When Chemists Attack

If you grew up when I did, you may have dreamed about owning your own arcade. I certainly did. This was back when people actually went to arcades (they were everywhere) to pump quarters into games like Missile Command, Major Havoc, Tempest, Robotron, Defender, and Pac Man. These days, anyone can have arcade-quality games in their home – by buying either a PC or one of the many consoles out there. Heck, you can even buy a joystick that contains one to a dozen old arcade hits.

But something’s missing from these games, good as they are: the old stand-up arcade experience. I was in Target today and I saw one of these. It’s one of the 12-in-one arcade games that you could buy in joystick form, but it’s in its own arcade cabinet!

Target had it plugged in, though it was sitting a bit precariously on a shelf with some televisions. It’s got a built-in monitor and speakers, two joysticks, and an assortment of buttons. And it’s got a price tag of $499.99 (which I didn’t actually discover until getting home and looking the machine up on Target’s web site).

I had a little time to play with the unit before my wife dragged me away, kicking and screaming.

The machine is a little … small for adult players. Its size is about the size of one of those mini Neo-Geo arcade systems you might find in a Pizza Hut. The monitor, though, is tiny. The cabinet is the right proportions for an arcade cabinet, but in a real arcade machine most of the space is taken up by the screen. In this cabinet, it’s almost as if the screen is hiding out at the bottom, hoping you won’t notice it. Also, almost all old arcade games have the screen mounted so that the long side of the screen is vertical and the short axis is horizontal. This cabinet has the screen mounted as if it’s a television, which means that most of the games included in the unit would have to be modified to fit the screen size. One of the big pluses of having an arcade cabinet is supposed to be playing the games as they were meant to be played – or so I thought.

The quality of the screen was also disappointing. It didn’t have that crisp look that a real arcade machine would – or even that a television hooked up with an S-video or composite cable does. Some of the displays looked blurry and were hard to read. Whether the machine was improperly assembled or whether tht’s just the quality of the machine I don’t know.

The buttons felt flimsy. They would have felt more at home on a game of Simon than on an arcade machine.

That “Big Electronic Games Limited”logo on the front is also very cheesy. Less self-promotion, more game art, please! (After all, the folks this is aimed at will track down the product!). I wonder if that is a sticker that can be left off or removed.

The actual games seemed pretty faithful to their original arcade versions, aside from the screen issue. I tried out Sinistar (at which I still, after all these years, suck) and Rampage and they at least looked familiar. The small blurry screen hurt Sinistar more than Rampage. The games included are Joust, Defender I and II, Robotron, Rampage, Splat, Satan’s Hollow, Tapper, Bubbles, Wizard of Wor, Timber, and Sinistar.

As much fun as the nostalgia factor is, though, I’d have to say that a better experience can be had by just buying a onsole and a couple of the classic game collections that are available for the Playstation, PS2, Xbox, or Gamecube. You’ll get more games and, provided you don’t hook your console up to a Watchman, you’ll actually be able to see them. Five hundred dollars will buy you a console and all the classic game collections (much more thn twelve games) with money to spare.

Now when these go on clearance and are half off, it might be another matter entirely. But for now, having a stand-up arcade cabinet in my house will have to remain a childhood dream.