As a counterpart to Awful Ideas, occasionally I’ll bring you some things that really aren’t all that bad! Enjoy!

Storming Kids Play Areas

One day recently I went on a trip. Yes. Shocking I know, I actually left my house. Anyway, the target for the day was a pub about an hour away in a town that really doesn’t deserve the quality of pub it actually has. So anyway, we go to the pub and seeing as I’m not driving, I start drinking and generally having a good afternoon.

Some time passes and we decide that dinner is definately on the cards, so we stay and have a great feed. Eventually we noticed while sitting there after our meal, that this particular pub had the great idea of having a cycling camera feed from the kids area (which was not within eyeline of the resturaunt). Obviously it’s there for the parents so they can enjoy the dubious “child minding via camera link” facility on offer, instead of actually getting up and checking on their children every so often.

Admittedly, this is pretty fucking awful parenting right here.

The only thing more dubious than this would be putting a plasma in the pokie room with this same cycling feed, but I digress;

As we sat there and watched the camera feed cycle through a couple of times, we thought we noticed… something… in the kids room. Something… incredible… but then the camera cycled over and we had an agonizing eight second wait for it to come around again…

That’s right motherfuckers: Daytona USA Arcade Machines. And they were sitting there waiting, begging to be played… in the kids play room. Suddenly memories of the eight-machine Daytona setup they used to have at the Brisbane city Replay Arcade came flooding back.

I was torn. Is it acceptable to enter a designated childrens play room… as an adult with no children? Or should I just let the machines tantalize me from the resturaunt, forbidden to be played? I didn’t know what to do. On one hand I had an arcade masterpiece, and on the other I had to deprive children of said awesome arcade masterpiece for my own amusement, whilst having not actually been a child for quite a number of years by that point.

Soon I knew the answer. I had to have at this 1994 arcade masterpiece, and I had to have at it immediately.

I’d made my decision: I was going to invade the children’s play room for a 15-year-old arcade game and fight the little snot nosed brats for it. Though seeing as it was a Sunday evening and the town’s in the middle of no-where, I expected little to no resistance. And given that I’d already seen over the monitor that there were only 2 kids in there, neither of them being anywhere near the fabled Daytona USA machines, I knew I would be successful in my battle.

So with a beer in my left hand, and my right hand ready to strike any opposition in my journey to the fabled arcade gaming machines, we set forth. The fifteen meter journey down from the resturaunt into the kids play area was arduous and exhausting but eventually we got within grasping reach of the kids area. In those five seconds it took to get to that point, we had lost half the team, and only had four to continue on. The bodies of the other four were left behind with hastenly made fork crosses of rememberence stuck into them.

Rest in pieces friends. As we opened the door, I vowed that I would win the eight laps of the Beginners circuit with a Manual Transmission, as a tribute to them. After such an epic and tiring journey, we discovered that only two of us could play. The other two had to sit out and wait for us to finish the “Best of Three” competition that we had all decided on.

As we sat down we realized we had a problem… We had left our dollar coins required to game back at the table!

Anyway long story short, the machines were surprisingly in complete working condition (fuck the ones with the broken gear sticks and no warning message that you pay money to play), we found the dollars, I lost the three races and then we went home.

What we’ve learned today from this Excellent Idea: Everyone’s just a big kid at heart, and let’s face it, who doesn’t enjoy Daytona USA enough to kick kids off them to play! The game is still awesome even all these years later. We also learned that having cycling cameras from the kids area feeding into a restaurant is great if you’re a mildly neglectful parent. And finally, we learned that bringing beer and swearing because of dirty game tactics, into the kids area of a licensed establishment, is A-OK!

So go forth, push kids off Daytona USA Arcade Machines, and don’t feel bad about it. Because one day, they won’t be there anymore!