A combination restaurant/bar/arcade, D&B is a warehouse-size entertainment complex with locations across the country. My two favorite attractions are the Battletech simulator and the machine that gives you an electric shock. Whee!

I work very close to a Dave & Buster's location and in the past I spent quite a bit of time there. But unfortunately I cannot recommend them for their arcade games because they don't maintain their games well. It actually goes far beyond not maintaining them well, they barely maintain them at all. Games will have the same simple problems for weeks, months and even years without the problems actually being repaired. Their technicians only seem to know how to load ticket dispensers and don't seem to know anything about actually maintaining games at all. They have an Ultracade machine there, but the screen was adjusted too far off to one side, this rendered Robotron 2084 and several other games on the machine unplayable. When I called the technician over to adjust the monitor his solution was to reboot the machine. When I explained to him that the monitor actually has to be adjusted via a knob located inside the back door (or possibly inside the coin door as some Dynamo brand arcade cabinets have monitor controls inside the coin door, and this game was in a Dynamo brand cabinet), his solution was to reboot the game again, and then stick an out of order sign on it since that didn't fix the problem.

Almost every game they have that is more than a year or two old has serious problems. Their Derby Owners Club: World Edition, which is a $100,000 machine that can earn them over $100 an hour during peak times was locking up and rebooting itself on a very regular basis for months, due to a faulty network adapter that could be ordered from Sega for a relatively small amount of money. Both of their Star Wars Trilogy machines suffered from worn out joysticks with fire buttons that were inoperable as often as not, and once again those are a standard part that can not only be ordered from Sega, but that can actually be picked up in person from our local parts distributor.

Their list of faulty equipment was a mile long last time I was there. One of the Pod Racer units had a solenoid out, the Pump it Up machine was skipping due to a faulty CD ROM drive, their Police Trainer was displaying graphics corruption, one of their moving cockpit Jet-Ski games was canted to one side and unable to move, and that electric shock machine that Quizro is so fond of was no longer fun because both handgrips were defective and seemed more rattly than shocking.

Even with all those problems I still went there fairly often, that was until I discovered they had actually replaced a part on a machine. For some reason they removed the perfectly functioning 4-way joystick from their Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine, a stick I might add that was designed especially for that machine, and had replaced it with an 8-way fighter game joystick, rendering the game unplayable.

I never went back again after seeing that.

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