Awesome little game place

[FatCobra]

There's a little independent game store where I live called Game Zoo. They sell videogames there, but what they really feature is a nice big setup for you to play games on and you can play whatever you like, as long as they have. The only catch is that you have to pay a small fee if you want to play for a couple hours. Of course, you can also fork over about $60 and be able to play all you want for a entire month! I've haven't tried it yet, as I don't have that kind of money to blow at the moment, not to mention my car is a gas-guzzing piece of shit so all my money goes right into the gas tank.

But I was there yesterday for about three hours (I paid about $6, you can play all you want till the store closes on Tuesdays and Thursdays for about $10), and playing shmups on a big screen stereo TV makes a hugely different experience. The sprites are bigger and makes it easier to dodge bullets, and the explosions have a nice bassy boom to them. I first started with the Raiden Project, and the people around me were asking me if that was Xexious. The store owner even asked me if I wanted to sell it. My reply was "Hell no!" He did say it was a good game though. After a couple rounds of Raiden, I asked for Midnight Club 3, a game I've been wanting to try out, even though I desipse things like free-roam gameplay, career modes, and last but not least, PIMPING YOUR RIDE OUT IN THE MOST CRAZIEST MANNER POSSIBLE. It however, turned up to be a very fun game, after I set the music to just Techno, and I started out with a '78 Monte Carlo. I focused more on performance, and thankfully, this game doesn't force you to tackify your ride to move on with the game, so I ended up with a nice orange Monte Carlo with white stripes and side pipes, for the old school look. You can even change the license plate. Mine's a Flordia 2004 one that says "OLDSKOL." That game did suck up most of my time, and when they gave me a reminder that I had half an hour left, I popped in my copy of Gradius V (you can also bring your own games too. I wonder what their reaction would be if I wanted to hook a JPN Saturn up to their TV and play some shmups on it).

All in all, it was a fun experience, and I would probably want to come back again, so I can try more of this new-school stuff and play my old school stuff on something better than my crappy mono TV from the Stone Age (aka 1992). The only I really don't like about the place was they seem a little Xbox-biased (which also means they overhype Halo. Blegh). But it was still fun, and a good way to get out of the house, even if you're going to end up spending time playing videogames at either location.

So, anyone have a place like this where you live? I like these independent type stores, they have a certain vibe that soul-less EB Games or Gamestop don't have.

[icepick]

There's a place that the kids in my neighborhood go to here, called "LAN Games." As you can guess, they have a little farm of "xtreme PCs" (imagine the EMR bouncing around that place with all of the case windows) set up where people can log in and play against each other (or on the Internet), for about $6 an hour (which I think is a bit much).

Additionally though, they've had an XB (or PS2 or something) set up in the back of the... establishment, where they have some DDR pads (recently upgraded to platforms) for use with a decent TV at the same $6/hour. I've never seen it in use, but then, I've also gone to the place a total of twice (and the second time wasn't even to play). One of my friends said that one could bring their own games as well, so, I got to thinking.

The TV looks to be a newer widescreen model, and may in fact have VGA input. I was thinking that if it does, I'd definitely "rent it" for a couple of hours and bring the kids to play some Senko no Ronde on DC when it's released.

Even so, S-video on a TV like that would be way over the RF on thirty year-old TV that I'm using right now. Racing games would be fun, or even something like Sonic Adventure 2. I do also frequently have daydreams about playing games like Rez there, and befriending some LAN gaming guy's slightly-bored but faithful girlfriend.

(Not in direct relation to the RTV thread.)

The only downside would be that I would love to play games like Border Down there, but I'm way too careful with such belongings to even consider bringing them out of my room. I'd also have to put up with some obnoxious yelling and cussing from the LAN gamers, but if people are expected to be playing games like DDR there, it'd be assumed that I could have Rez going at fairly decent audio levels.

(All of the PC stations have headphones as well, I'm pretty sure.)

[BulletMagnet]

If there was a place like that around I might try it, just to see what kind of reactions I might get if I hooked up Parodius or something, heh. I wouldn't last very long since I'm awful, but just making some people go "What the heck IS that?" would be worth a few bucks for me.

[iatneH]

Cool, you can bring your own games and stuff to play on the screen?

I wish we had more places like that, it could get shooters some nice publicity :)

Yeah... playing Sexy Parodius or something...