[Arcade] Arcades: Now & Then

If its one thing I've always enjoyed about my childhood is that ever since I was 6 years old I use to go to the local arcade in my little community and even the town next to my litle community as many times as humanly possible.

I actually had a touch of Nostalgia very recently from a very unexpected location. I had went out to a company dinner last week over to Boston Pizza, and I noticed they had a few arcade games to one side of the bar area of the restaurant. Usually any time I see any arcade games in Fort McMurray more often than not their usually the light gun hunting games or stuff along those lines, but I actually was very delighted when one of the arcade games was an arcade collecion of about 30 to 40 games and they had quite a lot of good games such as:

Missle Command
Joust
Bubble Bobble
Road Blaster
Arkanoid
Puzzle Bobble
Mortal Kombat
Centipede
and many others.

Seeing that arcade game made me realize how much fun I had playing games in the arcade when I was a kid. These games are still challenging.

I'm 28 years old now but going to the arcade will always remain an enjoyable experience for me. It just feels like the games you see now at arcades aren't as enjoyable to me compared to all the arcade games I use to play from the mid 1980's to the late 1990's.

I think the only games when I play when I go to arcades now is probably some of the fighting games and ITG/DDR if its available, but I use to play a lot of the arcade games when I was younger.

I remember in my province in the 80's a lot of the smaller communities use to have an arcade but by the time the mid 90's came along you were lucky to find an arcade about 5 hours away from each other. Even now I only know of three arcades that exist in our province right now compared to the 40 to 50 of them that existed between the mid 1980's to the mid 1990's in a province that only consisted of a little over 500,000 people.

Obviously these days people would rather stay at home and play their games. I don't think arcades will ever be as popular as what they were back in the 80's and 90's. I just think that's just the nostalgia part of me talking that way because I tend to enjoy the classic gameplay of a lot of the older games compared to all the newer games. I just loved the satifaction of trying to beat the game or get a very high score on just 25 or 50 cents. The social factor of it was just great especially when it came to playing some of the 4 player games such as G.I. Joe, TMNT, X-Men. I obviously can't forget about pinball.

Basically there is a lot of things you could talk about in terms of this topic. To the GFF community what are some of your impressions about arcades now comapred to back then. What are some of favourite arcade games you use to play, and you could always talk about any fun or interesting experiences you've ever had at the arcade.

In closing I would like to tell you my favourite games of all time I use to love playing at the arcade:

Pinball
The Machine: Bride Of Pinbot
Demolition Man
Tales From The Crypt

Arcade Games
Willow
Golden Axe
Arkanoid
Captain America & The Avengers
G.I. Joe
Double Dragon
Bubble Bobble
U.N. Squadron
R-Type

Jam it back in, in the dark.