Game On: The Best Arcades in the Bay Area

The place that awakened my deep love for video arcades. Don’t waste your time with the mini golf. Outdoor course+spongy “grass”=a mini golf game that’s more warped than the Starship Enterprise. The real treasures of this arcade are the “classic” games from my youth. They managed to hang onto the cabinets for The Simpsons, X-men and Lucky and Wild (Driving AND shooting? Sign me up!). Beyond the extreme nostalgia (X-treme to the max, even), they’ve also got a lot of the hottest facekicking, fireball throwing, beat-em-ups that are so popular amongst the youngins. Unless you’re keen to trade eight dollars for fifteen cents worth of plastic spiders, keep your tokens away from the ticket games. The exchange rate is kind of embarrassing. It takes a decent game of skee-ball (20 points or more for each ball) to even get some stickers. Big plus: A wall full of pinball games. Nothing gets your gaming mojo working than playing fifteen solid minutes on a single token.

In a previous guide, I’ve given lipservice to Tilt, the arcade at the Metreon. However, the beauty and wonder that is Tilt deserves its own special highlight. Once upon a time known as the “Airtight Garage”, the arcade featured art from Silver Surfer artist Mobieus. Despite the awesomeness of virtual bowling (bowling with a trackball, really) the arcade quickly closed and was replaced by “Portal One”, which was something of a low rent Dave and Busters. Full bar, flashing lights, uninspired games. Portal One closed quickly. Tilt has recently filled the void. Leaning heavily on the gimmicky games with light guns and steering wheels, Tilt’s real claim to fame is their claw game. Normally the claw game is just for rubes, but this one is special. Sure, it’s still rigged, but it’s also one of the biggest you will ever see. Totally worth it!

It’s like Vegas without as much gambling. Dave and Busters strives to provide a more grown-up arcade experience. From the full bar (that they will deliver to the games) to the extremely late hours they provide (with no kids after 11), a great time will be had. In addition to some of the latest racing, shooting and fighting games, they have a world of ticket winning games. From the classics like Skee Ball to slot machine-esque quarter feeders, you’ll walk away with quite a few tickets. The exchange rate on tickets to cool stuff is pretty good. Most of my drink ware comes exclusively from Dave and Busters. For the less technologically inclined you can play pool or video golf. Don’t make the mistake of trying to bring too large of a group for dinner and video games. Especially on the weekends, it can be next to impossible to get a large table. For my birthday last year it took about four hours to get seated. If you want to have a lot of your friends get together, I’d recommend eating somewhere that takes reservations and then moving to Dave and Busters for drinks and video carnage. One thing to keep in mind is that you buy points and put them on a slide card. However, the games don’t take whole numbers of points, so that a game will cost 3.8 points instead of 4. It makes it really hard to keep track of how many games you have left and exactly how much each game costs.

Don’t waste your time. Sure, an Arcade full of crappy games costing 5 cents a play is fine. But when the arcade ALSO charges admission then they’re just taking advantage of the kiddies. There are better arcades to hang out at.