Coin Op-The Comic

Good afternoon everyone,
Time for a small rant about something that I find completely stupid....and I hope some people who run or operate video game centers can agree with me here.

What you are about to get is the short version of a long, ongoing story.

After the big arcade wars ended in Greenville (at one time there were 5 seperate places to go to play games), we now have 1. Not that big a deal at first....then the manager started getting greedy. It started with Soul Calibur II, with the conquest mode (for those who don't know, this saved game data in the game itself and kept track of how well you do). After people drop about $20-$30 in the machine....management decided to reset all the information, deleting all the records in the game. Claiming to make it "fair for everyone to play".

Then Tekken 4 came around. This establishment can have anywhere from 3-12 people lined up on any given weekend to play. So in an effort to speed gameplay and make more money, management decided to make 30 second rounds, at maximum difficulty, and if you blocked a hit, you take damage. Well sure enough, the gamers quit playing Tekken 4 and those who wanted to learn can't play cause they can't get past round 1 cause the computer difficulty was so high.

Tekken 5 came around, everyone was happy. The manager tried the hard setting first, and realized it was going to be on a more reasonable setting. People came in, people played...people were happy, then they started changing a few things at a time. The data card (which people willingly paid $5 for) wasn't being used up fast enough so they changed the settings from 500 credits, to 500 matches. Then they added the guard damage...(you block, you still get hurt)...so the people could get knocked out faster....and now they did the max difficulty setting (where tournament players can't get past round 5). Same exact thing, and there seems nothing to do to get these people to understand they are being stupid.

I would love to try to get these people to understand that they are running their own customers out of the arcade and I would love get others to join me on this. But I really don't know where to start or if it would be worth the trouble.

Until a clear vision enters my head.
I remain....
Dan