I'm not sure how often gets updated or how its coverage is outside the SF Bay Area, but it looks pretty accurate for me. Emporium/Musee Mecanique - I don't go to them often, but they're both more generalist arcades, so they'll have a few machines at varying maintenance levels. Gestalt always has machines in decent shape, but the bar itself might close any month now. A lot of people seem surprised when I mention it's there. Doesn't seem to get rotated much and I'm not convinced it's maintained regularly, but it doesn't get much traffic so it doesn't seem like stuff breaks quickly there. ![]() the Alamo theater actually has a reasonably decent room upstairs from the bar, across the hall from the theaters. (On pretty much any modern machine every lane/ramp/hole is probably going to be required for some mode or another, so a single broken sensor breaks the entire game if you're trying for wizard mode.) It's definitely the place to go for the arcade experience with a lot of machines to choose from. My feeling is that they don't keep up on maintenance well enough because I always have trouble with tables always having enough small things broken about it that it's impossible to advance some modes. Free Gold Watch is the place everyone always recommends because it has the most machines. Decent Hawaiian food and a quite good beer list. The owners met playing pinball, are heavily involved in the local scene, and do the maintenance themselves, so the machines tend to be in great shape. Outer Orbit is my favorite place, even though they've recently removed a couple machines for more seating (more evidence that the bar/restaurant is the money maker). One possibly useful proxy for this is seeing where your local leagues play - in general they're more likely to be in places with well-maintained machines. I like enthusiast owned/operated places because the owner who's actually playing the games will notice problems and fix them, as opposed to bars where any problems with the machine will either be broken until the maintainer gets around to it on their scheduled route, or possibly the problems never get reported at all. To expand on this a bit, the actual maintainer of the machine is probably the most important factor of the quality of the barcade, at least if you're the type of person who cares about rulesets for games and will be irritated if something doesn't work because of a broken sensor. Most often the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor or dedicated hobbyist (who knows how to fix them.) No game physics engine comes anywhere close to all that detail in all these areas. Response time matters too - a computer platform is usually limited to 1/60 second input resolution by the host hardware and OS, while a real machine responds hard real time instantly.Īnd of course nudging - no virtual controller comes anywhere close to all the things you can do to a real machine, shoves and pushes and slaps. Flippers accelerate and decelerate on a time scale of single-digit milliseconds, with all sorts of subtleties that an experienced player can feel. There are really subtle details in the interactions with the rubber on the flippers - a real ball will sink into the rubber by a fraction of a millimeter and rebound in ways that depend on that. ![]() It's much more than one object moving at one velocity. A ball's motion is very 3d even on a 2d playfield - it can have a spin axis aligned anywhere on its sphere.įlippers too. A real ball slides and spins and scrapes across the playfield and the objects in all sorts of ways. Real ball motion is so much more than a pair of X-Y coordinates and velocities. Same as how a tabletop game store is really making money on the food items, not the trading cards.Īnd as for your last, yes, virtual pinball games don't come close on ball physics. Most often the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor or dedicated hobbyist (who knows how to fix them.) The games make it a destination for families with kids, and the adults play some but really spend on food and drink.
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