Rating: 
Summary: Nice Photos, Informative Text
Review: I thought that I would end up just browsing through this book looking at the pictures. Instead, I found a great deal of information in the easy-to-read text. The introductory material is interesting. After that, many games are covered in chronological order. Boy, did it bring back memories. I recall encountering a lot of the same information at the time, lending some credibility to the material. Great history of arcade and home games during a formative decade of the genre. Recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: No Content, All Fluff
Review: I was extremely disappointed with this book. The content of this books consists entirely of video game screen shots taken from PC based emulators and small snippets of information taken from other, better books. There are no notable insights in this book, and the writing is weak and uninspired. There are many notable exceptions in the content of this book, including one of many collectors favorite games, Atari Quantum.
The book holds up fairly well (relatively) on the raster games, but on the true XY games, the emulator screen shots do no justice to the beauty of the real thing. Do not excpect any history lessons on arcade games in general either, there are other, better books for that.
If you want to learn a little about the games you play on your emulator, this may be the book for you, but if you are looking for info on the history of video arcade games, you will not find it here.
Rating: 
Summary: Photoshoped Mame Screenshots and some extra
Review: I'm 33 and cut my teeth on Firetruck, Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Dkong. Having been involved with the Mame project for 6 years, which attempts to preserve arcade games through emulation, I'm always interested to read new books on this subject. Supercade caught my attention with its gaudy presentation and heft. It's a glossy collection of easily smudged pages with screenshots taken from Mame with rudimentary Photoshop filters applied along with some image skewing, and flyers and cabinets shots also from the collection/emulation community. Most of the screenshots are accompanied by short descriptions that could easily have come verbatim from Mame's history.dat file, originally compiled by Brian Deuel. One could also imagine the author going through Mame32's year folders one by one looking for tasty tidbits to present as one-offs or games not as mass produced as Pac-Man. Steven Kent's books do a better job burrowing into the stories behind these games and I enjoyed his writing style more than this author. All that said it does still have merit in that it nicely lumps all of this together in what could be described as a coffee table style art book. It may provide an accessible entry to the classic gaming genre for the newbie, but the hardcore will already have delved into other more mature offerings on the subject, including Mame itself which this book owes for much of its information.
Rating:
Summary: Photoshoped Mame Screenshots and some extra
Review: I'm 33 and cut my teeth on Firetruck, Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Dkong. Having been involved with the Mame project for 6 years, which attempts to preserve arcade games through emulation, I'm always interested to read new books on this subject. Supercade caught my attention with its gaudy presentation and heft. It's a glossy collection of easily smudged pages with screenshots taken from Mame with rudimentary Photoshop filters applied along with some image skewing, and flyers and cabinets shots also from the collection/emulation community. Most of the screenshots are accompanied by short descriptions that could easily have come verbatim from Mame's history.dat file, originally compiled by Brian Deuel. One could also imagine the author going through Mame32's year folders one by one looking for tasty tidbits to present as one-offs or games not as mass produced as Pac-Man. Steven Kent's books do a better job burrowing into the stories behind these games and I enjoyed his writing style more than this author. All that said it does still have merit in that it nicely lumps all of this together in what could be described as a coffee table style art book. It may provide an accessible entry to the classic gaming genre for the newbie, but the hardcore will already have delved into other more mature offerings on the subject, including Mame itself which this book owes for much of its information.
Rating:
Summary: Tried the rest. This is the BEST coffee table book offered
Review: In recent years, I had bought the other similar historical reference books on the subject and saved this one for last because I took the bad reviews about the photo quality seriously. I work in printing/graphic design and I avoided buying the book until the price came down. After thumbing through it for only five minutes, I knew I'd found the best one. Yes, it may be true that many of the images could have lifted from MAME screen shots but here's my take on that. I was looking for the best VISUAL record of the era. That's what this about isn't it? Walking into an arcade today may have the same visual appeal with all the lights and noises, but since the late 80's, our expectations obviously changed. No one can milk a quarter for more than 3 minutes anymore. My memories of the old arcades are the unique characters, the first time that we were able to play with multiple players and all those other "firsts" that influenced what we see today. This "found art" really takes me back in time. The images may only be low rez screen shots, but for the most part they are clean and made more fun by being enlarged to the point where you can see all the pixels. I think the word from art school I'm trying to remember is MACRO. Where you zoom IN to a particular piece of the image and crop it to make it more interesting visually. These photos are big and bleed beyond the edge of the page. It's funny now to how those huge pixels made us spend so much in the 80's in our era or super slick realism in current games. While THE FIRST QUARTER and THE ULTIMATE HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES may be a "good read" for historical facts and funny stories, they lacked imagery. The book ARCADE FEVER is another strong visual book for it's sharp photography of actual game cabinets and more traditional screen shots. Supercade is an artsy (but not cheesy) way of showing the era. I was also happy to see arcade games featured that came along years after 1984. This book goes the extra mile visually.
Rating:
Summary: Im-PAC-tful.
Review: It was a golden age. For many, it was also the crystal palace of our youth, a flashing arena of optical adventures and sensational soundscapes.Authors Burnham and Baer have rendered an illustrated tone-poem of neon-drenched ephemera, of a time that was as fleeting and evanescent as youth itself. The so-called "golden age of the video arcade," circa 1971-1984, has never before been chronicled with such propulsive energy and scintillating production values. In so many ways, the world during that period was an era of contradictions, emerging from unhurried, unhasty modes of life, when quainter rhythms prevailed. Arcade games are a symbolic microcosm of that transitional period, the unheralded precursors to life at the speed of light. For those of us who spent our formative years wandering rapturously within rows of these now-legendary games, "Supercade" is our window on the past. It could hardly have been given a more pitch-perfect view.
Rating:
Summary: Generally satisfying, but lacking in some areas
Review: Like the last reviewer, I expected this to be the most definitive book on classic videogames I'd ever seen (in the author's intro, she says that's what she has set out to accomplish). While she does do a decent job of cataloguing the important videogame titles and describing the historical importance of the most deserving (Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, Ms. Pac Man, Defender, Centipede, Donkey Kong, Tron, Dragon's Lair etc.), the book generally shows us only one screen capture per game, many of which are distorted in a "design over function" misstep. There's no denying the nostalgic thrill of seeing even one screen shot from long-extinct titles like "Phoenix", "Scramble", and "Tempest", but there should be way more of them, they should be printed and displayed more clearly, and they should be captioned to explain which onscreen character belongs to the player. Captions would additionally make it easier to understand some of the details the author mentions in her game descriptions. As it is, if you've never played "Tempest", the screen shot will mean almost nothing to you. The book also makes the case -- correctly -- that a big part of the appeal of the classic arcade videogames was the cabinet design, which often would depict a scene that the game was not technically capable of showing. However, that the book shows us almost none of these cabinets is a glaring omission. These shortcomings aside, the author is obviously enthusiastic about her subject, takes pains to be historically accurate and does a fine job of cataloguing the important and even not-so-important titles of the classic videogame era, including the earliest home entertainment systems. Anyone who has fond childhood memories of basking in the glow of "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" at the local video arcade over lunch hours and weekends will almost surely bask in the nostalgic glow of this book. And here's to hoping that in this author's next book, she shows us what she tells us in this one.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful. Stunning.
Review: Not much to say-- it's really awesome, the interviews are great and the screen art is fantastic. The book ends at the bust of the industry but you'll love the glory years.
Rating:
Summary: All Sizzle and no steak
Review: Ok, I admit it...I am a child of the videogame age (born in 1966) and they are the "comics" of my generation. That being said, this book left me a little disappointed. First, there is no real flow to this book...it is broken up at a macro level chronologically, but within each era there is no apparent ordering. This makes it hard to get into the flow of book and get a feel for the evolution of games. I know a lot of folks were disappointed by the graphical treatment of this book, but I actually thought it was appropriate. Most of these graphics where crude and stark, and that is how they tend to be presented in the book. It seemed to me when I read this (and has been subsequently confirmed in my mind) that this is very much a book written by an "outsider"...someone with funny european glasses that caught wind of the retro-game craze about 3 years ago, bought a bunch of other folks books, did some screen captures. Although the author might be a "fan" of classic games, she does not appear to be an expert..just some hipster who thinks retro-games are "cool". It's also pretty pretentious. The author throws in the occasional obscure game probably just to fortify her position as some sort of expert. Overall, an ok book. Not worth the money. If you are a "fan" of classic games and are looking to read some basic facts and look at pretty pictures, it's for you. If you really want to learn about the games and their history, stick with Phoenix...a great book from someone who lived the gaming revolution, or find better pictures and more info at Klov.com.
Rating: 
Summary: Photos of Old Games? Try the Internet, they're free.
Review: Okay, I love games and I especially love classic games. But I don't love this book. I seriously can't imagine who would enjoy paying big bucks for a heavy collection of photos of old arcade games when the same pictures are available for free on the Internet. The games themselves are available for free, too! And do I really need to read tiny bits of history (essentially copied verbatim from other, better books on video game history) interspersed between these pictures? If I wanted a book on gaming history, I would definitely do better to spend my money elsewhere. And if I wanted to relive my old arcade fantasies, I would do it by playing the games, not looking at a book of photos. Supercade is a lot of hype, a lot of style, and no substance.
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