and my main character, Rasputin. Why? Honestly I don’t know, he just looked cool, with his bright green flowing robe attire and his power was that his hands and feet when they punched and kicked were gigantic. It was more akin to the Green Lantern’s power I guess, but I never really thought too much about it. When I pick fighting game characters, I base them off how cool they look, and that’s about it.

The other game that was in the arcade cabinet that I remember (Neo Geo’s were cool, because their boards had several slots where you could actually plug in massive VHS sized cartridges that were the actual games. I ended up owning a few of these cabs, and still have some games for it). Samurai Shodown was the other one I really remember, another fighting game, this time with much more memorable characters, and didn’t immediately feel like a rip off of Street Fighter. I loved the characters like the big massive fat guy that took up a quarter of the screen, or the weird green hunchback with the Freddy Kruger knife glove weapon.

Yeah, Samurai Shodown was actually cool because it was a weapons based fighter well before we got Soul Calibur. There were ports on the SNES and Genesis, but they really dropped in quality. One of the biggest things about the arcade version was its use of scaling (Neo Geo was well known for it). The game’s camera would constantly zoom in and out, depending on what you were doing, and the sprites would scale at the same time. It’s a very memorable effect, and one I’ll always think of whenever I talk about the game.

These games, along with the Terminator 2 Pinball table are what I’ll remember most about Ballpark Pizza, besides hanging out with my best friend and our families and some of the best pizza I’ve ever had.