Game Thoughts: Arcade Paradise (Patreon)

Some game thoughts about: Arcade Paradise

I WANT to fully recommend buying Arcade Paradise but it feels like a game that’s been sabotaged by its own creators. Many of its issues could be easily fixed in updates so it may one day be worth buying, but I’d say to hold off for now.

I’m going to start with the bad fast, because what’s bad about this game is just terrible. Arcade Paradise has so much going for it and it absolutely dares you to actually like it thanks to some of the worst balancing you've seen lately. The requirements for many objectives are so awful that they completely undermine the loop of the game and what could be considered fun. My initial write-up was three pages of me going on about all kinds of terrible choices the devs made with the game, but I have tried to condense it a bit. Tried.

A lot of AP goes on too long for its own good. Some games aren’t a ton of fun to play (and some are just straight up lousy) and their goals are tedious. The match 3 game is pretty dead simple but it goes for days because you have to beat the same opponents 7 times to unlock the next area and the gameplay never changes, so the enemies in that new area are pretty much the same as the previous ones and then you have to beat the new opponents 8 times to open up the next area. You’ll have seen everything an arcade game has to offer but still have a lot of a grind left to go before you complete the goals, which are needed to progress in the story because they’re how you increase your arcade’s income. For example, in the Out Run game, the entire course is about 30km long but the machine’s goal is travel a total of 1000km and then there’s a trophy for buying every upgrade for your car, which will take so very many plays when you’ve already completed the course on your first or second attempt. Or in the Streets of Rage knockoff, the goal is to max level all 4 characters. It takes 6 or 7 complete runs through the entire game to level up a single character, and now you need to do that with 3 more characters. And as far as I can tell, the different characters are purely cosmetic, so it’s not like actual Streets of Rage where there’s a reason to play every character. There’s just no need for any of that and it sucks the fun out of AP. If the Goals were reasonable, I would be quite willing to stick with a mediocre arcade game to boost its output, but since everything is such a grind, I went from “I’m going to do everything!” to “let me just finish the story” pretty quickly.

The same goes for your daily To Do list. It’s the only way to get the upgrade currency, but some of the requirements take an entire day of play so you don’t get anything else done. Some requirements are really fast (like just loading up 3 specific games) but others are a slog (like having to win 10 battles in the puzzle game). You could set most of the To Do tasks to be 1/3 their current balancing and some of them would still feel kind of tedious. Because the To Do tasks are the only way to upgrade, you have to make a choice between grinding out these boring tasks or actually playing the game you want to play and advance the story or, gasp, have fun. It seems like you can get goals that become impossible to complete in combination. For example, one goal is to clock out early and another goal is to spend X minutes playing a specific game and by the time you complete the third goal and then spend your X minutes playing the specific game, you’re already past the time you were supposed to clock out. To make that tedium worse, the prices for upgrades are so ridiculous that you’ll likely have finished the game’s story before you have even half of the upgrades.

It would be nice if the objectives incorporated the idea that people are visiting your arcade. You can have your customers go to work on the grindy ones and you the player are just juicing it/unlocking ones that take skill. The current objectives work pretty counter to the narrative of running an arcade and seeing people walking around playing the games. There’s already an under-baked “popularity” system on games, so get rid of most of the To Do tasks and pay out the upgrade currency by having your customers complete the arcade-level tasks. Or heck, let me put a cash bounty on a goal. What kid wouldn’t spend hours grinding away at a tedious arcade game if they were going to get $1000 for completing it? Let me employ virtual child labor so I never have to play that match 3 game again.

The beginning of the game where you barely have any arcade machines is somehow less tedious then when you’re running a full arcade and the laundromat gets pushed aside. The loop of getting laundry going, cleaning up the store, switching laundry over, and playing a few games is actually fun even though the game treats this as the grind. Once it switches over to full-time running the arcade and having to fix multiple broken machines a day through a not-fun minigame, grinding away at Goals to make money, and grinding away at To Dos to get upgrades, that’s when the game actually feels tedious. Again, there’s just no need for the game to be balanced this way. It doesn’t serve the story, it doesn’t serve the gameplay, and it just isn’t fun.

So for the bad stuff that can’t be fixed with easy balancing updates, Arcade Paradise is really buggy even after two major patches. There is trash you can't clean up, Goals that don’t complete or Goals that reset mid-progress, To Do goals that don’t complete, some objectives show you making progress and others only show up when you leave the game you’re on, and it’s frustratingly picky about how lined up you have to be to interact with objects (if you get close to some objects you can’t pick them up so you have to actually stand away from them to reach them but sometimes there’s an arcade game in the way so you have to be close enough to not trigger the arcade game but far enough away to pick up that can). The bugs are in the arcade games too. I’m pretty sure the hit boxes are wrong in the racing game because the left side of your car can pass through objects but you crash when objects don’t even touch your right side. In the Bomberman game, the game sometimes treats your own bombs as solid objects when you place them, so it zips your character outside of the bomb and into the wall where you're now stuck and you can't do anything but kill yourself. And these aren’t weird edge cases, they’re all obvious and visible if you just play the game normally. Did nobody test this game or did the engineers just never check their code? Did nobody look and see, hey, the fundamental core loop of our game is broken in several, non-subjective ways? Even after two major updates, I still have Goals that are resetting themselves, Goals that don’t track, and major bugs that can cause your controls to stop working in games or the game rules to just break. A fun yet annoying one is that in the not-Bomberman game, if a match goes on long enough that the borders start shrinking, on your next match, some of the border tiles remain on the field. You’ll start the match and then several CPU players just instantly die because they spawned inside the border tiles. That’s bad but funny but extra bad because the machine’s Goal only counts if you kill opponents with your own bombs, so everything drags on because the CPU dies before you can kill it.

Those awful, glaring, bleedingly obviously needing fixing balancing concerns and bugs aside, when you actually get to play the game, it’s SO good. A dark arcade lit by neon, synth music playing through the speakers mixed with the sounds of arcade games all bunched together? Oh, that is a vibe that is just fun to exist in. The world just has style to spare. If it weren’t for the poor balancing, there are smart levels about how it does progression. There doesn’t seem to be any way to suffer penalties, it’s just simply not making money as efficiently as possible. So you can take your time and just pick away at just trying to beat each arcade game, the To Do List for daily missions, completing Goals for each game, making money to buy a new game a day or so if you’re focusing on making money, buying character upgrades, and then larger upgrades to the store that are your story progression. The story and writing are surprisingly fun too. At the start of the game, your character’s dad really hasn’t done anything THAT bad, but aurgh, he feels like a villain! This is really a kind of game where you don’t need any story at all, but what’s there is fun to engage in. It was oddly compelling to want to move on up to make your sister proud and get to chat with her again.

A lot of the arcade games are fun to play around with. There are certainly a share of losers in the bunch, but when the games are good, it’s fun to return to them multiple times to complete Goals and play around. There are some fun mash-ups too, like a starting game that’s Pac-Man plus Grand Theft Auto. Seeing how creative some games are, when the games ARE just a straight pastiche, it feels really disappointing. Like, there’s a Pong game and it’s just… Pong. Then a digital version of air hockey. Then a real version of air hockey... Some games have persistent upgrades that carry across plays, but most of the hardest games don’t have upgrades and the upgrades are usually on the easier games, like Out Run and Mr. Driller.

There are A LOT of quality of life features that could be added, but they fall much lower on the priority compared to the godawful balancing and the bugs. Some games/goals/directions are just poorly explained or worded. It’s always reassuring when you find multiple search results of people asking the same question to figure out how to play a game or what an objective means. Some goals require you to do a lot of tasks (like listen to every song on the jukebox), but there doesn’t appear to be any indication of which songs you’ve listened to. Of course, as of writing this, some of the jukebox Goals are totally broken. I’ve listened to 11 tracks to completion and my Goals still show that I’m at 8/10 songs, which is at least better than the first patch where I was stuck at 1/10. It would be really nice to be able to put games into storage so you still own them but no longer get To Dos related to them. It’s not quick to rearrange the arcade, and I want a clean way for me to track what games I have Goals left for or that I’m working on and so I never have to look at some of those bad games again.

I don’t know if the dev team just ran out of money and had to shove the game out the door unfinished, untested, unfixed, and unbalanced or what. Did they not know how good the game could be? Did they just not care? Only they can answer these questions, but the state of the game is heartbreaking compared to how special it could be. I really hope with enough updates it gets there, but the state of the launched game plus updates doesn’t make me feel good about its prospects.