My Arcade Memories

[dinoboy38]

Let's face it, we all have our favorite classics, and refuse to depart with them. And true enough, our gaming hearts rejoyce when we come across our favorite games once again. Here's a true story on what happend to me. One day I went to Nathan's and they had a little video arcade with some large cabinets for the adults, and the small cabinets for the little kids to play. Well, one of the small cabinet games was Kangaroo. I was soo excited and anxious to play it that I had to kneel down on my knees to squat down to play this rare classic game. Now video arcades were great to go to, however they did have their problems of tapped out gammers, loitering, and often it becomes a classic hangout with gangs. But I do remember that some arcades had cool bonus offer of giving you an extra 20 tokens when you cashed in a $10 bill or something. Dad used to take us to the Milford Amusement Center years ago, and treated us to a good time. However one time I go money from my grandmother, and Dad had decided to take us to the arcade. I left my money behind, figuring that Dad was going to treat us, but he just dropped us off and told us that he would pick us up later. Something was very wrong here. We got into the arcade and my sister and I went to the change machine, and after she got her change, she found out that I didn't have any money. My sister then told me "You jerk, you were supposed to bring your own money, didn't you know that." Dad didn't tell me before, but he expeted me to know that already, but how was I supposed to know, since he treated us before. My sister had to give up half of her tokens to me so I would have something to play with.

Afterwards, Dad picked us up and my sister told Dad what happened and he said "Now you know better than that, you should've brought your own money, why did you do that, that was not fair and dishonest." So when we got back to his house, I had to pay my sister back with the money grandma sent me. This wouldn't have happend if Dad took the time to explain that I should bring my money from grandma, since he was not going to treat me. Other video arcades we went to had stange names, such as Gompers. When getting your game tokens, you got double the amount back, which was cool. They had some classic games of Ladybug, Q*bert, Bubbles, etc. It was a very short lived arcade. The best and the biggest arcade I've been to was Spaceplex Amusements. This place was so huge, that they had children's theme rides, bumper cars, skee bowling, skill games, video games, a cafeteria. It was space themed, and I remember the fog effect you experienced upon first walking down the hallway to get inside the gameroom. Allot of the paintings on the wall featured characters like Topcat and his friends riding a space car from the Jetsons, Gumby in a space suit, etc. It was a great place to spend the afternoon, but one day it was closed down and transformed into some type of indoor ice hockey rink. I'm sad to say that Sportsplus isn't much fun. At first I had a blast playing Bust-A Move, watching the I Werks motion theater Dinosaur Island movie, and maybe got a bite to eat. Now the place doesn't interest me much anymore. The I Werks was replaced by an indoor rollercoaster. Sure they have indoor ice skating, bowling, golf. and special events, but this is my point of view. I guess I'm just stuck in the past wishing to play the classic games once again. Oh the only classic game I saw was an Arkanoid game, which was ok.

[dinoboy38]

Now that the Atari aracde hits can be played at home, I have to admit that my older sister really enjoys playing Centipede, and has gotten a really big high score on it. Sometimes when I house sat for my sister, I would be playing Centipede for hours trying to beat her score, but eventually I would just beat it by a few points. However, my sister would just beat my new score again. Hmmmm, I wonder how she would do on Millipede? I have that for the pc with the Atari 80 games in one. You get the Atari vector classics, traditional Atari arcade hits, and a nice handful of Atari 2600 games. A very nice way to spend an afternoon.