Indie Game of the Week 468: Arcade Paradise

While I did partake at theme parks and the like, there was never much of an arcade scene where I grew up so I've always been envious of stories I'd heard of people spending long afternoons with a stack of regional coinage and a particularly obstinate brawler or light gun game that they were intending to conquer before they were called home for dinner, absent the money they were given to procure groceries on the return trip. A simulator where you gradually turn your dad's dull and dusty laundromat into the hottest arcade parlor around during some indeterminate point in the 1990s not only compels those who love the type of simulator game where you run your own business, but in addition those who have a specific fondness for arcades with their black carpeting and low (and mostly neon) lighting. Then the game goes one step further in letting you play all the cabinets you've purchased to stock your parlor, providing incentives to achieve certain in-game goals which in turn increases that cabinet's popularity with the clients somehow and generates you even more revenue. And you can still do the laundry for customers, if that's your whole bag of dry cleaning.

Arcade Paradise from UK team Nosebleed Interactive (presently assisting Poncle with Vampire Crawlers) fulfils the dream of pulling gum off your plastic chairs and unclogging the toilets of your very own arcade, with your income going directly towards acquiring new cabinets and expanding the arcade's area (usually at the expense of the laundromat "front") to fit even more devices within its walls. There's a story going on in the background about your attempt to prove your business acumen to your absentee father—a business magnate that spends most of his time on a yacht in the Riviera—and you'll occasionally check in with answer machine messages and AoL messenger chats with your sister working in city hall (from whom you're able to get all these planning permissions to expand your business) so there's something of a beginning, middle, and end to your narrative journey here but the vast majority of the time is spent completing various chores around the arcade and laundromat—putting loads into the washer, then subsequently into the dryer, cleaning up trash, fixing machines when they break, grabbing the cash from all the machines' hoppers once they get full, and occasionally fielding emails from weirdos who keep wanting to brag about their high-scores—and working down a procgen "to-do" list that might involve said chores or some score target in any of the arcade games you have at your disposal. Completing these to-do lists grants you a separate currency (the savvy devs went for pound sterling, rather than the American dollars your business brings in) that can be put towards permanent upgrades like a reduction in how often cabinets break, brand sneakers for faster movement, or hiring some chump to empty out the hoppers on your behalf.

Images you can hear. And smell, to some extent.

It's the type of plate-spinning experience you're probably familiar with if you've played any of these business/life simulators in the past: there's always something to do, problems to fix, and long-term goals to inch ever closer to. You might find yourself engaging with the laundry part for far longer than you need to until you realize how much more money the arcade brings in by comparison (also, don't people usually go to laundromats to do their laundry themselves? Or is this like an American thing where in some states you have to let the staff handle it, like filling the car with gas?) or you might forgo the sim element entirely to focus on unlocking income-boosting goals in specific arcade games that have caught your attention. The range of arcade mainstay proxies in here is staggering, incidentally: there's more than two dozen arcade machines and they range from traditional barroom pastimes like darts and pool all the way up to racing games with the fancy driver's seat and wheel, DDR machines, whac-a-mole, and the wider cabs built for four players. The games themselves are familiar enough approximations of series that made it big in the arcades across various eras: shoot 'em ups, puzzle games like Arkanoid (except this one features a sausage dog and is called Barkanoid) and Puyo Puyo, a Soviet alien twist on Missile Command, classic Pong, a reverse Space Invaders where you're the UFO destroying cities instead, a virtual Air Hockey cocktail table, and my personal favorite Stack Overflow which is like Sokoban by way of Tower of Hanoi (I realize that doesn't sound like a glowing recommendation but it's oddly addicting). They all have the requisite bezels and CRT filters so it's about as close to the real thing as you'd want. Well, outside of a 200lb box filled with a MAME library sitting in your living room at least.

Some consideration has gone into the way the player is constantly being distracted while playing these arcade games, as angry little red pop-ups are constantly alerting you to new machine malfunctions or WC cloggages, and so many of the games contain uncharacteristically benevolent progression systems. For instance, the zombie shooter Zombat 2, the Mr. Driller ersatz Strike Gold, the futuristic racing game Space Race Simulator, and the closest thing the game has to a traditional vertical shoot 'em up Vostok 2093 all have upgrade systems that are persistent across playthroughs. A few of the other longer games simply let you resume where you left off, despite that not really being a thing in arcades (outside of those Japanese ones that let you save progress on those credit card-shaped passport things), and those that lack such features tend to be short and sweet affairs you can easily drop out of to rush off to whatever is demanding your attention. If all else fails, time stops at 2am and at that point you cannot interact with anything in the building because you're essentially dead on your feet: if you're in a game when this deadline approaches, though, you can play for as long as you'd like. One of your permanent upgrades even slows down time if you feel the days move too fast. It does feel like the devs were trying to find that balance between the constant chore-juggling efficiency demanded by games of this genre and letting you explore a pretty diverse set of arcade game ersatzes whenever you have a moment free. That said, the quality of these games can be hit and miss as can their degree of stability: you'll have machines freaking on you from time to time, either kiboshing your current attempt or granting you goals you were nowhere close to achieving naturally (in the fake QIX, for example, it bugged out and granted me 99% completion of the current stage, which is a damn impressive feat given the big flying enemy in the center that usually prohibits anything higher than 80%). And, yeah, all the nagging can be a bit much, especially if you're locked into a game and your guy is constantly checking his watch for laundry updates.

Thank you for the laundry update, anachronistic smartwatch, but I can't see where the vector helicopters are coming from while you're waving that hamfist in my face.

Arcade Paradise has plenty to commend it as one of these cyclic simulators due to its variety of game modes to enjoy and obviously the '90s nostalgia is very front and center if that's something you're into, or conversely put off by, with as many parody tracks of then-popular songs playing in the background as there are parody arcade machines lining your walls, so I admire the attention to detail that went into this whole package. I'm not going to suggest these arcade games are as compelling as those in other faux retro game compilations like UFO 50 or the GameCenter CX/Retro Game Challenge series for DS, but I will say it shares a similar degree of affection for those it homages, and even if the character models of your customer base aren't all that sharp the lived-in feel of the rundown laundromat and the era-apropos specificity of the arcade parlor's decor both endear the locale as a place you want to keep polishing up and pushing forward as the town's newest youth hotspot. And, hey, you can even spend upgrade money on putting Solitaire on your office PC if the arcade games ever become too much for you. Stacking 'em deuces, now there's where the real action is.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

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