On March 30, I had the chance to go to the Wayback’s Arcade in Pineville with my brother as a kind of late birthday thing, as my 19th birthday was the week before and my brother had wanted to bring me sometime the following week.
Now, I’ve never been to the Wayback’s Arcade before, I had never heard of it. Most of the information I had about it was from my brother. According to him it is the biggest one in Louisiana. It also apparently didn’t require you to pay for each individual play, instead you just paid once at the entrance and then you gotta play the games for an unlimited amount of time until the arcade closes for the day.
Hearing those things made me excited. As much as I love arcades, my least favorite part has always been feeling limited by how much I can play as it costs a lot of money just to play a few games. At Wayback’s Arcade however I got to play as much as I wanted for as long as I wanted. I was very much looking forward to it.
Eventually the day came and drove over to Pineville to meet my brother to bring me with him to Wayback’s Arcade. When we approached the outside of the building I could already feel the old sort vibe the arcade carried. It carried several drawings of old video game characters and even some anime characters along its windows.
Entering the building it was filled to the brim with neon lights and old video game posters. It felt very ‘80s-like inside to some degree. Only thing it was missing were those ‘80s carpets with all the patterns all over them that you would always see in films with ‘80s arcades in them.
The first thing I did arriving there was looking through the arcade machines and seeing what games there were to play. I started off playing some of the old arcade games like Donkey Kong, Q*bert (which I beat my brother at), Centipede, Tapper, Super Mario Bros, Sinistar and I attempted to play Dragon’s Lair but gave up after failing several times.
Following this I moved onto the pinball machine section. There was a line of several old school pinball machines all over the wall. I mainly played on one of them though. That when being the Spiderman 3 pinball machine which was pretty cool.
Next we moved into another room of the arcade. This part of the game contained rail shooter games, WWE games, sport games, driving games, air hockey machine, skeeball, basketball, pool tables and even the strength testing game with the punching bag.
My favorite part of this section though had to be the rail shooters. Especially The House of the Dead ones. The House of the Dead series is my favorite arcade shooter series as I love many of its monster designs. I played the Wii versions of the second and third game with my brother and with friends all the time as a kid and they were always such a blast to play.
My brother and I played through all of the first game in the series and the third game as well. We attempted to play the second one but the controls were off and weren’t working the best for some reason, which I hope is later fixed in the future.
Lastly we ended off the day by going into the final room of the arcade located directly across from the section with the shooting games. This was probably my favorite as it contained a variety of rhythm games (not even American ones but some more Japanese oriented ones as well), a couple fighting games and lastly a collection of old video game consoles with several old video games to play on them.
My experience in this section however was very limited, and not because there was nothing I wanted to check out, but because there was so much I wanted to do on each thing. I spent so much time just infatuated on one of the rhythm games my whole time in that section. It had controls I’ve never seen on any rhythm game I’ve ever played before. I don’t even know how to put it into words. All I can say was that it was absolutely amazing.
There were many songs from anime, games and more to select from. I couldn’t draw myself away from the machine. Next time I go however, I definitely plan to explore more of the rhythm machines as there were so many intriguing ones that I wanted to give a spin at. The rhythm games had to have been my favorite part there overall.
Overall I can say that I had an amazing experience at Wayback’s Arcade and I can’t wait to return back to it and play even more of the games it has to offer sometime in the, hopefully, near future.