I am back! I hope you all had a nice
Thanksgiving. After a much needed vacation from everything for a couple of weeks, I am well rested and back to my precious precious video games (okay, I managed to squeeze in a few hours of Call of Duty 4 at my cousins house on some restless nights in California). My travels took me from San Francisco, to L.A., and a few other cities that I can’t even remember (if you honestly didn’t know, Cali = Huge). Now onto a couple of gaming related happenings on my journey:
My picture of this claw machine does not do it justice in showing how big it was. Still, I had to share, it was taken on Pier 39. At the very same pier, my brother, cousins, and myself went to a fairly
nice sized arcade, where we found a nice couple playing one of those drop a token in and hope to get some prize ticket type games called “
The Simpsons Kooky Carnival.” If you own an arcade, do NOT buy this game!
I am a Simpsons nut, so I was pretty much waiting for these people to get off this machine already, then I looked down to see they had the biggest pile of tickets I have possibly ever seen (I do not exaggerate when I say they had well over 8000 tickets, when I was cashing in my tickets for prizes they were still at the prize counter picking out games/stuffed animals/candy, etc). I ended up waiting it out for them to leave at the same time watching their strategy. They had figured the game out, with just 3 tokens, you could easily walk away with 100+ tickets. After they left, I quickly got $10 in tokens, grabbed my brother and one cousin, and quickly got to work with 20 minutes until the arcade was closing.
The secret: Memorize where you make the coin go to hit the letters W, I, and N. Okay, so not a big secret, the thing is, memorizing those spots only will cost you a buck or two, once you have it, the tokens almost always would go the same way unlike most of these type of machines, where I swear they slick them down with baby oil so your coins always go different directions.
So that last picture isn’t gaming related. I just wanted to let you know, if you were thinking about going to San Francisco, be prepared to walk past a crapload of bums. I can’t help though and admit, they were all the most creative bums I had ever seen. Mixed in with bums are street performers, some with Wikipedia pages like “
The Bush Man” .. who I swear smelt like both ass and crack.
(more…)