| rev:text
| - I remember the very first time my step dad took me to a video arcade. I must have been about six years or seven years old. It was the early eighties, and I was all about Defender. Sure, I loved Missile Command. Ultimately, I remember thinking Pac-man was "kind of dumb" but I never was much for maze games. I wanted to press buttons, fly spaceships and shoot things. Oh sure, I had an affair or two, Tron, Donkey Kong, the games with lots of pretty colors and such. Nothing quite matches the magic of those days for me. Perhaps it's the misty rose colored filter of childhood nostolgia, but arcades seemed like something different then. Something magical. Pitch black havens for the disenfranchised where a quarter was enough to win you fame and glory, provided you had the skills to back it up.
Fast forward some 2 decades later. Video games have jumped the shark in a lot of ways. With dedicated consoles, online gaming, and PC gaming, most people don't leave the house to get their digital freak on. A person doesn't get good at "video games' They learn the survival skills for FPS, or RTS, or MMORPGs, Sports simulations, Music simulations, fighting games. And they do it at home, or at a LAN party. So what's the appeal of a place like Gameworks?
Well you get to hang out with the highly annoying teenage crowd at "The Mills". But for me it's all about the latest developments in Arcade stand alones. They have some interesting "immersion" / VR type games, like Sky Pirates (steampunk hot air balloon aerial combat baby!), Afterburner Climax (with a servo equipped cockpit designed with some help from Boeing and Northrop Grumman, you will soon find your ego writing checks your body can't cash, and loving it!), Of course they have the old skool stuff upstairs. But hey, I got plenty of that action 20 years ago. Or Let's Go Jungle, a dose of safari madness where you and a friend can hop into your utility vehicle and unload on mutant frogs, leeches and lots of other unpleasant things. The 50" screen, 5.1 surround sound and kick back motors on the guns help with the fun factor.
So when you get tired of listening to your best friend's girlfriend murdering another REM song on rock band while you hammer out a beat on your flimsy toy drum controller, when you've played with your wii so much that you can't lift the controller anymore, come down to Gameworks and try out some of the new developments in stand alone games. The arcade is still fun, I promise. But leave that Dio t-shirt everyone thought was so cool in the bottom of your closet. Nobody really thought it was cool, we were just being nice.
(See Also Golf Land and Dave and Buster's.)
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