The Great American Arcade

I really like cabinets and arcades. It’s practically a dead form of entertainment all it’s own that’s been replaced by online gaming. Video games are stronger than ever and only becoming more popular with each passing day; which I am very grateful for, but there is a special place in my heart for the old American Arcade. It was a social hub for teenagers when I was growing up. A place to get together with some friends while drinking sugary soda, munching down on candy and just dishing out quarters to anyone who’s willing to play a game with you.

While there are still a few arcades around most places don’t have the population or the popularity to keep them open for long. I know my home town’s combination arcade and billiard hall closed when I was about 16 years old and this was before the days of xbox live and the PSN. Sure, there was still online PC gaming but in my tiny, economically disadvantaged town not too many people had a broadband internet connection. These were places for us to be exposed to new games, make new friends and honestly, to just be left alone by adults for a few hours while we hollered, gamed and competed with one another for top score and bragging rights for the night.

The arcade was a social hot spot for a lot of us, the local arcade was our Cheers, the place to we go where everyone knew our names. The owners of the place saw us in there all the time, they would ask us what types of games we wanted or what sort of things we would want in the vending machines tucked away in a little room next to the Foosball tables. The soda machine was always stocked with $0.50 cans of Surge for us to rot our teeth on and keep us at peak gaming performance and they’d always give us our quarters back when a cabinet got greedy and snatched our money without giving us a round to play in trade.

My friends and I would spend hours and 10’s of dollars playing the old wireframe Star Wars game released back in 1983, or Strikers II 1945. To this day I travel from bar to laundrymat through my town and even a few others looking for Strikers, but to no avail. I know I can get it as a PSone game but it’s just not the same unless you’re dropping a quarter in a slot and playing on a old wooden cabinet; the way the game is meant to be played. Playing it on a console is almost a disservice to the game and the men and women who built those cabinets.

My best friend from childhood does the same thing and he isn’t even a gamer! Strikers comes up in conversation roughly once a month as we’ve both spent time looking for it but each time we come up empty handed. Sure we could find another top-down 2D shooter like Strikers II but that’s not the point. That game was a big part of our teenage years and a lot of other friends of ours too. The day that the arcade in Potsdam New York shut down we all went to pay our respects in a manner of speaking; it was the end of an era for us. We all showed up to have one last hurrah because the doors would be closing forever and the those beautiful, old, wooden cabinets would go dark for the last time in front of us.

That day, I probably spent 25 dollars alone simply playing Strikers II. I played a few other games, like the original Time Crisis and once in awhile I’d race a friend in Cruisin’ USA, hell we even had crazy taxi. I had shown up with my pockets loaded with as many quarters as I could fit in each one, giving anyone a quarter who was willing to play some Strikers with me, and boy were there a lot. A few of us hung around until about midnight that day, staying awake as long as we could knowing that when next evening rolled around those doors wouldn’t be unlocked like every night before.

With the hobby slowly shifting into what it’s become today things had to change, and unfortunately one of the things that got left behind was the Great American Arcade. There are a few that are still hanging in there around New York State, small businesses have popped up giving some measure of new life back to these old cabinets. But walking through an arcade these days it’s painfully obvious to see that most people simply don’t have an interest in these old bits of functioning history. strolling down the isle’s of the these dimly lit establishments, hearing the the old midi and 8-bit audio tracks playing on a loop just waiting for someone to play them is almost heartbreaking for those of us who remember what a busy arcade was like. There was nothing like waiting in line for you chance to smoke the person’s score who is in front of you or taking up the challenge to see who can get the furthest on one quarter. For the most part, those days are long gone, stuck in the past with the malt shops, record and book stores. The greatest shame is that these types of machines are tanks and can be repaired again and again, yet no one seems to want them. I’ve seen dead cabinets sitting in the corner of bars, dark and lifeless with a “Out of Order” sign hastily written and taped to it. I know in my mind that they are fixable, but the reality is that someone is just going to take it to the dump, or hack it apart and sell it for scrap.

Lately I’ve found myself thinking back on those old days and while they weren’t perfect like nothing ever truly is, they were fantastic times with even more fantastic games spent with some of the greatest friends I’d ever had. The highlight of my summers was sneaking a flask of cheap rum into my arcade and taking stealthy nips off it while sharing with friends who’ve been kind enough to pay for a game or two for you. While everything moves forward and make progress there are always bits that get left behind and some of those things won’t even come back. You can’t capture the atmosphere of an arcade in your living room, no matter how dim you make the lights or how much stale cigarette smoke floats around you there is just no replacing the Great American Arcade.  

The Many Worlds of Bioshock Infinite

I’ve spent some time this week playing Bioshock Infinite since it was released on Tuesday. Now by that I mean I’ve spent pretty much every waking hour thinking about the game since I first got my hands on it. I started to play it at around 1:00 am Tuesday morning and straight through until I was literally too tired to keep my eyes open anymore, then awoke the next day to finish it, after a few things that needed to be taken care of throughout the day of course. I won’t talk too much about the game itself, it’s an amazing game but that is coming up a little bit later once I’ve had enough time to fully wrap my head around the game. No, this article is about a bit more than a wonderfully crafted game.

The ads for Bioshock Infinite are amazing. Now, they didn’t do anything too out of the ordinary on the surface. They got a good musical score to accompany what most assumed was cut-scenes or just snippets of the gameplay. The real kicker about all of these trailers is there are a lot of scenes that don’t actually take place in the game, and there is an amazingly well thought out reason for this that isn’t even apparent until you’ve played the game for awhile, or hell even beaten it entirely.

Now, at this point if you care at all about playing the game and not having any of it spoiled for you, I’d highly suggest you stop reading now, turn back and we can pretend that none of this has ever happened. Moving forward I will try to remain vague, however some parts of the story cannot be avoided when covering this bit. So just a bit of warning, continue at your own risk. I will not be blamed for anything you see from here on out.

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Alright now that, that’s all out of the way lets take a look at some of these trailers if you haven’t seen them already. Many people have been following this game for quite some time and there were lots of inconsistencies between trailers and even some of the screenshots released by the developers. A lot of this was noticed online and people within the gaming community as well as the press assumed it was a change in style or direction, ultimately causing delays in the game’s release. I, like a few of the people out there was just excited to see the game progressing but for me the game’s trailers and released content was just not adding up. Different character models, clothing, styles even the NPC and minor characters populating the world seemed to change every time there was more information made available. Some gamers, including myself were surprised to find some sequences we’d seen in the trailers or  some of the some of the footage we’ve seen of the game in action weren’t even in the game at all! I found this a bit odd at first as I played through the game, but hey sometimes things are cut or things get changed. That’s the downfall of following a game that is still in development. I was looking forward to playing through some of the iconic moments we saw in the trailers only to realize little-by-little that I most likely won’t get to as I neared the end of the game.

On top of all this, the story really wasn’t adding up. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was all going to add up but when was the question, for me. I knew there was some big twist coming since nothing made all that much sense yet, almost like bits of information I should know were missing. I really started to think that I’d somehow skipped over a huge sections of the game that weren’t necessarily required to play but certainly helped flesh the story out much better. In the end I turned out to not be missing anything and that it in fact was not supposed to make much of any sense until the end of the game and the same thing goes for these disconnected, inconsistent trailers that had started getting released two years before the game was even ready to ship. Now comes the big reveal! (seriously, if you read this far but don’t want it spoiled stop, this is literally my last warning.)

If you’ve made it through the end of the game then you know that Elizabeth (Anna,) has the ability to control space and time with those wonderful little tears she is able to open and as her power increases towards the end of the game we find out that she’s a being who has ascended passed the confines of time and space all together. We essentially find that she is no longer bound by the same laws of the universe that Booker, Comstock and even us poor saps playing the game are. No, Elizabeth can see everything that has, is and will ever happen throughout the universe. As she puts it, there are infinite possibilities and the story we’re playing through is simply one of them. That’s the sinch right there. Once the player finds themselves staring at all the towers, leading to different worlds you realize that all the things that you’ve done are simply one of many things that could have happened, the choices you made could have been mirror images of yourself except one subtle difference, or it could have been as drastic as looking like a completely different Booker; or worse off Booker not even showing up to rescue Elizabeth.

All of these trailers, screenshots and gameplay demonstrations that have different content in each one are of the same exact game, just where different choices were made. It is both the same and different world! The events that unravel in front of the player in this world are unraveling differently in the neighbouring universes so it stands to reason that all these trailers happened somewhere in the same time frame too! These stories were all unfolding at the same time with different choices that produced different consequences, except the way it began and the way it ended, your choices matter but there are fixed points that no Elizabeth or Booker can avoid in any universe. All these trailers are advertising the same game in a different universe with different choices, but they are all still Bioshock Infinite. This realization hit me like a ton of bricks. Whether Irrational thought of this from the beginning or it was something that just “came to be,” as they started sifting through what had been developed so far I can’t say, but it certainly helps build up and explain the world at the end. It carried much more weight for me once I realized how every little thing both in and outside of the game came together to make an entirely new and unique experience for me as a gamer and gave me ever more to think about as a writer.

Welcome to WriteClickZoom

Hi all,

Since gameblurb.net had it's plug pulled around the new year I've been looking for a place to put my thoughts, mostly about video games, because if you know me you know I spend a shit-fuck-ton of time thinking about video games. I've tried cruising the comment sections, reading other blogs and just generally seeing what is out there, but the life of commentary does not a writer make. WriteClickZoom is a place for me to get my thoughts out and have a place to discuss topics with others who are passionate about gaming.

I would also like this blog to allow players to explore things that normally aren't mentioned, or things that have always nagged them about gaming, but they can't quite put their finger on it. Mostly I want a place where people can have honest to goodness conversations about gaming from the stand point of being adults.  I've wanted a place where we can discuss the topics any topics that might come to mind, from the philosophy of a game right down to what drives some of our favorite or most hated characters. Where we think developers when wrong and arguably the most important aspect, where we think the future of gaming will take us.

So WriteClickZoom is what I've come up with, (with the help of some friends of course.) I'll keep it up-to-date and do my best to entertain the lot of you. Thanks for reading and stick around, I promise it will be worth your while.