Went to the Cary North Carolina Dave and Busters to try out the Star Wars Battle Pod a few days ago after posting someone's youtube review ages ago. The arcade experience in the US has certainly changed since I was a youth. Nearly everything I loved as a kid is gone, with the exception of some classic physical games like air hockey, skee ball, pool, etc. The Battle Pod is a great example of how the spirit of the arcade is getting lost. Starting with the screen: it's a spherical projection screen where Dave and Busters had the awesome idea of keeping their card reader illuminated so strongly during gameplay, that the screen black level was practically white: nearly impossible to see what was going on. That might have actually been a blessing, because whoever wrote the spherical projection code apparently figured out how to do something worse than bilinear filtering: it looks horrible. What is left is relatively low resolution which would be fine if properly filtered, except in this case the aliasing is so bad, I kept on getting the feeling that the only point to the card reader was to hand out a refund to pay for the player's eye pain. It gets better: the game hitches, doesn't even feel like 30 Hz, let alone the 60 Hz which sets the minimum bar for frame rate in a real arcade game. The classic arcades were defined by perceptually zero latency input designed to take a beating, with locked frame rates at the highest rate possible on the display hardware, and stunning visuals pushing the limits of the hardware. Someone badly needs to bring that experience back...
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