ArcadeCraft Review Confessions of a 'Noob'

The Xbox indie set up is the future of casual gaming. There I said it, it’s out of the way and I can’t wait for the trolls to have at it! You’re probably itching to get to the comments right now. Well go on then I’ll wait, you just come back here and finish the rest of the article once you’re done. I’ll admit that it’s like following around a dog that has swallowed a wedding ring at times. You’ll have to see a lot of crap before you find the diamond but it’ll come out eventually and it’ll be worth the wait because when you do find it you’ll reap the rewards.

Who better to make games for the gaming community than the gamers themselves? Cutting out the middleman groups of passionate players (or tortured loners) in basements and sheds around the world can create charming little pixelated adventures that appeal not only to their friends and family who are obligated to play whatever they churned out but actually can sell make them money and most importantly entertain those who pick up the sticks and play them.

Just as now in filmmaking amateurs are picking up a camera and making a feature film worthy of distribution, and in the case of one funded through Kickstarter a shiny Oscar to go on the mantel piece, it’s now time for the video gaming community to start rivaling the big boys. It even appears that the rules in both the worlds are the same all you have to do is write a compelling narrative or have a concept that brings you in and the audience don’t really mind that things aren't in focus or that every so often there’ll be a little bug in the works that make a character walk through what appears to be a solid wall.

ArcadeCraft delivers that narrative that easily sucks you in and holds you in the chair. You start off in the 1980’s at the birth of the arcade industry and after naming your dark room off the beaten track and getting a loan from the bank it’s time to start raking in the quarters, dimes and nickels to pay them back. The guys who created ArcadeCraft at Firebase Industries are a small outfit out of Vancouver, Canada and you can tell that the main resource that went into creating the game was love along with a lot of late nights.

The game plays a little like the “Theme” franchise with Theme Hospital coming most to mind, except the player isn't dealing with the trivial matters of life and death, it’s much more important we’re looking at  video games here. Starting off well ArcadeCraft has enough to keep you interested for the first few “years” churning out new machines and a few additional extras like hiring staff and customization options to make the dark room less dark. However, it soon runs thin with all the machines basically looking the same and only one member of staff to fire then re-hire there isn’t much else to do and the room soon becomes boring. The options on the machine also are a mystery to me, no matter what I set the difficulty to or chance the price the popularity of the machine never seems to change. The saving grace is that Firebase promises that they will be releasing updates for the game soon that may add some more features.

The real strength of ArcadeCraft is that everything feels very tactile. Although you’re interacting through the world basically through pushing buttons and wiggling sticks the game gives you a strange satisfaction from shaking the coins you’ve earned out of a machine with a tilt, or picking each of your games up and slamming them back down to turn the power back on when there’s a blackout is verging on thrilling (maybe I need to get out more). It appears as if the simplicity that the game is infused with is its biggest draw and it’s largest failing.

It might just be that the arcade business is particularly nice to start ups but with ArcadeCraft  even someone with the most basic understanding of how to run a business will manage to make a success of the arcade. There seems to be no possible way that you can fail even if you just let the game run its course I’m certain that you’d scrape back enough to pay the bank back. In future expansions I’d love to see a little more threat or even consequences to decisions made. Maybe a few more staff you could hire with specific skill sets or even the odd threat from outside the store other than the power-outs. The most important thing though is more time and options to develop the arcade right into the twentieth century with the inclusion of dance machines and those shooting games that you instinctively duck out of the way of the oncoming hail of bullets.

All in all a great little title for the cost of a multipack bag of crisps with all the replay value of something seven or eight times the price. You actually feel a deep attachment to the arcade that you run from infancy to adulthood and especially the machines that you purchase and hope become classics.

I wonder how long it will be before we see a socially awkward programmer stumble their way through his/her acceptance speech at the video game BAFTAs, I’ll be the first on my feet whooping and hollering. Beware the gifted nerd’s corporate giants, we’re coming for you.