El Fin del Tiempo

Also known as: N/A

Developer: Niemer S.A.

El Fin del Tiempo is translated as "The End of Time." And to be completely honest, I simply could not wait for the end of the time I spent playing this game. That said, El Fin del Tiempo was an arcade game developed in Spain, most likely one of the first (if not the very first) arcade games created in that country. The concept sounds decent enough: a scrolling shooter where the player can fire their ship in all directions….well, eight directions. You can fire up, down, left, right, and diagonally between those four directions. Basically, as long as what you want to shoot is at a multiple of 45 degrees from you, you'll be able to shoot it. The problem is that you immediately find that the game is very awkward and not very fun to control…I found myself essentially just rotating the ship in a circle and shooting at everything unless I had to adjust the ship position to prevent crashing into something. If you make it through that first stage without hanging a noose above the arcade cabinet and asking a nearby stranger to kick the stool away, you're rewarded with an equally awkward stage that involves zero scrolling…you're simply on a single screen, with the same awkward controls, shooting at asteroids that fly down at you and phallic-shaped missiles firing up at you. The boring circular motion I mentioned above works well in this stage, too. From there, you're on a stage where you exit your main spaceship and control a drone-like object that flies down to the bottom of the screen to grab some components, then tries to safely fly back up to install them in your ship. The drone controls and fires just like the ship…so it's a different visual, but the same awful gameplay. With your ship parts installed, it's time for an awful screen of shooting alien ships that fly around like flies hovering around a giant pile of dung. This game is that pile of dung. Same awkward controls, but simply moving to one spot and rapidly firing upwards will wipe most of them out. Then poor Star Wars music plays as you meet the "boss," which is a UFO that tries to drop a bomb on the city below. As far as I can tell, your main goal here is to defeat the smaller ships, then shoot the bomb before it makes its way to the bottom of the screen. If you're successful, you get to start again at a higher difficulty…though, by that point, your tears will have hopefully short-circuited the arcade cabinet and you'd be free from that sort of punishment. El Fin del Tiempo really is a bad game…I want to say good things about it, but the developers didn't give me much to work with…it's like pointing at a turd and asking me to pick it up by the clean end. El Fin del Tiempo has no clean end.

Review added: 08/05/2026

Extra Inning

Also known as: Ball Park II (Japan)

Developer: Midway

Extra Inning (often misspelled with an "s" at the end) is a subpar baseball game released in arcades back in 1978. If you emulate it, like in the picture with this review, it looks pretty dull and bland, with a black background and white everything else. If you play this on an actual arcade cabinet, though, you'll get a slightly nicer look. The white players, ball, bases, etc. are all still there; however, the black background that you see in emulation is replaced with a static background of a baseball field displayed in color. This is done by using a mirror to project the screen onto a colored background. It's a nice look if you're playing on an actual cabinet…but rather boring if you're emulating this at home. Anyway, Extra Inning, like the name implies, is a sequel. Known as Ball Park II in Japan, this is the sequel to the 1976 baseball game, Tornado Baseball (known as Ball Park in Japan). And while the actual arcade cabinet looks quite a bit nicer than the Tornado Baseball arcade cabinet did, that's really the only noticeable improvement over the original game that I could find. The name "Extra Inning" makes me feel like this was basically just a continuation of Tornado Baseball in a fancy new cabinet. Honestly, the only improvement I found was the display at the bottom of the screen. With Tornado Baseball, the numbers are labeled on the background that the graphics are projected onto. In Extra Inning, the background no longer has that information, and it tells you everything right on the screen: which is nice if you're emulating the game rather than playing on an actual cabinet. Anyway, if you've played Tornado Baseball and found it to be so-so, there's nothing here that'll win you over. This is an extra inning of baseball that wasn't really needed.

Review added: 11/06/2025