Arcade Crawl
On a recent August day while I happened to be on vacation and both my kids were home for a visit, I convinced everyone to take a drive to Funspot in New Hampshire, which bills itself as the “Worlds largest arcade”.
Funspot
This place is truly an amazing arcade and is very large. It is three floors of arcade goodness along with some museum-type stuff mixed in. The lowest level had a small shop to get food along with skee-ball and a variety of driving games such as Daytona and Mario Kart.
The middle level was mostly geared at the young folks with games that tend to award tickets, but also more modern stuff.
The top floor is where all the cool retro stuff was and obviously where I spent all my time. There were pinball games and at least 6 rows of classic arcade games.
I played a lot of games, which Funspot made easy with its fair pricing. For $20 you could get 110 tokens! All the retro games were just one token, so less than $0.25. Pinball games were two tokens. The more modern games were more expensive and could go up to four tokens per game, but I didn’t play any of those.
First up, my son and I played Gauntlet. I was the Valkerie. The joysticks were a little worn so it was tricky to control at times.
We then moved on to try Asteroids before splitting up. I wandered around and played Galaxian, Galaga, Pole Position, Turbo, Joust, Ms. Pac-Man, Joust (cocktail version), Space Invaders, Moon Patrol, Donkey Kong, Crazy Kong (A Donkey Kong knock-off).
One of the Pole Position sit-down games I previously wrote about.
Galaxy Wars was a Space Invaders clone. One row of the invaders were invisible, however I’m not sure if that was a hardware glitch or a feature of the game.
Crazy Kong was a wild copy of Donkey Kong. It has nearly identical graphics, but the gameplay was different and worse.
FunSpot even has the original Pong!
FunSpot is also partly a museum so there was lots of cool displays and trivia. I was not aware of Cloak & Dagger.
There was a great display of Coleco’s video game products, including a 5 1/4” disk drive for the Adam, which I didn’t know existed.
Lots of stuff at FunSpot was donated.
We spent a total of about 2 hours at FunSpot and I could have spent hours more, but we had other things to see on our adventure so I had to say goodbye. I will be back, though!
Weir’s Beach
This beach is only a few miles from FunSpot so we stopped there to eat and look around. There were two, much smaller, arcades that we also stopped in to check out. They each had a few retro arcade games, along with the current games where you win tickets for crappy prizes.
Gotta have Pac-Man!
York Beach
Then we headed back to Maine and stopped at Nubble Light House before moving on to York Beach, which also had a small arcade along the beachfront.
Ms. Pac-Man
The common thread among all these arcades is that they each had Ms. Pac-Man! I played it at each location and set the high score at all but one. This was not as big an achievement as you might think since my scores of around 30,000 to 50,000 was usually enough to set the high score.
Ms. Pac-Man is one of my favorite games. It is much better than plain-old Pac-Man with the extra colors and different mazes. It’s also very popular which means that the machines are not always in the best shape. The joysticks were of varying quality with some having nice short throws and others being so sloppy that you could hardly control anything.
Each game also had different settings. Some start slowly and ramped up the difficultly quickly. At one arcade, Ms. Pac-Man moved around crazy fast, but the ghosts did not, making it seem pretty easy at first. But then the ghosts sped up and stay blue for only a millisecond. I did enjoy the variety, though.
What is the last retro arcade game that you’ve played?
In Chicago they have what I believe is one of the largest video game arcades (excluding gambling machines), Galloping Ghosts https://www.gallopingghostarcade.com/. It's epic, and well maintained despite the obvious challenge of having so many systems of such advanced age. Highly recommended!
I don't mind the MS PacMan, I recall getting into it in 2022, I guess I should have been working, but I got the cartridge (again after owning it in 1983) and played it on the 800XL. Being PAL, it's a bit slower which might have helped my scoring, I was eventually getting around 30-35k. I tried it on my Arcade machine running a Pi3b, and it was faster, so the score was lower, the joystick seemed to make it tougher than using a gamepad. There's not really any good arcades in Perth. We were the home of Timezone, and it's manufacturer Leisure & Allied Industries, which made cabinets for Australia and SE Asia. They were popular in the 80s and 90s. There is still a few around, but the games are more modern, and not so interesting for old guys.