OK, a rather extravagant title and one which makes more of my recent experiences than they really were, but I’ve just come back from a ten day camping holiday in Mid and South Wales with my girlfriend Anna. Obviously the main aim of the trip was not to focus on gaming, but I did get the chance to visit some seaside amusement arcades and also try and unearth a few gaming bargains from a variety of towns.
As we all know, amusement arcades are not what they used to be. While they were once the best place to play cutting edge videogames, the rise in power of home consoles now means that most of them are filled with Fruit Machines and Prize games aimed at emptying the pockets of unsuspecting parents, whose children crave the pathetic toys that can be obtained by winning tickets from the machines. If there are videogames in arcades then the majority are flashy racing sims or lightgun shooters that cost £1 a credit and rarely give you more than a couple of minutes play. 
So, my aim was to see if I could find any classic machines at the remaining arcades along the Welsh coast, or at the very least find something close to the arcade experience that I enjoyed in the early 90’s. As a side quest I was also on the lookout for any shops that sell classic games, given that the likes of Gamestation have pretty much given up on selling retro stuff.
The first significant location we visited on our trip was the town of Barmouth, which we used as base camp for a couple of days. Barmouth itself has two arcades, which I’ll come back to, but my first gaming experience of the holiday was in Harlech, a small town about half an hour North of Barmouth. Our main reason for visiting was to look around Harlech Castle but due to bad weather we didn’t stay long and ended up in a combined arcade/café nearby called Castle Amusements. As expected the majority of the machines were Fruities or Coin Pushers, but they had a couple of modern driving games (which were ignored) and Sega’s Gunblade NY that we had a game on. Dating from the mid 90’s, it feels like a cross between Virtua Cop and Operation Thunderbolt as you try to keep control of a rapidly-recoiling machine gun to mow down wave after wave of faceless enemies.
Heading back to Barmouth in the evening, after eating we ventured into the two arcades near the seafront for a look around. The first seems to be combined with some kind of nightclub and was predictably filled with the usual gambling machines, but there was a Sega Rally twin cabinet in the corner along with two massive sit-down Sega NAOMI cabs running versions of Virtua Tennis and Virtua Striker. Nothing worth putting any money into, to be honest...
The second arcade however was a pleasant surprise. Las Vegas Amusements was a fairly inappropriate name for the place given its rather unglamorous appearance, but inside we found close to a 50/50 split between gambling/prize machines and videogames, which is about as close to replicating the arcades of old as you can hope for these days! There weren’t any real classic games on offer, the oldest probably being GTI Club and Jurassic Park, but had a great selection of modern arcade games such as Fast and the Furious: Super Bikes, Aliens Extermination and Afterburner Climax, which combines the classic playability of the original with cutting-edge graphics. I had a big smile on my face playing this as with the simple blasting action and all the noise of the other machines around me it almost felt like the old days.
Another game that was of interest (and which Anna had great fun with) was Konami’s Fighting Mania, an anime-themed fighting game where you inflict damage on your opponents by hitting six pads that pop out of the machine – very amusing to watch, and seemingly a precursor to the likes of Wii Sports Boxing that ask the player to get physically involved with the game. Sadly we didn’t get to this arcade until shortly before closing time so didn’t get to sample as many of the games as I wanted, but I’d definitely like to go back there sometime.
Click here for the full Barmouth Gallery on Photobucket
The next stop on the trip turned out to be just as impressive, albeit for slightly different reasons. Having pitched our tent at Devil’s Bridge and spent an hour or so in a nearby nature reserve, we headed into Aberystwyth to get a few supplies and browse around the shops and along the promenade. On the way into the town I noticed an independent games shop called GamePark, so having parked up nearby I headed there expecting the best case scenario of filling a few gaps in my XBOX, Gamecube and PS2 collections. Imagine my surprise when I walked through the door to find not only loads of games for the aforementioned systems but literally hundreds of retro games, everything from 8-bit computer games, to console classics for the Megadrive, Master System and SNES all the way up to PS1 and Dreamcast titles! 
This is a retro gamer’s dream store, with prices that are pretty competitive in comparison to Ebay and a vast selection. A year ago I would have spent a fortune here, but as I have already got most of the common games for most systems I own, there wasn’t too much for me to pick up. I still spent £18 however, on 3 loose SNES cartridges for a tenner, plus an official Megadrive 6-button pad and a PS1 game. The guy running the shop advised me that they will be selling stuff on Ebay soon but you really can’t beat a good browse through real stock on a store’s shelves, so I strongly recommend heading to GamePark if you live within a reasonable distance of Aberystwyth.
That wasn’t the end of the fun either, as we went for a stroll along the prom and checked out the arcade on the pier, which had a pretty decent selection of videogames including House of the Dead, Star Wars Trilogy, Daytona and Sega Rally. Of most interest to me however was the one game I’d been hoping to see on my travels – Guitar Hero Arcade! Of course I couldn’t resist a game on this and decided to play the Kiss classic “Rock and Roll All Nite” on Hard level, which I set the high score on. The game is heavily based on the Guitar Hero III engine and setlist, with the only significant differences being that there’s no whammy bar or tilt sensor on the guitars – star power activates automatically as soon as you have charged it up. Oh, and the guitars weigh a ton compared to the plastic ones at home! I was a bit gutted that we didn’t take the camera so I could get a few snaps of this arcade, but Anna did get one on her phone... 
