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Today marks the opening of the Retro arcade with beer, wine, cocktails, food and Mead too! I saw my favorite Star Wars game from waaaay back in the day in one of the photos of the brick walled space and can’t wait to head over and see what beers are on tap. Will see if Barcade brings an A beer game.
http://barcadenewyork.com/games/
We here in L.A. already have Button Mash for that potent mix of classic arcade games plus good beer and now the venerable name Barcade is planning to venture west from their East Coast hub.
The planned Barcade will be on York in hipster Highland Park. Further details when they become available.
I am not big into video games. I played the old-school games like Donkey Kong, Qbert, Dragon’s Lair and the now hillarious Track & Field game but I never kept up with all the upgrades and new games and Halos and John Madden’s.
Now I can order a beer and play (badly) some of the games from the past. It is quite a nostalgia trip at Button Mash. To see Frogger and Pac Man and an NBA game that featured NBA players from a long ago era was fun.
The space that has a sort of Denny’s layout and shape to it is broken up into four parts. There is a bar, a restaurant sit down area, a pinball machine grouping and then the classic video games in another area. On the night I was there, it was hopping with activity. A birthday party had commandeered one table and the Game of Thrones pinball machine was occupied whenever I looked.
Playing my favorite Star Wars games with the graphics more suited to pre-visualization for big budget movies was a blast. And the tap list was well done. Nice variety with IPA’s to choose from as well as the excellent Amburana Porter from Three Weavers. Cans were also available though at a heftier mark-up than the taps which I consider a skosh on the high side.
Two problems that I see that could be improved upon are that if you buy tokens from the bar, you have to buy in $5 increments. Which is fine in some cases but I don’t see why you couldn’t do any increment at all. Also, if you order at the bar and take a seat at one of the tables, the attentive wait staff can’t take an order until you close out the bar tab and then open up a table tab. There probably is a reason for it but I felt bad for the waitress who could have easily gotten my order and a tip.
Those tweaks aside it is a fun spot for a party and to blow off steam after work by destroying all the Tie Fighters that you can.