Arcade centers

Speaking about arcade, there is a question I would like to ask to all the members : is there still arcade centers where you live ? As here in France there isn't so much..maybe in Paris there is some but I don't travel very often to our dear capital so...can you tell me more ?

Not here, but I don't think there was ever one in the closest town to my home. A few grocery stores used to have game machines up at the front, but they stopped doing that a long, long time ago. For a real arcade, I always had to travel a couple of towns away. That arcade was still there the last time I went by, but that's probably been six years now. I've no idea if it is still there.

THOUL : Thanks for the answer ! As we are now in a period of "cloud gaming" and tablets/phones used as playing video games devices, hard to see many more arcades centers...
And even when there was a lot of those arcade cnters, I wasn't really a fan of Arcade games : where you ?
I didn't spend a lot of money in those machines !

I think this was going on a different enough tangent that it deserves a new topic, so I've split the conversation off to one.

Well, I always looked forward to going to the arcade as a kid. I didn't get to go too often, so it was a rare and fun weekend diversion for me back then. I would save my quarters for each trip so I could play lots of games. Some of the games were more fun than others, though. I liked the plane games that had a seat, where you could sit in the cabin and it would move around a bit as you used the controls. I think Afterburner was the name of one of those. And of course I loved X-Men, which I think was the only machine at that arcade I ever played from start to finish.

We still have some arcades over here, and there's one actually not that far from where I live. The others are generally located by the shore or in actual cities, but considering we got Sandy, I'm not too sure of the status of the ones by the shore.

THOUL : Thanks for having put this in a new topic ! I was just telling me " But I haven't had created such topic" and I was starting to feel I'was going crazy lol
That is a good idea.
About arcade machines with seat, that is true : if you go in an arcade center, it's best use the machines you CAN'T have at home ! Only rich people can have arcade machines like Afterburner (even if I'had Afterburner on my...Master System ! ).
For me it's a bit the same about movies when I'm going to the cinema : better to see action r "special effects" movies, as you can enjoy a very very large screen ! At home (especially my home !!) it's harder ^^

R-90 : Thanks for your contribution ! That's great that there is still arcade centers near you
Near the shore ? But where do you live ? (if that's not a secret !).

Man, we used to have a really nice one at the mall in Baton Rouge, but it's long gone. There is still a small collection at the Gameware in the new mall, but it's mostly DDR and a handful of other games. At least one of the theaters has a few still operating, too. Although a friend and I tried the Marvel vs Capcom machine, and the buttons didn't even work, so that was a bit of a let down.

And I have to agree with Thoul that X-Men was the bomb. Although I have to admit that my favorite one growing up was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II.

Yeah, the Turtles series was another great group of arcade games. I always preferred the first one, but I think all of those were good games. It's a shame X-Men didn't get continued with such nice sequels.

As a little kid, I used to go to this strange arcade managed by those nice, bearded and tatooed men who used to give us 5 quarters for one dollar. The sweet, innocent 10 years old that I was did not know but, I was a participant in the process of money laundering for the local biking gangs. Oh well. All we knew was "Wow, these guys can't do math!" So we took a 20$ bill borrowed from my friend's grandfather, got it turned into 25$ of quarters, pretended to play a while. Then we left, got the quarters magically turned back into paper money at some random store. Rince, repeat. We could easily get 20$ each plus the original 20$ that we gave back.

Imagine that. 1986, you're 10 years old, you have TWENTY DOLLARS to your name. What CAN'T you do?

Good times.

Those were the mid to late 80s, I used to play Wonder boy, Rolling Thunder and such.


Then high school came, we had an arcade right in front of our school. I was very good at Street Fighter II and I was a beast at Superman. I could easily beat the game with one llfe.


These days, "arcades" are mostly bunches of machines found in theater's common halls. Those are mostly DDR and other games involving mechanical devices and movement. The "pure video game" arcade is outdated as home consoles can now do far, far better.


Anyways, I have very fond memories of my kids days spent in arcades. I was oblivious to all the smoking and drugging done by other kids and teenagers. There were the machines, and there was me. Everything else was superfluous.

I happen to live pretty close to an arcade that doubles as a store with classic systems and games (I hope you're taking notes, GameStop), as well as tons of imported items for very reasonable prices. In fact, I managed to find the Sonic Heroes soundtrack and Phantasy Star: Generation 1, among other things.

I also found a cool arcade near the hotel I was staying at during my vacation to Virginia Beach back in 2010. The lineup there was practically nothing but retro games (I think the only post 90's games they had were Tekken 5 and Marvel vs. Capcom 2). They even had the extremely rare Jr. Pac-Man, which is a huge plus in my book.

As a 16-year-old, I sometimes wonder if I was even born in the right generation. In other words, I'd rather hang out at an arcade and waste my quarters on Street Fighter II or TRON instead of trying to get that same feeling on emulators. I imagine things were much simpler back then ...