Im probably in the very very small minority of people who still love and go to arcades. Its such a great place to meet like minded nerds. We are lucky to have 2 really awesome ones in town, one of which has a lot of good old machines, and they repair them too. They have some new ones that are OK too.
Anyway, I dont like that they changed to the dumb card thing. I get it (efficiency, capitalism, it was bound to happen) but it removes another visceral experience in society that was so fun.
Anyway, my old man rant!
I don’t like tokens or cards. I like open play, just pay like $20 for all day access. I’m fortunate to have places like that around. The pay to play model penalizes you for being bad at or new to an arcade title or pinball machine, which mega blows and discourages people from trying out random games they might lose quickly at.
I built an arcade machine from scratch (MAME for arcade games) and had a coin button to begin with. Mostly meant that it was too easy to just spam the coin and start button (sits beside one another) and just “pay” our way through games.
I built coin slots with tokens falling through a light sensor and now it is a little more work to “pay”, and also a slight shame introduced to the gameplay when your pile of tokens are significantly smaller than your friend’s :)
We’re trying a little harder now to play better.
We have a local barcade, but with actually pretty great arcade games. They charge a cover fee, close down to minors early, and charge nothing at the games themselves. It is the best thing ever. Makes the arcade experience honestly better than it was back when it was actually big.
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Dallas area. https://freeplayinc.com/faqs/
We have a national videogame museum nearby that works with time slots, you pick an amount of time you want to be there or just get the all day pass, and inside all machines are on free play. I never liked arcades because of tokens, but man do I love single pay arcades!