PixlBit

Recently my wife and I got to go on a dinner date sans kids and afterwards we went to Draftcade, a local bar/arcade. It was a spur of the moment decision because we didn't realize it was so close to the restaurant we went to but I'm glad we went in! $10 each got us in and all the games were set to free play. It wasn't as big as I had expected but the game selection was excellent. Sure, I've played Donkey Kong as an arcade game before but they had both the sequels as well as Popeye! I got to play some well known old games that I had never actually played before, like Tapper, Dig Dug, Burger Time. They had a vector-based Astroids Deluxe. They had the orignal Mario Bros. and a bunch of pinball tables (I remain bad at pinball) and a decent smattering of fighting and beat-'em-up games.

But coolest of all was the collection of Pacman games. They had the original Pacman and Ms. Pacman, which isn't too surprising, but they had Pac Land, which is kind of a precursor to autorunners today. That was neat. But what blew me away was the functioning copy of Baby Pacman, which mixes playing classic-style Pacman on a small tv screen with playing physical pinball. Exits in the maze cause Pacman (or his infant son, I guess) to shoot out into the pinball field. It was really cool! But also very hard. I have heard that these machines are a pain to maintain, however, so it was a shock to see one in working order in the wild.

We didn't get to stay terribly long, so we will definitely be back, perhaps with our older kids in tow. It was a good time!