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The Dave and Buster's Experience
The Game Chair has a piece looking at the lackluster experience offered by one of the few remaining American arcade chains, Dave and Buster's. From the article: "Dave & Buster's is perennially in my bad books because they don't have Dance Dance Revolution. Each time, I enter with the hope that they might have seen the error of their ways, and each time I am crushed. Honestly. What kind of arcade does not have DDR? Although Dave & Buster's merely possesses pretensions, rather than aspirations to be an arcade, the lack of dance games except for one lonely Pump it Up: Exceed 2 machine is nigh unforgivable. I know DDR isn't so popular in Japan anymore, but unless I am totally mistaken Dave & Buster's is not Japan."
something is wrong with you if you're that concerned about DDR not being in an arcade. =P
Why is someone's blog entry whining about a random arcade worthy of /.?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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First place I ever played DDR was a D&B, maybe your local one doesnt have it but mine does. But then again I live in jersey where the arcade has yet to die. Infact every summer I make it a mission to go to the "Flashback" arcade, a little mini arcade inside of a huge one which is packed with 80's and 90's games.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Odd placement on /. aside, this article is also odd because it doesn't pay any mind to the target D&B audience. This place is specifically targeted as an entertainment destination for adults--kids can't even get in without a guardian. Gambling-style games, poker tables, shuffleboard, etc. populate much of the restaurant's real estate. These are not the kinds of patrons who hop around on dance pads or whip up 40-hit combos in hardcore fighting games; they want to shoot stuff, race in cars and play games that require as little learning curve as possible.
It's called Fun and Games - in Wayne New Jersey in the WIllobrook mall. It's open 365 days a year, and has pinbal machines, DDR, multi player racing games, air hockey and practically anything else you could want. It probably has 150-200 machines. It's been there for at least 30 years.
..........FULL STOP.
I hate people like you. Waaaahhhhhhhh they don't have my game, so I'll bitch about it on my blog. Oh, I'm not a hardcore gamer, I'm not an arcade lounger, and I'm not a Dance Dance Revolutionary, but here's a helpful hint you moron, if you want your favorite game there ASK FOR IT. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, so they say, and you certainly seem to be one of the new generation of squeaky, mousy losers. Quit using your mouth to whine, use it to speak like a person, and stop wasting everyone else's time talking about wasting your own time.
Submitter, maybe Chuck E. Cheese's has DDR. Go there!
How ya like dat?
Maybe the D+B arcade machine purchasers are, in fact, well aware that a DDR game would make money, but in the long run money would be lost by the type of clientele the game might attract? ie: people who spend money on the food, bar drinks, pool *simultaneously* being attractive customers versus someone who just pumps money in the DDR machine and sweats?
/self
this is in retort to another awful article i read here not long ago about how DDR was killing arcades and everything else holy to some random 'hardcore' gamer.
the D&B here in DC has at least 2 DDR machines, one of which was taken over by this 35~ year old asian guy who was playing only to impress audiences last time I was there. he was finishing songs with his back to the screen, showing off, etc. i got a kick out of it.
and just to get my bitch in, i hate D&B here because all they have for fighting is a 35+ mame cabinet that has SF2 (not WW/CE/etc). jesus, shell out for a 3s machine to appease people. it'd probably make more money than the 3 broken pinball tables you have. (and i love pinball!)
Personally, I can't imagine trying to keep my pint from spilling while hopping and jumping.
And I wouldn't put my drink down where I couldn't see it in a D&B.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Well I don't know if anyone else has posted about this yet but, The D&B in the palisades center in Rockland NY has a dance dance revolution machine. I havn't seen anyone use the one they have but I'm usually spending my time at the bar.
http://slashdot.org/comments.
Every D&B I've been to has DDR, but very rarely is it used. Most often, D&B is used as a place for drunken ski-ball, arcade style basketball free throws and overly elaborate pachinko style gambling. Any other game is something to do while waiting for something else. Video games are now HOME entertainment.
GameWorks > D&B
I was quoted out of context in my autobiography...
this guy doesnt keep up on current events, Konami is putting out a US and Europe DDR mix later in the year, "Dance Dance Revolution: Supernova."
At least it did for me the one time I went..
It was the D&B at the Palisades Mall in West Nyack, NY. I went to go get a beer for a buddy and me and when I went to pay the Asian MALE bartender gave me a sort of wink and said "This one is on me". He smiled and pushed the beers towards me. I got freaked out and ran off.
"THE BARTENDER IS HITTING ON ME!" I said to my friends.
And then I thought about it a little more..
"Oh man! The bartender is hitting on me! This is going to be great"
I went back up to the bar, sat down next to my bartender friend and said "You know, I trust you. I want you to choose my drinks for the rest of the night. You pick what I drink tonight." And with that I spent the rest of the night making small talk and drinking for free. Eventually the friend I was with came over, I introduced the two and the bartender made us both free drinks. They were good drinks too. I'd say at least $6 or $7 a piece, premium mixed drink double shot things. At the end of the night he said it was all free of charge. I walked away to tease him and then came back a minute later.
"Hey, I really like you, what's your schedule?"
He wrote it on a napkin, I got his phone number, I gave him my friend's number, and we were on our way. Drunk as hell and still with full wallets.
The article's pretty content free, so lemme crosspost a comment I left on this guy's blog.
The problem with D&B is not DDR. It's the entire attitude that they will house NOTHING but 'casual games'. They're not appealing to arcade fans, they want people who come there to drink and eat, and MAYBE play some games... so, the games have to be playable with no instructions whatsoever. Anybody can drive a car or shoot a gun, so, those are the dominant forms.
Fighting games are more esoteric, since you need combinations of joystick moves and button presses to succeed; unless you read FAQs or are a fan from the console versions you won't do well in them. There is no longer a real fighting game subculture in this country, at least not one that goes to arcades.
Another category they utterly dump is classic games, things from the 80's and 90's. You'd think they'd at least throw in a Donkey Kong or such for nostalgia value, but the problem is that these games don't pay well, don't have a ton of 'continue?' style profit chances, and are costly to upkeep (unless you buy a re-released game like the Space Invaders Anniversary, or Ms.Pac-Man/Galaga combo).
The bottom line is money. They don't make enough money off anything that you can't play for 20 seconds with no prior training and then dump more credits into for another 20 seconds. It's a global problem on the arcade scene, and D&B, which is an arcade secondarily, will never be the answer.
The arcade itself, though, is lacking. They can't seem to decide whether they want to be a destination for kids or adults, so they sort of half-ass both of them. I'd say a little less than 1/2 of the floor space is dedicated to "ticket games" for kids. These are of no value whatsoever to me, but I could see having a good time if you brought the kids along. They had a pretty neat trivia game that my group of friends tried out and it was the lone standout among such games.
The "video arcade" had a token cadre of "classic" arcade games, maybe 3 or 4 machines, to please the old-timers or the people that just wanted to play a game of Pac-Man. This was ok with me but I would have liked to see a few more classics in there. The most glaring omission, in my opinion, is the complete lack of pinball machines. I suspect the reason for this is pinballs require fairly regular maintenance to stay in good working order, and they are expensive. D&B probably didn't want to mess with it. This loses big points for me, since I am a big pinball fan, but they could have made up for it by having a better selection of video games.
The modern portion of the video arcade consists of a large number of what I would call "big footprint" games, i.e. two player shooters where you hold a big gun or something. These are often technically impressive, but since they simply take up so much space, they take away from the total number of games that can be put in and thus have to be more selective with what they put out there. This results in a bunch of generic semi-crappy games that I never really felt interested in.
For a franchise that bills itself as an arcade for adults, D&B sure needs some help. I've been to one in Dallas and it had the same problems. I like what they are trying to do, but I feel like the place just doesn't have any "soul", for lack of a better word, like the old arcades back in the 80s did. Maybe I'm just getting nostalgic.
Really, I have no idea what the reviewer was going on about for the most part. This isn't the type of arcade that used to be present in every mall in America, it's a bar that happens to have a restaurant and a whole lot of games.
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I mean where else can you drink alcohol and play arcade games.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I completely agree that most D&B's suck in their game selection. I've only been to 2 or 3, but they seem to lack variety in their shop. This guy's little post neglected to mention the lack of pinball machines, Golden Tees, or depth in classic beyond one pacman/galaga combo and qix/space invaders combo that most have.
Who cares? Where the hell is my Dodonpachi: Daioujou?
Where are all the shooters?
Get a few drinks from thier bar in you and then try playing DDR. Drunk people don't dance to high energy dance games without hurting themselves...
(limps away on crutches, broken leg in tow...)
Personally I could care less about DDR, though I haven't seen a DDR machine at either of the 2 D&Bs I've been to in VA/NY. However, stranger thing I have noticed is that there are NO pinball machines there at all. Also, the only fighting games I saw were old school crap, SF2turbo and then one Tekken 4 machine which is at least several years old now. No soul cal, no MVC, no MK... I'm assuming the reason for both of these is that in both instances you can literally sit there for hours on just one token, and both are pretty constant gaming so that means you're also going to be drinking far less when playing them so neither make any money. I'd go out on a limb and say DDR is the same way. You can't drink a beer and play ddr at the same time and I see people sitting on those machines for a long ass time before they lose. It's just wasted revenue whereas instead they can put in some 1996 Nascar game that lasts 5 minutes for $2 a play almost.
They had DDR and I played it.
(Man, diagonal arrows are hard if you're used to orthogonal ones!)
-Clio
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