GameWorks Goodbye

GameWorks
 785 Las Vegas Blvd S
Ste 10
Las Vegas, NV 89109
(702) 432-4263

 Above is a video of footage of one last GameWorks Las Vegas walkthrough. GameWorks Las Vegas is closing this April.
 
As I saw the golden yellow of the words Game and Works mashed together as I descended one last time into my superhero secret hide-out, my super-villain's lair, my library of great gaming memories I was saddened.



 Heading to GameWorks after Amusement Expo made me hardly care, I couldn't even find it, I knew it was underground, but didn't know the location. When I finally got there it surpassed Amusement Expo and my childhood exceptions.

 When I was younger I remember multiple vacations spent in Vegas. There we're all kinds of hotel arcades to play around in, but the greatest arcade of them all was GameWorks. Time has been cruel, I don't know what happened, but when I was younger it had it some sort of laser tag ride that would hoist you up while you were shooting and more places to stuff your face full of food, maybe a rock wall too? Now all it has left is it's arcade games.

All of them, arcade games galore everyone you'd want to play or ever heard of, even the old Sonic Fighter, I barely remembered it. I forgot Amusement Expo the second I got on the ground floor of GameWorks. Overly delighted with how much fun I was going to have I loaded up my card more than once, I was foolish to think I wouldn't want to play more games or the Amusement Expo had ended my gamer hunger Pizza Expo ended my real world hunger.

Classics were around me as well as other titles I had never even head of.

One game with tanks I must have played over 5 times. It was strangely enough called "Tank! Tank! Tank!", I'm not sure if there's one in LA, but Namco  made of hell of a addicting tank ride. You can battle friends or team up with friends to battle monsters. You can even team up with some friends to battle other friends. Power-ups include extra-missiles, machine guns, plasma-bolts, laser guns and turning enemy tanks into little toy squirt tanks. The whole city or area your in is destructible, so if your enemy is behind a building you can just blow it up. You even get your picture taken and have it altered to make you look silly. While playing an icon of your face juts out of your tank like Starfox 3DS multiplayer. I wish they had four units hooked up which is the maximum, but alas they only have two connected units

I passed by Afterburner Climax and had to try it out, the one unit I was playing on was damaged graphically so lines were just jutting out of my plane and levels were slightly corrupted in the same way. In a way it was kind of beautiful.

Rushed passed the pod racers to some forgotten section where the huge Sega Horse Racing game Derby Owners Club went un-played, in front of it was some shooter I couldn't master called 2 SPICY: Too Spicy, which wasn't about serving hot food to people, but was a shooter with an annoying heel balance element.

I went on one of the motion simulators in the back, but wasn't prepared for a bumpy and boring ride via Initial D racing, why this game was chosen for the motion simulator I have no idea.

 So many missed titles I should have tried and played earlier like Virtual Bowling which I've only played at Jillian's at City Walk, Mario Kart Arcade GP, Arctic Thunder was surprisingly fun, who knew it was wise to wear a bikini while riding a snowmobile?

 "The Sega arcade cabinet Let's Go Island the only game in the series I hadn't played", I yelled to my friend as the place was shutting down, it was almost midnight, I had come by late after the World Pizza Games. Now I was going to miss out on Sharks trying to eat me and Sega's terrible sense of humor about American tourists (love the series). I would want to play it next time, but there won't be a next time or a new game.

Only one employee was on duty while I was at the place at he was behind the counter, not doing much. Now with two bankruptcies one in which Sega took control and then GameWorks being sold to some investment group in 2011 the fate of this GameWorks might be the same as Nolan's Bushnell's uWink, I mean gone for good. A few days a go GameWorks released a statement to the local Las Vegas press that they'd just be moving, but didn't have a location. That seems unrealistic, now it's going to be a local arcade? I doubt it and it might be Game Over for the place.

While uWink was an awful series of restaurants where you could order food on screen and play some crappy games on the same screen (before iPads)  GameWorks simply worked, it was sort of a gamers paradise. Not a Chuck E Cheese, more an adult place where you could grab food and play the latest arcade games. Sure they had some kiddie games to win tickets, but they were off on their own side and when I was younger I wanted tickets.

You have Excalibur's arcade area or Luxor's arcade units or MGM's, but none of them compare to GameWorks. Now GameWorks is going goodbye and I'm not happy about it's passing. I didn't even hear of Long Beach losing there's, it was still here as late as 2010. The only other one nearby is in Ontario and I can't think of driving that far just for that arcade it's not the one I knew. Goodby GameWorks!

                               The last card dealt.

Here's some more photos and commentary

Here's more of the ticket section, the spongebob jumping up and down game

 The prizes were well beyond and arcade I can remember.

 I'm not sure if these were even on, but they happen to be some of the only arcade units in America that take cards you can collect.

 Sonic adorned air hockey, Sega did own the place.

 L.A. Machineguns, one of my all time favorites, you head across the West Coast trying to save the president. Hey you travel to Vegas in it and LA. Your a future cop I think with some sort of flying jet-ski, the guns give off this great sensation when you fire. It ate a lot of my quarters until I started to master it.

 Police Trainer is a great shooter where you get random shooting tests. It's so random and there's so many different stages to try,

 I've never heard of this game and hate how it plays, but I love it's graphic style and it's arcade unit design. It reminds me a lot of the black and white wonder on the Wii Mad World, maybe it had some of the same people work on the two games.