The company I work for recently (by which I mean like yesterday) held its annual holiday party, and this year said holiday party was held at the local arcade/bowling alley/laser tag arena/bar, which had me pretty goddamn excited—arcades are mostly dead, it’s true, but I’ve yet to enter an arcade that didn’t at least have a forgotten Tekken or Street Fighter cabinet tucked away in the back corner, along with maybe a Gauntlet Legends cabinet for when I tire of getting my ass absolutely handed to me by the computer, 5 year-olds, the blind, and people without any actual hand-eye coordination to speak of at a fighting game (I am really bad at fighting games, but they maintain a place in my heart tied to memories of the one time I played through the majority of Soul Caliber in a movie theater lobby, before getting my ass handed to me by Cervantes at the end. It was a magical run). This particular building masquerading as a proper arcade, however, lacked anything but a shocking number of driving games, a couple of light gun cabinets, and (this was the real shock to me, anyway) a number of iPhone game ports blown up on large screens masquerading as arcade games and, what’s more, designed to dole out tickets.

It has been said by basically anyone with even a passing knowledge of the topic that arcade games’ primary concern is getting money out of the pockets of those who would dare to set foot inside their gilded halls, much in the way that a casino is designed with the vacuuming up of money in mind. Normally, I give myself a $20 limit in any arcade setting (i.e. the few times I go back to Cincinnati and hit up the Dave & Buster’s there), but last night was on the company—and part of it being on the company involved some $80 worth of credit which I was keen to spend, because if it wasn’t spent it was wasted, and that would have been a tragedy. Even so, the selection was so sparse—and indeed depressing, on first glance—that I nearly spent the whole evening shooting pool instead. Alas, there were only three goddamn pool tables in the whole facility, so while waiting for one to open up I and another member of the party found ourselves looking for some sort of entertainment in the arcade.

We settled on a game which seemed to be a House of the Dead knock-off called Dark Escape 4D. The 4D part was because you could turn on a 3D mode (rubbery glasses included!), and you sat in a small booth which vibrated and blew cold air in your face for EXTRA TERROR. The guns were swivel mounted, and you spent a surprisingly small amount of time actually shooting them—there’s a lot of whirling camera and JUMP SCARES which you have to sit through, and while that’s going on you can’t shoot—plus the guns have heart rate sensors in the palms which see how PANICKED you get. Unfortunately, my heart rate is naturally high (unhealthy! Part of why I took up exercise again!) so it always thought I was panicking. Somehow that factors into your score? I don’t know, we played one chapter and then, even though we were still alive, it requested additional credits to proceed the story and we bailed out. NOT GREAT. The visuals were kind of rubbish, the 3D effect was just annoying, and the vibrating seat just made it seem like someone was farting the whole time. I doubt very much anyone would be willing to shell out $1.50 per credit (which was the average cost of a game on the floor, are you fucking joking), especially as I’m pretty sure the levels were designed to make it impossible to make through without having to burn at least one continue—boss creatures are given impossibly small windows to prevent insane amounts of damage, and the responsiveness of the guns never seemed to be quite all there to begin with. A thoroughly unpleasant experience when compared to the next game I wandered over to, which was Aliens: Extermination.

Aliens: Extermination is a beauty of a game where you reload by tapping the front of your gun. Again, it’s a swivel-mounted gun (which I hate, by the way. Whatever happened to giving you the ability to pick the gun up and move it around? Why did we stop doing that? Out of the six light gun cabinets I saw available, only two let you pick up the damn gun, and one of them was Big Buck Hunter, which seemed to feature a lot of shooting fish and not a lot of shooting big bucks, but whatever. The other we’ll come to in a moment). Unlike Dark Escape, I actually felt in control of my own fate on this one, and could almost forgive the gun’s incessant vibration (so it feels REAL, I presume). Almost. Plus, you could just spray bullets and there were only a few bits where you were not shooting Aliens in the face. It also had some semi-decent boss fights, which was as much a surprise to me as it is to you. I managed to get through the first chapter and a half before the game turned to shit (underwater shooting section! Just what I never wanted!) and I opted to just let the continue timer run out. I should also note that you carry your health between chapters, because of course you do, it would be too easy to allow you to regain health at checkpoints or anything—they want your goddamn money, after all. So much for that one—the shooting felt more responsive, and I’ll wager the plot was better than Colonial Marines’, so there we go.

Next, I played the Batman driving game, which apparently exists in the real world and not in some fever dream. You are Batman, and you drive your pick of the Batmobile (I chose to drive the Batmobile from the animated series, though I was sorely tempted by the one from Batman ’66) around blowing up cars full of criminals (Batman has clearly relaxed his stance on no guns and no killing) in the service of foiling plots by Bane, Mister Freeze, and the Joker. I played through the Joker missions, continuing a few times because again, there is no way to actually avoid damage in these games, you will take damage and you will run out of health before you run out of levels. Still, I’m a sucker for Batman and the Joker scenario was interesting at least in that you at one point have to enter in a cancellation code for a nuclear device while also driving (there’s a keypad on the cabinet, as seems to be common in driving cabinet design now), so that was something at least? Otherwise it just reminded me vaguely of Vigilante 8 while committing the sin of not being Vigilante 8. As far as Batman games go, it’s no Arkham Asylum, I tell you what (also their voice for the Joker is no Mark Hamill, I tell you what).

There are more games to go, but this has gone on a bit long and it seems like I can stretch this into two entries rather than just the one large entry, so let’s stop with Batman. Next week, the most grossly exploitative game I’ve ever seen (hint: IT HAS MICROTRANSACTIONS! LITERAL MICROTRANSACTIONS ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS), and a good reason to play a racing game. Plus, the one light gun game that actually let me pick up the goddamn gun!