The 90’s are an important decade for me, my youth, the ages where I’m making memories but am not tainted by being a teenager.
It would create tastes that elements of I still have to this day, even creeping ever closer to 40. There's music I enjoy, art styles I like, toys and video games still dominate my adult mind as much as it did when I was in single digits.

Arcades were a huge part of all this, living in a seaside town, previously having a Sega World in the next town along, all of these elements really added to my discovery of games.
These places are no longer quite the same, usually more about coughing out tickets, mobile tie ins or strange nostalgic movie tie ins.
In the 90s these were new frontiers, top graphics, new genres, fresh ideas. They were loud, bright and exciting and outside of maybe a few places in Japan I doubt anywhere can fully capture the same feeling they had - not without want of trying because shout out to all the arcade bars that exist to keep that dream alive.

Arcade Paradise’s biggest strength is that of a modern arcade bar. You aren’t back in time but for a few seconds you can trick yourself. It has “immaculate vibes” as people younger than me could get away with saying.
The radio station, the music, the colours, even the smaller elements like gum being everywhere really add to the feel of being in 1993. It’s a true love letter to that time with enough honest reverence for the decade that it is willing to poke fun at it.

Arcade Paradise as a game isn’t simply about just the Arcade games and machines, although that is a major element I need to come back to.
From the start your character Ashley has inherited a laundrette (or laundromat as it’s US based) from her father (voiced by that Geralt from Witcher). They discover in the back some arcade machines and quickly realise that not only are they obviously more fun than washing and drying clothes, there's actually more money to be made with them.

This is where the story and the loop of the game starts.
You do the daily errands of picking up trash, pulling off bits of gum, unclogging the toilet and doing the laundry biz of washing and drying clothes in the machine.
All of these are presented with little arcade game overlays, making everything a game and reflecting how Ashley possibly makes the menial tasks not so cripplingly boring.
As you do this you collect the money from the hoppers or the arcade cabinets too discovering where the real money lies and invest it into more machines - of the Arcade variety, not the washing.
Thankfully the game doesn’t just make you do the boring jobs, because it allows you to play these machines yourself - in fact a smart thing the game does is encourages you to play them as the more goals on each cabinet you achieve the more popular they become with the clients.

As the story progresses and more money is made, you get new machines, knock down a few walls to make the arcade larger and more but really this loop stays the same throughout.
For a while I found it very moorish, addictive in its own way.
Into work, clean the rubbish away, throw the big bags out, pick the gum, get some washing in the machine go to a game I like, hop off when my (in game) watch tells me a wash is done, put drying in, more washing on, back to the game until my watch went again, back and forth until closing time, collect money to put in the safe - hope I have enough for a new machine or upgrade and move on.
It’s a good loop but a limited one. Arcade Paradise does a few things to try and keep this fresh, arcade machines can break, playing a variety of games helps because you can make them all earn more money.
You could even just stop washing realistically as the games are where the profit is but even when giving up on the laundry part of the business the games themselves only have a limited appeal.

As I said earlier, you can play the machines and this is one the game’s strongest and at the same time weakest points.
The nods and the choices of types of games you get as the story progresses is smart and well thought out, but that means many of them feel like old crap that no one really wants to play anymore, at least not for more than five minutes and sadly I found that’s how I felt with the majority.
The minority that I did enjoy however were good to great, some clever takes on games such as “Racer Chaser” which is Pac-Man but in a GTA skin that if you get caught you do have a chance to get to another car and move on.
My favourite of all, at least it’s the one I’m sure I sunk the most time into, was Blockchain - thankfully not a game about cryptobros but a puzzle game that plays almost exactly like drop7 but with occasional power-ups.

Whilst Blockchain and some others deserve praise the issue lies here that actually, none of these games are better than free things you can play on your phone.
The in-game versions of sports you get (you can figure it out but no spoilers) are some of the worst versions I’ve played in video games.
The in-universe major game, a beat ’em up, you get later into the story was also disappointingly poor.
There were moments when I was playing this and wondered if maybe licenses would have helped, ignoring money and legal reasoning, you could have had big Namco or Capcom games fill the cabinets. However I don’t think that would be better as the question would then become “why don’t I just play a collection?”. I appreciate the devs made lots of little games and I didn’t expect every single one to be a banger, it’s just sad that barely any were.

In the end Arcade Paradise was like a sandwich with chores for bread.
The start of the game is a lot more of the washing side of things and whilst that may not be the smartest thing to keep people interested I think it was intelligent in terms of storytelling and I guess brave.
However towards the end I got to a stage where I was simply waiting for money to come in and the games were boring. I would literally open my phone to play Marvel Snap as Arcade Paradise ran in the background, picking up the pad only to fix a machine or collect money from a full hopper.
Then even when enough money had been made for an upgrade the choices were so limited that they never felt like they mattered.
A whole business simulation element felt so flimsy and tacked on, I could understand why it didn’t want to become a full simulator but the line between casual and hardcore could have been placed nearer that side to give the game more meat if you wanted it.
I could possibly write an entire piece here about how I didn’t like the money options, the progression system and lack of customisation but hopefully this one sentence is enough to say - it could have been so much better.

The entire time since finishing this game I wondered if maybe I “played it wrong” maybe I should have been playing this between something else for it to feel more fresh and less of a grind?
I’ve wondered, maybe the game was too long, or maybe too short because all though it dragged the end almost felt too sudden.

There are so many elements of this game I did enjoy, it’s a vision of a game I can fully understand and get behind but it is either missing pieces or some need replacing and without that it never hits the high of being paradise, just simply “a game that I played”.

The big war troll with an Australian accent is called "Brûz". Get it?

GET IT?!

The game is fine. More of the same, and I got RAPIDLY tired of the nemesis system this time. Story feels like nothing then suddenly ties into the films. I thought I had finished it when it told me to "Keep Mordor in a state of perpetual war. Only then can the Free People of Middle-earth prepare for the War of the Ring". Sounds like standard post-game shit to keep you playing. Thus, I went looking to see what folk thought of the ending, and discovered a final cutscene you get for holding the forces of Mordor back. You need to withstand 20 sieges in a row, and losing one of them sets you back to 0. You can fuck that sky-high.

!!!TRUE ENDING SPOILERS BELOW!!!

The cutscene shows that Talion held back the dark for decades before succumbing to it and joining the Nazgul, taking Isildur's place. Meaning he was there stabbing the empty beds, and chasing down Arwen. Then later when Mount Doom went nuclear he was riding a fellbeast and got clipped by a flying boulder, and for some reason in that cutscene he has his mask off and we can see his face. Cut to him looking normal again walking in a nice field, dropping his weapons, and no doubt going to rest with his family.

Wow, I care so much now that I know some jobber Nazgul who got murked by a rock was actually my good friend Talion.

Look at this.

One night while I'm in the shower, the door gets knocked and I hear my dad shout "WHAT WAS THAT SHOOTING GAME I SAW ON THE TELLY?". After some confusing and loud back and forth, I realise it's this and tell him. "THANK YOU" is all I hear. The next day the game arrives. He'd immediately went on Amazon and got it for himself.

"Can you set up the virtual reality?"

I oblige, and he commandeers my chair, TV, and console for three solid hours. I spent a wee part of this time lying on the bed browsing my phone, listening to the game and looking up whenever he was getting particularly heated. He was having an absolute blast, and eventually I was enjoying just watching him experience this thing. You might say he was truly "In a world".

He so quickly went from weird arm flailing to precision reloads and headshots with shite one-liners. I watched my almost 60 year old dad become a real SAS dude. Childlike wonder from him experiencing full immersion, accompanied by patter like "Through his fuckin' eye" and "Go to sleep forever". At one point he was hanging from a window ledge 100 feet up on a building site, he drops one hand to his pistol, shoots a dude through the opening, leans in and grabs the fella's vape, takes a puff, chucks it and keeps climbing.

I barely remember what the game was about, but the live show I got to enjoy over three nights was incredible.

This game crashes almost every time I play it.

I WANT to play the damn thing but goddamn apparently £70 doesn't get you a working console game

It looks stunning and I really like the art style. The bullet hell seems impossible at first but after multiple runs you start to realise it's not as bad as it seems. Like most rogue likes it's your impatience that will get you killed.

Took a bit longer to warm to this coming from Like A Dragon due to its unwieldy camera and awkward combat but once it clicked I was in love all over again.

For how often the game flits between high drama and wacky absurdity it's amazing it still manages to keep the story so engaging. I love Yakuza substories because you go in expecting the twist to be this, or maybe that but then it's actually both and also one more. So stupid/incredible.

Except the Catfights. Those were terrible.