The idea of the arcade isn't what it used to be but they still hold memories for a lot of people.
This arcade will hold memories for me that no one can take away. The first time I played the Simpsons game and couldn’t get past the Bowling Ball dream monster. When I was a kid, there were two other places by my house that I would get my video game fix. The first was a place called Sports World, the typical place where kids would have birthday parties, complete with Laser Tag and mini golf/bowling. The place did have one other must-play game, the X-Men arcade game. If you were having a birthday party with friends, you had to play this beat-em-up with them.
Cyclops was, and still is, my favorite X-Men character and if I wasn’t playing with him, I was playing with Nightcrawler. This game just felt like a game that was in the arcades. The port for Turtles in Time does a good job of this as well. X-Men was one of the better arcade games and it never got the respect it deserved outside the arcade like other arcade games like Mortal Kombat did.
The second place was a mall close to home that we did some of our Christmas shopping in over the years. The arcade had to be eliminated because it was mostly a gang hangout, unfortunately. This place was the ideal area for air hockey and sport arcade games. I can still remember playing NFL Blitz here sometimes as well as air hockey, like I said before. The other major place I remember arcades is when the family went on vacation to Wildwood, New Jersey and every corner on the boardwalk had an arcade. When you’re on vacation, you don’t play too many video games in the arcades; they’re just for crane machines and a place to sit down.
