Thoughts: Arcades

In light of yesterday's Game Room review, let's cover the arcade scene as a whole. Back in the 70's and the 80's, they were an entertainment haven. It was where people went to leave the house, to play pinball and what we now consider "retro arcade titles." Quarter after quarter would pour in and kids would try their best to wage war, save princesses, and explore galaxies, and arcades had this magical feeling of neon, bleeps, and victory.

While it wasn't immediate, the downfall for arcades began when pong consoles started to hit homes, and eventually the Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment System would become the first strong hit to the first nail in the arcade coffin. Arcade titles would see ports to home versions for the companies to bank further money on; Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Frogger... they'd all find their way in the home.

That's not to say the arcade was a failure, but quite the opposite. Arcades brought us the likes of Pong, Centipede and Millipede, Missile Command, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Q*Bert, Street Fighter, Time Crisis, Mortal Kombat, Dragon's Lair... And that's not including the likenesses we know today, including Mario and Luigi, Terry Bogard, Ms. Pac Man, Nightmare, Scorpion and Sub-Zero, among many, many others. Even characters outside of the gaming industry found themselves in games that ate up our money, such as the Simpsons, the X-Men, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Jurassic Park, just to name a few.


Oh, how I miss you in your glory days...

Let's flash forward, now, to today. The arcade scene is practically a joke. Let's define an arcade - a video arcade is a place or venue that includes many arcade video games for players to enjoy themselves in. Arcades by themselves rarely exist anymore, as it seems the whole charade is about gouging the customers as much as they can.

Don't get me wrong, I understand why. Machines now cost hundreds, thousands, even up to and over $10,000 per game. It will take an arcade owner years to break even, much less make a profit on games. It's a hard balancing act - charge too little for a game, and you make no money, but charge too much, and no one will pay to play it. This can literally be balanced on a single quarter value.

So how does someone that opens up an arcade make that up? They have something else on the side. Maybe it's inside of a bowling alley or a large skating rink. That's a typical norm. But let's get to my local area: there are four arcades in my area within a short distance from each other, three of which are inside the same mall. The first one is inside of a go-kart venue. The second is attached to a large restaurant, bowling alley, and billiard hall. The third was formally a part of FYE; that's right, the CD and music store had an arcade connected to the side, but has since been bought by Tilt Arcade, and even as a stand alone arcade it's a total disgrace. The fourth is inside of a resort hotel, but allows outside visitors to waste their money in the arcade as well.


No arcade is complete without a wall of shit...

But there's four arcades, how can they ALL be bad? I'll tell you how. Let's start with attention towards games. Since the arcade is normally a side event to a larger business, such as the go-kart tracks or the hotel, very little maintenance may be performed on machines, and many machines will either be out of order or in such horrible shape they should be turned off anyways. However, this is no excuse for the stand alone arcade, as its machines are in the worst shape of the four. Seriously?!

Secondly, let's move on to the "money-makers." In order to ensure they make some money, the arcades all have wasted money on cheap Spongebob plushies, Tootsie Rolls, and rubber or squishy balls at a prize redemption counter. So parents have their kids waste their own money in garbage ticket games in order to get crap they could buy from a fucking dollar store. Which brings me to my next point...

Ticket games. Apparently, it's either illegal to own less than three Skee-Ball machines under one roof, or they're always "buy two, get one free." You're telling me I get a 600+ score in Skee-Ball and I only get seven goddamn tickets for my work? Fuck you, Skee-Ball. And the token/quarter sliders, where you slip your token or quarter in and it lands on a sliding silver arm and tries to push tokens or quarters over the edge in exchange for tickets? Those things can go to hell. And the Cyclone?


Damn you to hell, Cyclone!

I hate this miserable piece of shit. It's like every arcade has one, if not more, and they leave it in the middle of the fucking walkway like they're proud of it. One arcade here has four of the goddamned things. FOUR. The game itself has three play areas, which is NEVER full. There is NEVER three people that are all stoked to play Cyclone at the same time. So I'm curious as to the damn thought process as to why this place thought there might, at some point, be TWELVE people that HAVE to get their Cyclone fix all at once. Seriously. When has this ever happened? WHY DO YOU NEED FOUR CYCLONE MACHINES?! I dare you to do a Google Image Search on "arcade cyclone." It's like arcade management is so proud of this domed piece of ass that they literally take pictures of JUST this machine. And it's in EVERY ARCADE EVER.

Then there's the air hockey tables, which are only played by bros and frat boys that hit the puck so hard they either break each others' fingers or send the puck halfway across the damn arcade, or is played by little girls that play so agonizingly slow it's painful to watch. Since when was it mandatory that the same gutteral filth must be in every arcade across the nation? The prize counter, the tickets, the same games over and over... Going to the arcade has become an awful experience.

Now there are a few things about the arcade that may be redeeming, but even they are starting to get a little overplayed. The dancing games were cool at first, and fun to watch people that know what they're doing, but an arcade isn't successful without one these days. Each of the four local arcades has one - two have Pump It Up machines, one has an In the Groove 2 machine, and one has a ghetto bootleg version of Dance Dance Revolution Extreme, called "Dance Dance Revolution Megamix." Guess which arcade has the ghetto DDR. That's right, the stand alone arcade that should know better. Let's talk about that specific arcade in general for a moment, though.

I know this may be one arcade in my area, but I know there are other arcades like this across the country, and it makes me weep. The location has a ghetto DDR, and a Tekken 5: Dark Ressurection machine. These are two of the only games that make any money in this arcade. There are 3 SvC Chaos machines, four Marvel vs. Capcoms, two or three Marvel vs. Capcom 2s, two Soul Calibur IIs, two Gauntlet Legends, two Deer Hunter USAs, two CarnEvils, four Wing Wars, two Time Crisis IIs, and a Tekken 5 and Tekken 4, the latter of which has a completely red tinted screen. It's like playing Tekken 4 on a huge Virtual Boy. Oh, and almost all of the above games has at least one broken machine that sits in the back corner or takes up space. One of the only games that would redeem this arcade is the Guilty Gear XX: Midnight Carnival, however, not only does it have Mortal Kombat 4 side graphics on the cabinet, and the graphic on the joystick/button panel is SNK vs. Capcom, but the goddamned thing doesn't work half the time or won't even boot up. Beautiful. Oh, and they have an air hockey table, AND a goddamned Cyclone.


Goddammit! Another motherfucking Cyclone...

One of the arcades though, a Dave 'n Buster's, normally takes pretty good care of their equipment. They have many machines the others do not, such as a Trivia Time, Rambo, 8-man Daytona USA with driver-side cameras to film the player on televisions above the machines for spectators, and a Derby Owner's Club. The Derby Owner's Club machine is great, a horse racing game that uses a card for save data much like Initial D, however the games are very expensive. How expensive? Dave 'n Buster's uses a point system instead of quarters or tokens. This means you pay a certain dollar amount for a point total that's stored on a card, and the card is swiped as opposed to inserting a coin.

This doesn't seem so bad, until you start doing the math. For example, $20.00 is 100 points on your card. That's a big number, so you can run around and spend them often. Derby Owner's Club is a 12.0 point game. Doesn't seem like much until you calculate it up; each dollar is five points. This means on a $20.00 card, this game alone is $2.40. Would you pay $2.40 in any other arcade for a single race? No. That's what makes the point system seem less expensive by using a point value instead of revealing how much they're gouging you. Sure, the more you spend on a card, the more points you get; for example, you can add $3.00 to a $20.00 card to add an additional 25 points. But the fact of the matter is the games are more expensive because of this system, which is how they make their money back faster.

Japan, meanwhile, can manage to make things work just fine. They not only have the DDR machines, but plenty of other music games many Americans either have never heard of or seen. Pop'n'Music, Para Para Paradise, and beatmania IIDX are fine examples of such games that arcade enthusiasts wish to see more of here in America but never show up. Not only do they have arcades that do well by themselves, but they have fewer prize and ticket games. I have no intention to sound like a raving weeaboo about the matter, but it seems they have less of these garbage games and more games that are different or revolutionary, such as games that interact with sensors for your position, cameras to add your likeness, or microphones to use your voice. These things can work just as well here, but end up never seeing the light of day.


Organized, AND SEATS?! Count me in!

Business is about making money. That's all there is to it. However, this is what's killed off arcades; in the attempt to add exciting reasons to come in and play, such as dancing games, prizes and candy, and ticket games for a cheap sense of accomplishment, it's killed off the arcade feeling from so long ago. It's no longer about aiming for the high score so you can insert "ASS" as your initials, or about challenging friends to a game of Street Fighter II or Soul Edge. Arcades in Japan still prosper fairly well, so why can't it work in America?



As I wrap this up, though, a friend of mine that I used to meet up with at the local arcades is no longer with us, so I need to leave a shout out and hope the arcades are better where he's at now is better than the ones here. We'll miss you, Blake.