So my wife and I patronized Dave & Buster’s for my first time ever this past Saturday. I have to be honest, I am not sure I liked it as much as when we went to Lucky Strike in Novi. Here’s the thing…Dave and Buster’s has every popular game known to mankind that is available right now. They even cater to the nostalgic and the novice players in a pretty fantastic way but the only reason that I would not rate my experience as a 9 or 10 is because I prefer playing in an environment that isn’t so busy. I’m just not a “crowd” person…per se, but that is the ONLY reason.
For the most part I found that the environment is incredibly family friendly…at least at the time we went. We stopped in to the one on 7 Mile Road at about 15:30 hrs. About $120.00 later, which included the tip, we left. Now, that total involves drinks, food, and games so don’t think this place is expensive. We just went a little overboard is all. The cuisine is “bar” food. The drinks are where they get you but I thought that the bar looked pretty nice. Pricing for the game cards is standard, I guess. I didn’t do the math on any of the games. The card records points and each game requests X amount of points for each play. This was the same theme that was at Lucky Strike.
I wasn’t too surprised, even with all of the reading that I have been doing lately on gaming, that the crowd consisted mostly of people between the ages of 4 and 60. Obviously there were a plethora of children there. With them were their parents who were mostly in their 30’s. There were only a handful of people my age (around 50). I didn’t speak with any of them but I did corner a few of the children who were playing some of the more violent games and one father whose daughters were playing my new favorite game Halo. I introduced myself and indicated to them what I was studying at school.
Ron was there with his two daughters Elisa (8) and Monique (7) who were busy playing Halo. The game itself was incredible. There are two large screens and positions for four total players. The players are working in tandem and can play on either screen. There were two other children who were older than these two girls sitting on the right side. Elisa was sitting in the second seat from the left and she was “killing it”. I asked Ron how long she had been playing this game and he said since she was about 4 or 5 she started gaming in general but he keeps it alive at his home where they play Halo and other FPS games. I inquired about the violence in the game and if he thought that was too much for a child and he indicated that he has explained that it is a game to his children and not something that happens in reality.
I didn’t catch the names of the two boys I interviewed. They were teenagers from what I could tell, but too young to drive was my guess. I also asked them about their feelings regarding the violence in certain video games. They were both playing Alien and as you may already be able to establish, based on the movie, this is just a game of killing (see the video below). Needless to say, coming from two teenage boys, you can imagine their satisfaction with the game and the violence. They wouldn’t have it any other way. Of course, I tend to agree with them as those types of games attract my attention too.
Although this blog is wrapping itself around the idea of people who are over the age of 50 and still gaming I will still say that this place is a good place to go to experience some pretty good games. I would take the family there at least once a month. As I mentioned, they have games for pretty much every type of gamer. They even have the largest Pac-Man and Space Invaders games I have ever seen not to mention the larger than human size Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots game. Unfortunately it was out of order so we didn’t have a chance to play it. Overall, I give this place an 8 out of 10 for the environment and excellent choice of games they have. I find it better than the old arcades I used to go to but that is mostly because I wasn’t able to drink in those. Not that drinking makes it more fun…just more adult.
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