Don’t Bug Me for Quarters!

Been a rough week here in SL, but I found a fun place to relax and waste time thanks to my good buddy Ronri. It’s the game arcade at Digital Dragon mall, complete with accurate renderings of the arcade games that corrupted your brains and sucked up your quarters in your misspent youth. Yours, I say, because I was already a grown-up by the time video games made the leap from Pong (which I played my senior year in college, back in the Jimmy Carter Administration) to Pac-Man, and I earned the quarters I squandered on Asteroids during long nights in the bars of Wausau and Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Now I know there are bigger arcades in amusement parks around SL, but this one is ideal because it has the games you remember (okay, not Asteroids but others just as good), there’s hardly ever anybody else there and you don’t need quarters. So don’t ask me for any, got that?

Some of the games you can play on the game machine itself, like air hockey, while others direct you to a Web site that replicates the user experience on the machine, with varying degrees of success. Since I’m not a hard-core gamer, it doesn’t bother me that I had to play Pac-Man on the Web, but my friend Zak, a gamer veteran, complained about it. That was before he and I managed to break both air hockey games, and after I had to stand in utter silence while he conquered Typing of the Dead. He did bestow his benediction on Skee-Ball, however.

A few of your choices: Pole Position, Typing of the Dead, Tempest, Pong, Pac-Man, Skee-Ball, Neo Geo, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Dance Dance Revolution, Hogan’s Alley and Whack-a-Mole. Oh, and a tip when you get to the sim: It forces you to land  in the middle of the mall. So, to find the arcade,  make about a 45-degree turn to your left and fly across the promenade.