Friday, November 2, 2012

Adventure at Pinball Pete's!

SHEILA! WHY IS THIS NOT ON OUR SYLLABUS?! Seriously, though. I learned more in this environment about the type of play these early video games entail. So here are some things I encountered during my trip to Pinball Pete's downtown.

It's amazing what you can do with a twenty dollar bill at Pete's. All games are the same price as they were in 1991, so I could play a game for a quarter  You can barely get three games out of the same amount of money at Dave and Busters. Pete puts a ton of time and energy into keeping arcades alive, and I don't think he's going to give up on the market anytime soon.


At first, I only had one quarter in my purse. I saw Tron and went straight to it, put my quarter in, and got owned. There was a joystick and a paddle as the controls. I was pretty good at light cycles, but killing the tanks and getting to the center of the master computer was a challenge. His shoulder joint went 360 degrees. It was totally unnatural for human anatomy, and the gameplay was hard at first. One I knew what was going on in the mini games, I understood the controls as well as the narrative better. Each mini game was a scene in the movie, and I thought it was a good adaptation. After I died, it said I ranked eleventh. I'm not really sure what that means, but it sounded pretty good to me.



I was completely hooked after my first play, so Joe and I ran to the nearest ATM to get cash for the quarter machine. Each round of Golden Axe was only a quarter  so we played it (while dying plenty of times) and still had eighteen dollars left over. It was seriously one of the cheapest dates we've had. Joe is a huge Streetfighter fan, but his favorite machine was broken. He settled for Streetfighter II instead. 


There was also this really bizarre game. It was all in Japanese (I think?), but the ghosts looked cute. We popped in two quarters and started shooting ghosts in hallways, a can flying upwards from the bottom of a well, and a baby Frankenstein. At the end of each stage, you see a pink girl cat and a blue boy cat. After looking at them a couple times, we concluded that this is the game VG Cats originated from. 




We had a blast, and if you have a quarter to spare and a little free time, I highly recommend it. 





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