I’ve had a whole week to sit and let the hate for this next round of arcade games fester, or at least the hate for two of these games to fester—or really just the one. The others range from totally inoffensive to surprisingly fun, even though… well, I’ll explain why when I get there. No pictures this week, because I'm feeling lazy and don't feel like looking all that shit up. Plus I mean four of these are racing games, and you know what those are. Here's a picture of outer space to help you deal with the trauma:

So I’m going to knock all the racing games out quickly, pausing here and there to point out something relevant along the way, including, yes, the worst game in the whole fucking arcade. But we’ll save that for last, because I’ve got a good amount of bile. Let’s talk about the two Namco offerings that were available for the young man with racing shit on the mind, because they were completely inoffensive:

Dead Heat NOS Street Racing

This is a pretty straightforward racing game. Namco’s whole thing is they’ve developed GHOST TECHNOLOGY, which is to say they’ve caught up with every racing game since like… 1995? The cabinets are all linked so you can RACE STRANGERS, and the cabinet has a camera that takes a photo of you before the race and links it to your car on other folks’ screens. The other ghosts in the race will have the faces of those who raced previously (provided you gave permission), which means that you can tell how few people are passing through the arcade because it will just be four cars with the same guy’s face in there. Sometimes, it is my face. The seat is hard plastic and sucks. The steering wheel lacks any sort of actual feedback and just sort of flops around, which is just depressing. There is no shifter, so everything is manual transmission whether you want it to be or not. Not the best racing experience (that would be Daytona 2000, thank you very much), but not the worst thing I experienced. There are only like… four tracks, if I’m remembering right, so I hope you like repetition if you happen to find a group of people to race with.

Dead Heat Riders

The other racing offering from Namco, which is completely identical in every way to Dead Heat NOS, except you sit on a fake motorcycle which happens to be slightly less awful than the Dead Heat NOS seat. The courses are the same, the driving physics feel the same, and literally everything feels the same except you’re leaning to turn and there’s a finer degree of control. This game was my favorite game at the whole damn arcade—not because it’s particularly great, but because two complete strangers and I wound up spending a solid hour and a half racing and swearing at one another, complete with high fives and a not-insignificant amount of trash-talking. This was the one moment that made me miss older, less shitty arcades more than anything else; you don’t get moments like that any other way. I have memories of vacationing in Garden City, South Carolina, which had multiple arcades on its boardwalk, and almost all of them were jam-packed full of people playing TMNT or Street Fighter II, and you just fucking walked up and played with strangers. There’s internet multiplayer, sure, and that’s okay, but it lacks the physicality of being able to look over and high five the dude next to you. I’m not an outgoing person by any means, but fuck if an arcade does not make me far less anxious around strangers. My only regret re: a decision to live in the middle of nowhere (I really don’t like meeting people) is that I can’t get into Chicago to check out the few barcades down there on anything like a regular basis. Anyway, DHR isn’t actually that good, but I got lucky and had some cool dudes to play with.

Winter X Games SnoCross

Because everyone wants to race snowmobiles! These blow cold air in your face too, and there’s a snowball button you push to throw snowballs at other racers which has no discernable effect. The game allows you to upgrade your snowmobile with successive plays—like the snowballs, there was no real discernable effect on the actual performance I could see, but it was an interesting effort to get you to keep playing. You could also log in with a pin number (like the Batman cabinet, there was a pin pad on the cabinet) to I guess save your progress? Or carry over your stats? I don’t know, it didn’t seem worth the trouble. Oddly, this game still relies on FMVs of scantily clad dancing women (actually just the one woman in different outfits) as part of its attract mode, and she shows up at the end of every race too. It was weird, in the way that staring into a time machine set to the worst parts of 90s video game culture is weird. Fuck this game, the physics didn’t make any sense and there was a “trick system” which was really just “go off a ramp and you’ll do some random shit you can’t actually control but we’ll give you points like you just did something,” so really I guess fuck that noise. The two strangers I rocked Dead Heat Riders with showed up to play some of this as well, but the tracks are less fun and it wasn’t quite as enjoyable.

Fast and Furious™ SuperCars™

The single skeeviest game I’ve encountered in a long time. It’s not just that it has the exact same scantily clad woman from the SnoCross game (I assume it’s the same developer but I’m too lazy to check), but it has microtransactions. You can upgrade your car before a race (just like in SnoCross), but this time, adding credits can give you more parts. It’s one of the worst fucking things I’ve ever encountered, and I say this because I sat waiting for a race to start while the kid next to me dumped about $10 worth of credit into his game to max out all his upgrades (he would go on to finish last, because the upgrades don’t actually do dick). It was brutal, not just because I just wanted the fucking game to start, but also because this kid was not like me, who was wandering around with $80 in company money to burn, dude was there with his friends and wasting his money on shit that gave no actual benefit. It’s depressing, and it’s misleading, and the driving physics sucked balls, but at least you could have a manual transmission! Fuck this game. Fuck everything about it. I was able to sit through one race and then I just got up and left with some credits still in the machine. It was joyless, and not to hammer home a point about old sexist shit sticking around in a modern-ass video game, but really? FMV scantily clad ladies (who again, is just the one lady replicated multiple times across the stream)? Fuck that. Fuck everything about that. Christ.

Operation G.H.O.S.T

The one light game that actually involved picking up a light gun instead of using a mounted turret! You even reloaded by aiming off the screen, just like old times. Audio came out of your gun, which could be a little tinny, and the vibration from gunfire was fucking insane, so I wound up switching hands a couple times because I couldn’t feel my hand anymore, but it was a decent enough light gun game. Some input lag when it came to fast movements (you could watch your cursor sort of drag behind you), and the boss fights were poorly designed (or well designed, since they were meant to force you to spend more money). Also, it kept claiming you could get body armor but I never saw how or where or indeed, when that was ever possible. I played through the whole thing with one of my co-workers, and we both agreed the story was dumb (but in a good way—the Sega way), and sort of just ends with the bad guy getting away (maybe you have to get a better score to have it turn out differently? I don’t actually know), but it was enjoyable enough. There were also some “sniper” missions that were dumb, because there was no scope and if you’re going to not build a scope on your goddamn gun, don’t bother having a sniper mission, okay? Okay.

Well, That Was Okay I Guess

At the end of the night, I’d managed to burn through most of the $80 I had been given, mostly thanks to G.H.O.S.T and Dead Heat Riders, which were the two games I probably enjoyed the most. There were a couple iOS games that had been blown up to full size and put on giant touch screens (Fruit Ninja and Jet Pack Joyride, to be exact), but those don’t count as actual arcade games, so fuck them I’m not going to talk about them. The most fun I had was playing with random strangers, which is sort of the point of those sorts of arcade games, and the least fun I had was trying to suppress my gag reflex at every part of that god-awful Fast and Furious game. Christ.

The lack of a 2D fighting cabinet was fucking unconscionable, and given the chance I’ll never set foot in that particular arcade/entertainment complex again. The only thing this whole experience did was made me miss the arcades of the mid-90s (and consider how fucked up it is that the bowling alley I went to as a kid had more arcade cabinets (even pinball!) than an entire fucking building claiming to be an arcade. At least they had an MKII machine). I might go on a quest into Chicago for a thoroughly enjoyable arcade experience (my boss has been bugging me about a few places in her neighborhood I should check out with her and her husband at some point), but let’s not hold our breaths, shall we?

NEXT WEEK: I finally picked up some of last year’s games that I’d been meaning to grab for ages, as well as Capsule, which is super stressful. Maybe I will talk about those, or maybe I’ll have some other thing to talk about. Certainly if you’re dying to know what I think about Capsule, this week’s podcast will have some thoughts on it when we get around to putting it up. You can also hear my opinions on Kentucky Route Zero! Won’t that be fun?