If you’ve ever set out looking for some hard-core gaming in Concord, chances are you’ve likely had some trouble. For all of the great things Concord has, the city is decidedly light on arcades.
There is, however, a pretty legit gaming center inside Wal-Mart. It’s right near the front of the store, next to the self-checkout area, and there are several classic arcade-style games inside.
I went first for the “Fast and Furious Super Bikes” game, one of those ride-on jobs. I’ve always loved the ride-on motorcycle games. There’s just something that feels so cool about leaning that bike side to side.
The game was tricky to get the hang of. I selected manual transmission, but that may have been a mistake. After spending about a minute struggling to get over 35 mph, I realized that I was pulling the wrong lever to upshift the entire time. Apparently the left lever is up and the right lever is down. I had that reversed.
Once I figured out how to properly shift, my standing in the race dramatically improved. Within another minute or so, I was in third place and gunning for the lead.
The course opens up eventually and there are several roads to choose from. I chose some pretty tough, rugged routes, and that cost me a few spots in the standings.
Once I made it back to civilization, I started having steering problems. The issue was trying to maneuver around a windy course at very high speeds. Most of the time was spent crashing into things and trying to get the bike moving again.
Then, just as I felt I was really starting to get the hang of it, the game glitched out on me and froze. An error message popped up on the screen – the scene reminded me a lot of my old Windows 95-running Compaq desktop, always alerting me of some kind of problem or another.
In the end, there was no coming back from this. I had no choice but to get off the bike and wonder what could have been.
Next up was one of several claw machines. The first one I tried was a 50-cent, medium stuffed animal machine. This was about midway through the range of claw machines, ahead of the 25-cent cheapo supreme and the $1 big-prize jackpot machine.
Guess what? I didn’t win anything. The claw wrapped around a Care Bear’s head, but it wasn’t nearly strong enough to pull it away from its friends. Maybe you will have better luck.
