Historically, an arcade has been defined as “any part of a building (a building, in this case, meaning a shopping mall) with an equal number of video games and pathetic losers pumping their parents’ hard-earned quarters into them.” Upon reading this concept, I found it rather interesting, for two reasons: a) I came up with it; b) I needed something to write about. Thus, I took the time to extensively study the many different aspects of an arcade, primarily because my friend Dante was spending the better part of his adolescence playing “Tekken Tag Tournament” and he was my ride home. Essentially, I had no choice (and, worse, no change).
At any given arcade, there is one single attraction which bleeds the most money out of its audience, yet remains the most popular machine in the room: namely, the bill changer. This device changes dollar bills into coins based on your skill level ($1-beginner, $5-intermediate, $10-advanced, $20-get a life). Usually, one will receive, in lieu of quarters, copper tokens with the cash value of beer can pull-tabs. Armed with your value-lacking coins, it is now time to decide which of the arcade’s machines in which you want to lose them.
A popular token-drainer is the skill crane, a machine wherein you operate a hook (which has the lifting power of wet spaghetti) in order to snag stuffed animals, fake jewelry, and other tightly-packed items which have been in the machine since the premiere of “Taxi.” Egotistical guys are the core audience of this game, for they believe girls are impressed with a man who can smoothly and effortlessly win her a small, stuffed parrot for no less than 4,612,498 tokens (actual amount in dollars: College Tuition). Another skill-measuring game is the “Whack-a-Mole” type of game, in which players attempt to smack mobile plastic rodents with foam hammers attached to a string. Needless to say, the “Whack-a-Mole” games are not for the easily irritated, for these people are responsible for over 100% of all robotic mole concussions and broken hammers (not to mention terribly high scores).
A few more active games include pinball, skee ball, and, in keeping with this sentence’s established precedent of the word “ball,” air hockey. Pinball is a game in which a silver ball is sent throughout a forest of bumpers, springs, and lights on a surface as level as any given deck on the Titanic. The player’s lone job is to occasionally control a pair of flippers, which pound the ball back into the brightly colored Forest of Obstacles which it took 10 minutes to escape the last time. Scoring is tough to follow, for everything the ball hits (even certain screws in the machine’s construction) garners about 5 million points and twice that amount of flashing lights. Skee ball, on the other hand, requires a bit more physical exertion than thumb movement. Skee ball is a game “where you roll the ball up the ramp at varying speeds in an effort to pop it into the score circles; the higher the score, the more prize tickets you get” (source: Ben Affleck’s Holden MacNeil character from “Chasing Amy”). This line proves three very important points: a) it describes the concept of skee ball; b) it proves that Ben Affleck is capable of saying intelligent things; c) it proves I spend way too much time watching Kevin Smith movies. Air hockey, meanwhile, is different from pinball and skee ball, in that it is played on a level surface. Two players stand at either end of a rectangular table and use small plastic paddles that represent white chocolate sombreros to violently knock a seemingly invincible disc into the opposing player’s goal slot. While it is fun, don’t be fooled by the name; unlike regular hockey, air hockey lacks such aspects as fights, ice, or Canadians with less than half of their permanent teeth still intact.
However, the core of people in the arcade do not come here to play the games I just described for most of this article. Arcade-goers do not like games which require a lot of bodily movement; instead, they like to have their movement transferred to animated characters on a screen. Thus, they elect to play video games, which are machines that simulate virtually any sport, TV show, or combat fight between two ugly-as-sin contenders with magical powers and “special attacks”. The latter statement describes most arcade games, wherein players constantly battle hideous aliens and comic book characters against a background, which, in most cases (especially in one-sided matches), holds more interest. Other popular video games include The Simpsons, Jurassic Park, a wide range of simulated driving games by Sega, Atari, and other obsolete names in virtual entertainment…and countless others which I can’t describe now because Dante just annihilated Mutant Alien Boss #4036 and he’s ready to go.
In closing, allow me to leave you with the immortal words which every video game (obligatorily) states: “Remember: Winners Don’t Use…hey, Dante, wait for me, dammit!”
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