Fun and Games
I'm not generally fond of arcades. But last week I found myself in one for some time during a social outing with work folks. We had "unlimited play" tickets for most games and ten free tokens for "redemption" games (where you get tickets to redeem for baubles).
Fortunately, they had air hockey which I think is great fun, so I played many games of that -- mostly against Gopi. And I rather like classic Skee-ball too, which was the only redemption game that was any good, so I spent all my tokens there. Amongst other things, I redeemed my tickets for some Pop Rocks -- entertaining in themselves and to share with people who've never had them before.
I find most electronic arcade games really lousy. I think one primary problem is because of the lousy user-control. When I do something, I want something to happen. Immediately. Not after some noticeable sub-second delay to give the computer time to catch up with me. (Note how other games I like, air hockey and skee-ball, don't have this problem.) There are numerous other problems too which I could detail, but I won't now, because I really just want to note the exception!
Midway's "Cruisin' The World" game is great. It was a two-player setup with seats, three perspectives that could be switched on-the-fly, great interaction between the live player's cars and also between live and computer cars. The user control was great. Gopi and I pretty much exhausted all the race venues around the world -- which really is my only gripe -- I want more! So, thanks Midway for a great game.