By Conan “Suppy” Liu of Evil Geniuses
Arriving to the arcade was quite awkward. It was nearly empty because it was a Monday mid-afternoon. I could almost feel the staff eyeing us suspiciously as us “big kids” rolled in with suitcases and backpacks galore. We immediately bolted for the DDR machine, but were met with disappointment – it was broken. Nowadays it is incredibly difficult to find a working DDR machine, and this time we weren’t any luckier than any time in the past. We were about to leave and try a different arcade, but we realized we were kind of stuck – we had already spent $20 at the token machine to get the bonus 20 tokens for buying with a $20.
In the end it ended up being a blessing in disguise though because we had quite a bit of fun at that arcade. We started off with the typical shooter games, Sasquatch and I selected an old Jurassic Park game with really bad graphics while Snute and Bunny set off to play Time Crisis 3 right beside us. Afterwards, we went over to the Guitar Hero machine where Bunny showed off his sick Guitar Hero skills. But then the real games began – the ticket grind. We started playing a few of the games where you could win tickets, and it seemed like Snute and Bunny had actually never played for tickets before. It’s always really interesting to see cultural differences like that, and it was definitely mine and Sasquatch’s pleasure to show them the ropes of the ticket grind. We played all sorts of games, Skee Ball, Wheel of Fortune (where you have to try and stop the light as it hits the jackpot – which we did several times, but it was really buggy and sometimes didn’t give you all the tickets you won), some coin dropping game where you try to hit a lever on a truck to get massive tickets (also really buggy . . .), and Fruit Ninja on a huge screen that was quite enjoyable.
We learned that pretty much half the stuff in an arcade is broken or buggy (well, who didn’t know that already), but it was still a blast. By far the game I enjoyed the most was Deal or No Deal. All four of us crowded around the machine taking turns selecting cases and shouting for joy whenever we hit a low number. We were even calculating the token-to-ticket ratio that we needed to win in order to be the most cost-efficient! The most memorable part for me was when we had narrowed it down to two cases, a 100 ticket case and a 10 ticket case – the banker offered us 55 tickets which were quite cost-efficient as we had only spent 4 tokens on the machine. Most of the other good machines worked out to about 7 or 8 tickets per coin, so 55 tickets for 4 coins would have been higher than average. It seemed like we had reached a consensus to accept the banker’s offer when all of a sudden Bunny literally SLAMMED on the No Deal button – the animation showing the girl opening the case began to play – AND WE WON THE 100 TICKETS!!! I’m pretty sure we all jumped up in excitement and I definitely haven’t laughed that hard at something in quite a while.
At the end of the day we had amassed about 1500 tickets… we spent like 60 dollars and I’ll give you the rundown of the prizes we won: A really cool bouncy ball (okay I know it’s stereotypical but it had weird circular edges so it went in random directions when you bounced it and I think it was definitely worth the cheap cost as we played with it later in the airport for a bit and had some fun), three yoyo’s, and a 1000 ticket LIGHT UP GLASSES. But WAIT! We took so long trying to decide if we wanted the glasses or not that the girl at the counter just gave up and gave us a second pair FOR FREE! What a deal guys, right? We let Snute and Bunny have the light up glasses so that they could use them on camera at IEM Toronto, and it was definitely worth it when a week later I checked on reddit and saw that Snute put them on and showed off his sick style after his games versus MaSa.
After that we tried another arcade for its DDR, the machines worked but the pads were not too great, so overall Snute and I were not super satisfied. However it was still nice to get to play some DDR with Snute – the man is a god! Although I think if I played on a soft pad I could be very close to his level (but I guess we won’t be able to figure that out until I can challenge Snute someday!) Finally we took Snute and Bunny to the airport, and although we had our boarding passes already, Sasquatch and I couldn’t get into the terminal to have dinner with the Koreans and them since our ticket was a day later and TSA wouldn’t let us in, so we had to bid our farewells.
At night Sasquatch and I were pretty much exhausted; we just walked to get some Chinese food at a restaurant, talked quite a bit while in the hotel, and then made an impulse decision to do the ALS Ice Bucket challenge since we had both been challenged during the weekend. We didn’t have a bucket so we cleaned out the NASTY trash cans (we were in a cheap $45 motel) and used those in conjunction with the ice machine ice to complete the ice challenge. And with that, our day in Detroit was over!
Even though the weekend didn’t quite go as I expected it to (and DARNIT once again I was so close to beating HyuN, just like I was versus Polt in Atlanta), the extra day was still a very memorable one, and hopefully you guys enjoyed the read and got some insight on some progamer adventures outside of the game!
Follow Conan on twitter @EGSuppy