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| - This used to be "Jillian's", BTW, for those wondering...
Food: Overpriced bar food. Eat elsewhere first unless money is no object for you. I recommend "Slices", great pizza joint just across from D&B (more or less). Hell, lots of restaurants at Desert Ridge which are better choices. I would only eat here if I was starving after an hour or so of games.
Drinks: Overpriced. My suggestion: bring a bottle opener from home. Park between D&B and Total Wine. Walk to Total Wine and buy a bottle of good beer. Open it (outside!) with the aforementioned opener and drink it while walking back to D&B to get your buzz on. Maybe buy an extra one or two to stash in your car, so you can top off your liver. I absolutely refuse to pay for drinks here, since they are already ripping you off for the credits you have to spend on video games.
Service: I usually don't eat or drink here but I gotta say that the few times I've had to interface with wait staff/help... well, they don't exactly go out of their way to be helpful but they are not jerks either, and that does count for something.
Games: well first of all, the scam is that you buy credits that go onto a card with a magnetic strip, but it's kind of hard to do the math to figure out the credits-per-dollar exchange rate, and then figure out how much each game is costing you if you had just been able to pump quarters into it like the old days. I am just curious what they are charging me per game, and I think I have finally figured out it's rather high, of course depends on what game you are playing.
Suggestions for not getting shaken down too badly by D&B:
1) Go on 1/2 price Wednesdays.
2) Join their club, every month they will send you coupons. Some of them are "Buy $10 get $10 free", but other times they have actually sent me $10 free in gameplay. That's $10 free without having to buy any credits. However you can't use these on 1/2 price Wednesday, so just go on some other day if you can, charge up your card, then go back on 1/2 price Wednesday.
3) If you like old school games like Donkey Kong or Galaga, they got that and you can play them pretty inexpensively, especially on 1/2 price Wednesdays.
4) Attain Gold status; you save 10% in credits once you've charged up your card with a certain number of credits over time.
Prizes: they almost all SUCK and you will usually pay much more by trying to earn tickets to get the few things worth having in the store, than if you had just gone out and bought it with your cash at the department store. I got a decent coffeemaker only because I found a bagful of tickets someone had abandoned, and I got the remaining tickets I needed by shrewdly choosing to play Trivia when lots of people were playing. I totally rock at trivia and in one evening (1/2 price Wednesday of course!) I easily accumulated the tickets I needed with only $10 out of pocket (got an additional $10 credit free thanks to a coupon or something).
All in all, I don't mind coming here every so often but only when I can figure out a good way to game their system, because otherwise it is a VERY expensive way to play arcade games and drink/eat. They must hate people like me!!!
Downstairs they have a shit-ton of large screen TVs; it's a decent place to go just for strictly sports bar type of activities (like watching a Suns playoff game). Again, the food and drinks are overpriced but having so many big screen TVs all over the dang place kind of makes up for it. The upstairs arcade area seems kind of small compared to what I would expect and compared to what I hear the back-east D&B's look like. Also it seems the stairs keep the rugrats away, I see a lot of complaints about them but I rarely see them upstairs.
NOTE ON CREDITS: OK I think if you spend $12 you get 60 credits. That's 20 cents a credit. Most of the games 'cost' around 4 to 5.6 credits (they are almost always fractions, not whole numbers). So you're paying about a buck a game, which is on the high side I think, though again if you go on 1/2 price Wednesdays I think that is quite reasonable; if you attain Gold status you get another 10% off the credits charged against your D&B card.
So if you can score one of those 'buy $10 credit get $10 credit free' coupons, and IF you go on 1/2 price Wednesdays, it's quite a deal for gaming. But the food and drink prices are still way high (especially considering the food is completely average, you'll never tell anyone you ate really well here) and there is just no getting around that.
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