I was in an airport terminal in Paris this past week and noticed they had several kiosks scattered about where you could pick up a PS4 controller and play a game while you waited.  Each location I saw had two kiosks with three setups suitable for two players each (making a total of 12 possible gamers at one time.)  I saw a fighting game, some platformer I didn’t recognize at a distance, and a copy of FIFA 2018 getting a lot of play.  That didn’t catch my eye too much until I came across a small arcade with almost a dozen classic coin-operated games available.  They were clearly all emulators of some type but they had decent controls and were all free.  Details after the jump…

Since they were all just emulators, it was hard to tell what game you were going to get when you hit the “one player” button.  The first game I played was a classic game I think was called Rally-X or something…

Note the weird banner at the top.  There were two styled of banners on the various machines.  This one:

I think it’s C3-PO using his phone, R2-D2 doing something, Yoda drinking a green liquour, and Vader getting a tan….  don’t see how it relates to Rally-X or even a videogame, but there it is.

The other banner type around was:

This one is far and above my favorite of the two styles.  Catwoman eating a lollypop – ok.  The Hulk, BRUSHING HIS TEETH?  Wolverine getting a breath freshener (doesn’t seem in character, but what do I know.)  Lastly we have someone (Captain America perhaps) drinking a can of Tomato Soup…  WHAT?   There are so many things wrong with this banner I don’t know where to start.  Catwoman is a DC character, Hulk and Wolverine are Marvel (maybe it’s not Catwoman?)  The last dude is unknown, if it’s Capt. America he’d still be a Marvel character (but what’s he doing in France? – he was always fighting in WW2 I guess.)    As far as I know, even the French don’t drink tomato soup right from the can.  If you were picking a hero to brush their teeth, why the Hulk?   Banner gets so angry about gingivitis that he turns into the Hulk and starts brushing?  Would his brush even hold up?  What kind of toothpaste is he gonna use?

OK, back to the games.  I spent most of my time playing Donkey Kong.  As is typical with this sort of thing, my first game where I wasn’t trying all that hard went great.  When I tried to improve my score I just kept getting worse.

There was a sort of X-Man fighting game (the one where you scroll across the screen and can pair up.)  That one was particularly dangerous.  It was all free so you essentially had infinite life.  The guy next to me was playing but kept checking his watch about every other minute. I did the same.  No reason to miss a flight due to playing videogames…

Had I had a friend along I think I would have challenged them to a game of Tetris.

What better way to spend time in a French airport than to play a strange (perhaps Asian) rip-off of a (probably) American arcade game, designed by a Russian.  Go globalization!

How about you, have you seen old arcade games popping up anywhere strange?

Tags: Misc