1. Darius at Marriott's Great America.

There are quite a few amusement parks throughout California, but the one closest to
where I grew up was Marriott's Great America in Santa Clara (now called
"California's Great America"). In Junior High (grades 7th through 9th in Woodland),
I was playing clarinet in the marching band, and one of our band trips involved
going to Great America. In most amusement parks, there's usually one arcade
somewhere along the "Main Street" area, but in Great America there are several
smaller arcades tucked away in different corners of the park. Each arcade has a
different selection of games, but the overall decor is the same so it's hard to
tell how exactly one arcade is different from the others. This means if you're
looking for one particular game or arcade, it can be a bit bewildering to step into
an arcade and realize the layout isn't quite what you remember, making you think
you may have stepped into an alternate dimension or parallel universe.

On THAT particular day in THAT particular arcade, the experience is still etched
clearly in my mind. I was wandering around the park, not quite sure what I should
do next, and not quite sure which ride my friends had gone off to. I stepped into
an arcade, and there, facing the entrance, was an extra-wide cabinet, three screens
wide, with an attached bench. It was a side-scrolling shmup, which wasn't really my
thing at the time, but... THREE. SCREENS. WIDE. It was called Darius, and it was
absolutely GLORIOUS. I was transfixed and enthralled. I dumped all the money I had
into that machine. A HUGE BATTLESHIP KING FOSSIL IS APPROACHING FAST. I fought a
giant mechanical fish! In fact, the whole giant mechanical fish thing became so
iconic, it can be hard to find a shmup game since then that doesn't include some
variation on it. I stepped out of that arcade as an entirely different person than
the one who had stepped in. I tried to find my friends after that, to tell them
about this world-shaking, mind-shattering game I had discovered, but they either
didn't care or I couldn't find the exact arcade that had the Darius cabinet.

The next time I got to go to Great America,
Darius, and eventually found it tucked away
that... I couldn't find it. Ever since THAT
step into an amusement park arcade, there's
wondering... will I get transported to that
universe where I'll get to play my favorite
I searched every arcade in the park for
in another arcade. On the trip after
day, that first encounter, every time I
a small piece of my brain that keeps
alternate dimension or parallel
arcade game?

The game itself is a rip-off of Konami's Gradius (1985). Gradius was loosely based
on Konami's earlier game Scramble, which along with Defender gave birth to the
horizontal shmup in 1981. As with Gradius, Darius had a power-up system and a
series of stages that end with a boss fight. What Darius did differently was a
branching path of 28 different stages (lettered A through Z, with Y and Z appearing
twice), allowing the player to pick from two different stages after each boss
fight. After choosing their way through 7 different stages, the player reaches the
end of the game. As with Gradius and R-Type, there are a series of Darius games
that have been released or ported onto various game systems over the years, and
according to various shmup authorities, the origial Darius is not regarded as one
of the better ones. Even so, stepping into that arcade and playing Darius is still
etched into my mind as a life-changing event. Even if the three screens is largely
a presentation gimmick (you don't really have any more vertical space to maneuver
than any other shmup scroller so the extra horizontal space is mostly wasted),
sometimes presentation is just the frosting on the cake, and sometimes the FROSTING
IS THE ENTIRE CAKE.

2. Terra Cresta at Round Table Pizza.

I think there were a couple Round Table Pizza locations in Woodland when I was
growing up, but I think the location closest to my house was in a shopping center
off of Cottonwood Ave? In the 1980s, Round Table Pizza produced a series of
commercials featuring two affable and somewhat bombastic pizza chefs pontificating
about "Fresh Dough! Real Cheese!". (Hopefully somebody can help me out... I've been
trying to dig up the names for these two actors, but haven't been able to find
anything.) The franchise proclaimed it was the only "Honest Pizza" or "Last Honest
Pizza", and while this may have been a bit of hyperbole on their part, according to
my recollections the pizza quality tended to be a cut above most other franchises.
The location nearest to my house did not have a lot of arcade games, but they
tended to have one or two high-quality cabinets. This is where I first saw Joust,
Frogger, and Spy Hunter. But the game that stands out, etched in my mind, was Terra
Cresta. This was a top-down shmup vertical scroller, very much in the spirit of
Xevious with a mix of ground targets and waves of vaguely bug-shaped flying
enemies. What set it apart was the upgrade system: you could collect additional
pieces to your fighter, adding more guns and new types of weapons. You could also
hit the "Transform" button, deploying these additional pieces in a multi-ship
formation to spread your fire across the screen. If you collected all five upgrade
pieces, the Transform button converted your fighter into the terrifying Terra
Cresta, a flaming phoenix that floods the entire screen with death and destruction.
I don't really recall if I ever got far enough in the game to pull the full Terra
Cresta off... but I still oh-so-desperately *want* to. It's a sequal to the 1980
game Moon Cresta, which was itself a knock-off of the venerable Galaxian, but it
introduced the concept of joining smaller ships into a larger ship, later inspiring
the "double-ship" formation in Galaga, and was frequently copied in several other
shmups.

3. Star Wars Arcade Game at Scandia, Cordelia.

Scandia is a "Fun Center", by which I mean a miniature golf course with an attached
arcade, located just off of Interstate-80 at the 680 split before the Benicia-
Martinez bridge. There were a couple other Scandia Fun Centers near Sacramento when
I was growing up, but this one is still there, and every few years when I'm vising
California I sometimes get a chance to visit. Whenever my family drove down to San
Francisco or took 680 into Walnut Creek to visit my grandparents, this was one of
the landmarks we'd always drive by. In high school, the marching band would
sometimes stop here after a parade or competition in Vallejo or San Jose to let us
buy lunch and stretch our legs in the arcade. The arcade still embodies in my mind
the ideal archetype of what an "arcade fun center" should look like: a dimly-lit
hall painted half-way with faded 80's day-glow flourescent colors and the other
half with dark smudgy adolescent angst. The hall should be large enough that you
can't quite see wall-to-wall, so there's always the lurking suspicion that if you
go down a different aisle or wander into a different corner, you'll find some
unbelievably awesome new game you've never seen before. There needs to be a variety
of flashy new cabinets with a few battered but never-gets-old classics. Over the
years, the quality and variety of games at Scandia would change as the fortunes of
the arcade business surged and subsided, but one old classic you could always find
tucked away somewhere was the Star Wars Arcade Game. This was the X-Wing rail-
shooter with vector graphics, digitized voices, and that weird "steering yoke"
controller. When I was younger, I wasn't particularly good at this game, but it was
fun to get swept up in the music, the sounds, and of course that iconic salutation,
"May the Force be with you!" As I grew older, after getting frustrated with
whatever newer, flashier games were eating through my supply of tokens, I would
often fall back to this old classic, and eventually got good enough at it that I
could survive several waves without thoroughly embarrassing myself. The graphics
are simple wireframes but the action gets intense, diving through the barriers in
the trench is nail-biting, and blowing up the Death Star is always satisfying, even
though you have to blow it up again in the next wave.

More recently, at the Cleveland Pinball & Arcade Show, I got another chance to play
this old favorite, and some guy watching me play asked me, "Do you know about using
the Force to get the bonus points?" I told him no, and he showed me that "Use the
force!" is not just a voice clip, it's a hidden feature in the actual game: if
you're able to go through the Trench Run without firing any lasers at anything
except the exhaust port, you get a bunch of bonus points. I did not know that!
However, after several play-throughs trying to use the Force... I'm not really
playing for a high score, so I eventually decided I don't really care about the
bonus points. If you give me four quad-linked KX9 Taim & Bak laser cannons and then
start throwing fireballs at me... I'm going to shoot your stinkin' fireballs. I
guess I wouldn't make a very good jedi.

4. Gauntlet at Straw Hat Pizza, Woodland.

Taking the team out to a pizza parlour after a soccer game or other sports-related
activity is a time-honored tradition in suburban America. In Woodland, there were
several pizza chains that could accomodate this, but the odds-on favorite was Straw
Hat Pizza. There were several reasons for this: they had a large seating area that
could accomodate several large groups, prices were a little cheaper, and the
quality of the pizza was at least edible, which put them slightly ahead of, say,
Domino's. Straw Hat also had two advantages over Round Table Pizza: they had a
larger arcade area, and they had a mechanical horse novelty ride that only cost a
penny. This was a toddler-sized ride you would sometimes see in front of a grocery
store that rocked a couple inches up and down or side to side, but generally at the
exhorbitant cost of a full quarter. The horse was named after the pizza chain's
mascot Charlie, and lowering the price to a penny meant if your kids had begged and
pleaded and stripped you bare of all possible quarters, you could keep them
occupied for quite a while with just pennies. Straw Hat Pizza was also well-known
for one other thing: big plastic pitchers full of root beer and crushed ice. I do
not normally go out of my way for root beer, but for some reason the flavors of
Straw Hat root beer and Straw Hat pizza matched up really well together, so much so
I could dispose of an entire pitcher by myself. To this day, I have not found any
variety of root beer that can match whatever was in that watered-down slurry of
brownish liquid and crushed ice. Even just crunching on the root-beer-flavored ice
left in the bottom of your plastic cup tasted better than most root beers.

I was immediately attracted to Gauntlet because the four character options vaguely
resembled four different classes from Dungeons & Dragons, a game I had been playing
regularly with my friends since junior high (7th to 9th grade in Woodland). I was
initially drawn to the Elf because he was the fastest, but after some experience
with the game, I switched to the Valkyrie and found with her more balanced mix of
offense, defense, and speed, I tended to last longer. This may be the game where
"Pick the Girl" became my default character selection strategy. However, I had some
misgivings about Gauntlet as a game. The countdown timer on your health (and deep-
voiced demeaning commentary from the game itself) meant that the game was brutally
and explicitly honest about the diminishing value of your $0.25 investment: this
was not a game where you could stretch out a long play session with a great deal of
skill or luck. You could not pause the game to rest, and even if you found a spot
where you could catch your breath, your health meter was always counting down. In
short, this game demanded you keep feeding it fistfuls of quarters. It was also the
first arcade game I encountered that was explicitly cooperative. Playing a solo
game tended to be brutally short: there were just too many enemies, and not enough
allies to soak them up or divide and conquer. So Gauntlet was asking a lot from
you: you needed 2-3 other friends, everybody needed a huge pile of quarters, and
everybody needed some basic non-asshole communication skills to determine which
direction to explore, keep each other on the screen without getting trapped,
equitably divide up food/treasure/potions to whoever needed it most, and to find
the exit to the next room. Once you had all that in place, playing Gauntlet was a
truly transcendent experience.

5. Time Killers at Cal Poly University Union, San Luis Obispo.

Streetfighter II was released in 1991, and it changed the landscape of arcade
games. After the video game crash of 1983, interest in arcade games faded somewhat,
and when Nintendo reignited the home console market in the U.S. around '85 or '86,
it was easier to get your video game fix in your living room. But SFII made arcades
popular again, and along with it your arcade skills were a part of your social
status. I was, of course, not particularly good at it. Inspired perhaps by Metroid
on the NES or the Valkyrie in Gauntlet, I almost always picked the "Token Female",
so Chun Li was my chosen fighter. The special attacks in SFII mystified me, as I
could never pull off her Spinning Bird Kick except by accident. However, her
Lightning Kick was considerably easier to trigger. I could get past E. Honda and
Dhalsim, but that stupid poophead Guile always nailed me with that Flash Kick. In
1992, I graduated from high school and went off to college.

I was at California Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo when the first wave of Street-
Fighter knock-off clones swept through the arcade industry. Mortal Kombat had come
out, touching off a wave of outraged parent groups complaining about video game
violence. I was horrifically bad at Mortal Kombat, as my tried-and-true "Mash the
Buttons" strategy was completely incapable of finding the "Block" button. But there
was another knock-off that I was much more interested in: Time Killers. This game
appears to be designed not only to inflame outraged panic in parents but to also
make them bleed gushing spurts of boiling blood directly out of their eyeballs. The
game had two compelling gimmicks: every fighter had a different bladed weapon, and
you could cut body parts off of your opponents: two arms, one leg, and eventually
the head. Even better, if you pushed forward and slammed your hand down on all five
buttons at once, you could launch your character into a bloody tornado of severed
limbs, finishing off your opponent with a slo-mo insta-kill decapitation. The Token
Female character was called Matrix, so following my time-honored "Pick the Girl"
strategy, she was always my chosen fighter. As with most fighting games, there is a
Code of Conduct where your game can be interrupted by a New Challenger who wants to
test his mettle against your fighting skills. Prospective challengers can place a
quarter up on the lip of the cabinet, establishing a Pecking Order for who gets to
challenge next. The two players square off for a best-of-three match, with the
winner getting to "claim" the cabinet for the foreseeable future and the loser
retreating into shameful demi-life of lonely obscurity. Stick around the arcade
long enough, and you will eventually find yourself stratified between every player
who is nut-crushingly better than you and the scant few dregs of players that you
can reliably beat. If the game was popular, getting enough "solo" time on a cabinet
to improve your skills without being humiliated by a better player could be
difficult, turning you into something of a lurking stalker, haunting the dark
corners of the arcade during off-hours, hoping to get a chance at an open cabinet
or scaring off a lesser opponent with a few lucky combos. I eventually got good
enough at the game I could get all the way to Death, the final boss, but he had
this dick-move where he gets bored of eviscerating you with his scythe and just
straight-up incinerates you with an unblockable insta-kill move. Time Killers was
also a favorite game of my friend Joel, who could completely and utterly pwn me
with Rancid the Cyberpunk Chainsaw Guy. Joel was a great and kind-hearted friend,
but I knew that if he wandered into the arcade while I was there, I wouldn't be
playing much Time Killers. He was also surprisingly good at T-Mek, the bastard. A
few years later, my wife and I were moving out to Ohio, and stopped at a family fun
center somewhere along the way. This was some years after the switch to 3D fighters
had swept away a lot of the animated sprite fighters, so I was surprised to see a
still-functioning Time Killers machine. I tried to explain the significance of this
arcade game to my wife, but she was happy to go off and play skeeball while I
dumped somewhere between five to ten dollars into that machine. After about 45
minutes, I was finally able to defeat Death. Looking back, the graphics are
cartoonishly cheezy, the gameplay is klunky, and the gore is immaturely over-the-
top. But it was also a blast to dismember your friends or squeak out an impossible
"Monty Python Black Knight" win with a frantic head-butt or kick.
6. U.N. Squadron at Tilt, Country Fair Mall.

During the retail boom in the 80's, a lot of shopping malls were built in mid-size
cities that had never had a big mall before. My hometown of Woodland (referred more
colloquially by residents of slightly more suburban Davis as "Woodpile") was no
exception. Since the mall was built across from the Yolo County Fairgrounds, it was
called County Fair Mall, and despite its somewhat more rustic location, it was
everything you'd expect to see in an 80's-era mall, as typified in Kevin Smith's
1995 "Mallrats" film. It had white tile floors, big box department stores, food
court, poster galleries full of Patrick Nagel prints, and bored mopey teenagers
with way too much hairspray and no spending cash. Unfortunately, it took about 20
years to figure out that the idea of going to the Mall was an empty promise: there
was really nothing interesting to do there, even if you did actually have any
disposable cash. The County Fair Mall now sits abandoned and empty, an urban corpse
gutted by copper thieves looking for scrap metal. But in it's heyday, the County
Fair Mall did have an arcade called "Tilt". It wasn't a particularly large or
distinctive arcade, but it wasn't hard to out-do a handful of cabinets shoved into
the back corner of a pizza parlour.

It was at Tilt where I first played U.N. Squadron, a side-scrolling shmup in the
tradition of Konami's 1981 classic Scramble. Somewhat distinctive for shmups, you
had a "health bar" that depleted as you took hits rather than the more unforgiving
one-shot deaths, and in between missions you could buy weapon upgrades or shields.
This more forgiving approach allowed someone even with my terrible arcade skills to
last much longer. In fact, I believe U.N. Squadron was one of the first arcade
games that I "beat", and I got good enough at it that I could get to the ending
with only a couple of dollars. The graphics are crisp, the controls are sharp, and
the gameplay is engaging and frenetic. If another game in the arcade was giving me
a hard time, I always knew I could fall back on U.N. Squadron for a satisfying
experience.

And then two years later, it was 1991. Street Fighter II arrived at Tilt, and the
whole world changed...

7. Strider at Yolo County Fairgrounds

I do not recall exactly where I first saw this game... it could have been at Cal
Expo WaterWorld or the Manteca Waterslides, but I'm guessing it could have been at
the Yolo County Fairgrounds. It has always befuddled me exactly why you'd want to
put arcade games in a water park or a fairground, because... you're going there for
the water slides or the carnival rides, so why exactly would you want to play
arcade games? On the other hand, I play a lot of arcade games when I go to water
parks or fairgrounds, so this should really not befuddle me.

Strider is a side-scrolling platformer from Capcom, a game company famous for

producing a whole bunch of top-notch side-scrolling platformers. Strider Hiryu, a
member of a secret order high-tech ninjas, wields a tonfa-like energy sword called
a "cypher" as he battles his way through a futuristic Russian Empire on his quest
to kill the mysterious Grandmaster. So, it's basically MegaMan with a laser-sword
instead of a mega-buster. Capcom made so many excellent platformers, it may be easy
to forget Strider, but Strider is one of the best in the genre. I love the smooth
graphics and the creative gameplay, but what really sets it apart from other
platformers are the unique boss fights and the innovative ways it plays around with
the "platform" concept with slopes, zip lines, and hanging grapples. If you didn't
catch it in the arcade, Capcom also released an arcade-perfect port of both Strider
and Strider 2 on the PlayStation One.

Strider was also the favorite game of Ernie, one of my friends from high school. We
met sophmore year standing in line to get into the high school library for
registration. He'd just moved to Woodland, and knew absolutely nobody. After
talking a bit, I discovered he had been playing Dungeons & Dragons, and had
designed an entirely new character class based on the Strider video game. I was
surprised to find someone else who loved Strider so much. Ernie also played
saxophone, so once I knew he was in band, I introduced him to the rest of the geek
subculture at Woodland High School. I didn't wind up playing much D&D with Ernie
(my high school D&D group could be very skittish about "outsiders"), but for most
of my high school years we were nearly inseparable. Ernie introduced me to the J.
Geils Band, the Cars, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show. We were hanging out in his
basement when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. First cars, first dates, first formal
dance, first "Hanging out at Denny's after a Formal Dance", first "Driving Around
at Midnight with Nowhere to Go" were all things Ernie and I stumbled through
together as we tried to navigate the inscrutable fabric of high school social class
structures, which we invariably boiled down to one particularly vexing problem:
"How do socially inept nerds get laid?" (Answer: Not very easily.) Our most
ambitious project was hosting a "How to Host a Murder" dinner party at his house
with six of our close friends from band (which did not get us laid). Unfortunately,
Ernie and I drifted apart after high school. In 2012, I decided to see if I could
track him down and see if we could catch up. However, I put it off. One month
later, I'm making plans to visit Woodland because our high school band director is
retiring, and I remember I was going to look up Ernie. And that's when I find out
he just passed away from cancer... *TWO WEEKS BEFORE* I bothered to track him down.
So... that's a gut-punch that still hurts to this day.

8. Xenophobe at Santa Cruz Boardwalk.

The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is the amusement park featured in the 1987
Schumacher film "The Lost Boys" (Santa Carla = Santa Cruz). It's California's
oldest surviving amusement parks, and one of the few oceanside parks on the West
Coast. Other than the Schumacher film, the Boardwalk is notable for two other
things: it has the Giant Dipper, one of the oldest roller coasters in North America
(built 1924), and also the Looff Carousel, one of the few carousels in North
America that still has a functional "brass ring" dispenser (actually iron rings,
but whatever). It's not a particularly large park, sandwiched between the Pacific
Ocean and Beach street, and is unusual in that there's no admissions fee: there's
no fence or enclosure, so you can just go hang out at the park or go to the beach
without paying anything except parking (which of course is horrendously expensive
the closer you get to the beach). While it may have technically been closer to
where I grew up than, say, Disneyland, the Boardwalk was not a park our parents
ever took us to, mostly because actually driving to Santa Cruz from any direction
is an ordeal. You can drive down the PCH (California State Route 1, colloquailly
called the "Pacific Coast Highway"), but to get there from the Central Valley means
matrticulating through the parking lot known as Insterstate 80, fighting your way
through San Francisco traffic, and then another hour or so of white-knuckling
around the curvy cliffs on a two-lane highway where not paying attention for even a
few seconds mean you're plowing into a vertical rock wall on one side or going
straight off a cliff and directly into the Pacific Ocean on the other side. The
other way to get into Santa Cruz involves taking Interstate 680 or Interstate 101
through San Jose, and then taking Highway 17 through the mountains down into Santa
Cruz. And no one in California willingly agrees to drive Highway 17 unless they are
locals or there's no other choice. Highway 17 features all of the white-knuckle
cliffsides and blind curves of the PCH, but removes the scenic views and adds
impassible convoys of slow-moving semi trucks along with insane local drivers who
angrily zip past you at 90+ miles an hour... around the blind curves... with no
passing lanes. If you don't get turned into chunky roadpizza by a semi truck or
insane local, then someone else up ahead of you invariably will, which means the
highway frequently comes to a dead standstill for several hours so they can scrape
the hapless tourist off the pavement.
In played clarinet in the Douglass Junior High Marching Band. This involved
periodically traveling to different cities for parades and band competitions. There
was one competition (I think it was Watsonville) that put us within reasonable
driving distance of Santa Cruz, so I believe my first visit to the Boardwalk was
with the Douglass Junior High Marching Band. There was another band trip to
Marriott's Great America that I'll talk about later, but suffice to say I think the
band director at my junior high had something of a thing for roller coasters. In
any event, the Boardwalk at one time featured a casino that has been converted into
a large arcade. And that's where I first saw Xenophobe.

Xenophobe had several unique qualities. The gameplay was a mashup of a side-
scrolling "run and gun" action game with what would later be described as a
"survival horror" game. It was also a cooperative game for up to three players,
with a narrow band of the screen dedicated to each player. The game borrowed
heavily from Star Trek (transporter, uniforms), and the xenos were clearly inspired
by the Alien/Aliens movies. The players are transported into a spacestation
infected with xenos, and they have to carefully move from room to room, picking up
a variety of weapons to clear out or kill as many xenos as possible before the
self-destruct timer runs out. And while I said it was supposed to be a
"cooperative" game... it could unexpectedly become extremly uncooperative without
any warning. The various guns didn't hurt other players, but a poorly-tossed
grenade could bounce back and kill other players or even yourself. The weapons and
power-ups in the game were very limited, which did not exactly inspire sharing. If
another player had a more powerful weapon, you could punch them until they fell
down, forcing them to drop their weapon (and allowing you to pick it up). Ominous
music, creepy environments, and the rapidly multiplying xenos created a dark,
atmospheric, terrifyingly intense game. Survival didn't even seem to be an option,
it was just a question of how long you could last before you were overwhelmed.

9. Moon Patrol at UC Davis Rec Hall.

My parents both graduated from University of Californa, Davis, and since we were
living only 10 miles away in Woodland, they frequently took the whole family to
sporting events at their alma mater. This meant at a young age I was going to "Cal
Aggie" football and basketball games, wearing lots of Blue and Gold, and... not
having any particularly strong feelings about sports for many of my formative
years. It wasn't that I disliked sports or I objected to going, I just wasn't
particularly fond of the idea of sitting in one place for a long time. So I would
get up and wander around, drool longingly at the snackbar, or look for bottlecaps
(the Lucky Lager caps had cool picture-puzzles). Basketball games for the Cal
Aggies took place at what we called the UC Davis Rec Hall, but as I understand it
the Rec Center has since been expanded and the original facility is now called the
"Pavillion". I haven't visited the new facility, so in my mind the old Rec Hall
still stands like a squared-off three-layer cake, with stairwells, elevators, and
restrooms at the corners. Seating was in three sections: wooden pull-out bleachers
on the bottom layer, blue plastic fixed stadium seats in the middle layer, and
towering stacks of roll-back wooden bleachers on the top layer. On the top layer
behind the roll-back bleachers were additional practice areas, mostly for
gymnastics and wrestling, but you had to be careful in those areas because the
staff would yell at you or chase you out of there (I imagine for liability
reasons). However, I spent most of my time wandering around the tunnels on the
mezzanine and ground level. The layout was square-shaped between the four corners,
but in my mind all the disjointed pipes, industrial conduits, and layout of the
intervening rooms turned it into a maze. Snack bars and ticket offices were located
in the corners. Along one of the sections of the mezzanine level were lockers,
work-out rooms full of nautilus machines, and changing rooms with showers for
students. Another section featured glass walls overlooking racquetball and squash
courts. Underneath that section on the lower level, an ominous metal door with a
wired glass window opened into a narrow corridor with a series of small hobbit-
sized white doors that led to the actual courts. The staff didn't "police" these
tunnels, so they felt like they were mine to explore, and they became everything
and anything my imagination needed them to be: medieval castle, arcane labyrinth,
space station, obstacle course, underground city, ninja dojo, mutant factory, alien
hive, Rebel base, Imperial detention block, Cylon base star, and so forth.

In one of the mezzanine tunnels, one or two arcade games could be found. Over the
years, the games would change, but the one I remember most distinctly was Moon
Patrol. If I couldn't pry any quarters out of my parents, I would search every
single vending machine in the building looking for enough loose change to play Moon
Patrol. And I was absolutely terrible at it, maybe lasting a whole 30 seconds on a
really good play. For those of you not familiar, Moon Patrol was the first game to
introduce "Parallax Scrolling", a technique where the background graphics move
slower than the foreground graphics, giving a rudimentary illusion of depth. Moon
Patrol had a couple other innovations: a checkpoint system with a progress
indicator, and warning lights to show you what types of enemies/obstacles were
coming up. No doubt inspired by my ineptitude at the arcade version, Moon Patrol
was one of the cartridges I had at home for my Atari 2600. The 2600 version was...
well, as with most 2600 games, if you know anything about the hardware limitations
of that system, it was kind of amazing they were able to fit anything even remotely
related to an arcade game on that cartridge. More recently, I had a chance to play
Moon Patrol at the Cleveland Pinball & Arcade Show, which gives you unlimited
credits for over 100 pinball and arcade games. I was able to get some uninterupted
one-on-one time with this classic, and it's still a very challenging game,
combining an overhead shooter with a side-scrolling driving game. This forces the
player to keep track of two things at once, trying to shoot enemies above while
keeping track of obstacles on the ground. I was impressed that the game is able to
get a lot of variety by stringing together a small number of basic obstacles into
different combinations, but I was a little disappointed that the arcade only
offered two different courses, a "Beginner's Course" and a "Champions Course", the
latter of which more-or-less repeats (if you've been graced with unlimited
continues). It seemed to me that it would have been relatively easy to scramble up
some of the sections for a new course, or add a couple enemies/rocks/craters to an
existing section. However, given how some sections are horrendous quarter-crunchers
(notably the mine sections which require some absolute pixel-perfect timing) I'm
not sure how many players would have bothered with additional courses (unless they
had unlimited continues). After about an hour or two, I was reminded of how much I
really prefer games with a definitive "ENDING".

10. Crystal Castles at Cross Court, Woodland.

Back in the 80's there was this racquetball craze that swept through what we called
"Country Clubs", which were these private recreation centers, sorta a gym attached
to a pool and a series of glass-walled racquetball courts, where your parents paid
a monthly membership "fee" to use the facilities. My parents belonged to the one
called Cross Court. My mother had a friend she played racquetball with, and she had
a son I was good friends with. So Tye Pickering and I tagged along and occasionally
attempted to play racquetball in an empty court, but mostly we got bored and just
wandered around Cross Court, charged candy bars to our parents' membership account
and tried to avoid getting yelled at by the staff. They had a lounge area where I
saw my first arcade game: the cocktail-table version of Asteroids. Later, they had
the cocktail-table version of Pac-Man. I was terrible at both of these games, but
not above begging my parents for another quarter to try again. When the arcade boom
hit, they got another cabinet or two, but didn't show much interest in arcade games
outside of keeping one or two bored teenagers occupied. After the arcade boom died
down, the cocktail table games disappeared and for a few years there was only a
Crystal Castles game up on the second floor near the Day Care Center. When my
mother played racquetball or my father played squash, I'd spend the time sucking up
gems with Bentley the Bear. I was not particularly good at it, as it hadn't really
occurred to me that these sorts of games can be beaten if you memorize the correct
patterns. Crystal Castles is one of Atari's three classic trackball games, the
other two being Missile Command and Centipede. Despite the space theme, Missile
Command was not one of my passions, and I was horrifically inept at Centipede.
Crystal Castles was not quite so frenetic at first compared to those other two, so
I could make a quarter last a little bit longer, and the isometric Lego-style
graphics are still very eye-catching even by today's standards. I like the level
design, the different enemies, and the risk-vs-reward trade-offs in this unique
game, although playing it on an emulator is not entirely satisfying: you really
need the trackball to properly enjoy it. Crystal Castles was also notable for
several other features: it was one of the first arcade games to have an actual
ending instead of a restart or kill screen, it had warp zones to skip levels, and
it even had a couple easter eggs.

Afterburner County Fair Mall

Dig-Dug Chuck E. Cheese
Time Warriors, 7-11?
Legend of Kage, Yolo County Fairgrounds
Golden Axe, Roseville?