Extremely Lame

Dave & Buster’s is a small national chain of restaurants/midways (restaurant/boardwalks for those of you who live in coastal New England) that you’ll typically see only in large cities, most often in the South Central part of the country. If you haven’t been there, think Applebee’s meets Chuck E. Cheese. Except, you know, for adults.

It takes a thoroughly generic restaurant, kind of like Shenanigan’s without the goofy shit on the walls or Chotchkie’s without the flair, and combines it with lame games of skill and chance and only the arcade games that provide the largest profit margins and least amount of fun.

At one end of the non-restaurant part of the joint you have things like skeeball, which pretty much is one of the only cool things there. Some of them will have some large multi-player game that saves your info on a little card so you can come back and continue. Ch-ching! The one I remember best was a horse racing game put out by Sega. Think of it as Monster Rancher or Pokémon, only with horses, and each race costing you more money.

A little further down you have the pseudo gambling machines. You know, the ones where you put in the tokens and use some lever or whatnot to get more tokens to drop down? Yeah. LAME.

Then you have a couple of legacy arcade games that seem to be put there just to placate people like me. You know, the Centipedes, the Ms. Pac Mans, the Donkey Kongs, and if you’re lucky, an old version of Dance Dance Revolution.

Finally, at the other end, you have the high profit margin, low fun margin arcade games. There are numerous machines, unfortunately they’re all racing games and shooting games. Oooh! Cruisin’ XIX and Time Crisis 32! Sign me up! Pffft.

There do exist genuinely fun games that are all about stuffing unbelievable amounts of quarters into them. Off the top of my head, I can think of Gauntlet, Smash TV, and Total Carnage. If Dave and Buster’s really wanted to keep old geeks like me coming back in addition to their current cadre of patrons, they’d lose the multiple copies of their racing and shooting games and use that space for things such as great ’90s arcade games like The Simpsons, Mortal Kombat 2 and 3, Rampart, the previously mentioned quarter sinks, and a few more classic ’80s arcade games like Paperboy, Bubble Bobble, and Rampage. And despite their admitted high maintenance and relatively low revenue, throw in a few of the greatest pinball machines ever, like The Addams Family, The Twilight Zone, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.