Galaga Review: The Rainbow

Location: 
Rainbow Bar And Grill: 9015 Sunset Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA

1. Cost: 25 Cents (10/10)
No classic arcade machine anywhere should ever cost over a quarter!

2. Tabletop Machine

2. Controls: Impossible! (1/10)
So right off the bat, I noticed that the firing button on this machine was almost completely non functional, firing off a shot maybe once for every 25 times you the button. Needless to say, the makes the machine impossible to play. The review should basically end here.

3. How Many Starting Ships: 4 (10/10)
Not that it matters, because you can defend yourself against the aliens, and you are sitting duck cannon fodder, nothing more!


4. Setting/Distractions: Busy, very annoying (2/10)
This machine is smack dab in the middle of tone of the world's most famous rock and roll bars, so if even the machine DID work, it would still be hard to play, because you would be looking out for hot rocker babes, celebrities, or possibly even Lemmy to walk by.

5. Permanent High Scores: No
Don't know!

 


















6. Amenities: Abundant (9/10)
OK, so it's in a famous rock and roll bar, right on the Sunset Strip. Basically, anything you want (except a decent Galaga machine) is within spitting distance. Overpriced booze, fake tits, pizza, etc. Nothing to complain about in this category.

7. Wildcard: It's in the fucking Rainbow (8/10)

Overall Score: 6.66 (Seriously!) Even though this machine doesn't work, it made up for it well by it's ultra cool and famous location. This is probably the ONLY time I will let a crap machine slip by with a decent score!

How The Scoring System Works:
1. Cost: 25 Cent Machines get 10/10, 50 Cent Machines get 5/10, etc.
2. Standup Machine: Tabletop or Standup does not affect the score
2. Controls: Score of 1-10 depending on how well the joystick and firing buttons function
3. How Many Ships: If you start with four, that 10/10 points, start with three, that's 5/10 points
4. Setting/Distractions: Score of 1-10 depending on if there are a lot of annoying people/noises at the location
5. Permanent High Scores: If the high score list is preserved in the machine, it gets a 10/10. If not, it gets a 1/10
6. Amenities: Score of 1-10 rating the availabilty of food, beer, other cool stuff close to the machine
7. Wildcard: This is a a category where I can add extra points to a particular machine for whatever reason I want

Galaga Review: My Flagship Machine

Location: Launderland, 4852  Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, CA


















This is to be the first in a series of Galaga Machine reviews. Since one of my "life rules" is to play a Galaga arcade machine whenever I see one, this should be a pretty fruitful pursuit.

1. Cost: 25 Cents (10/10)
No classic arcade machine anywhere should ever cost over a quarter!

2. Standup Machine

2. Controls: Sticky (4/10)
This is one of the tougher firing buttons that I deal with on a regular basis, only firing off a shot at the aliens maybe 50% of the time. It takes some getting used to. The controls almost always fuck up when you're trying to enter your name in the high score list, so you end up entering the wrong initials, not that it matters because the list resets it's self every night anyway, but still... fuck.

3. How Many Starting Ships: 4 (10/10)
I think four is the highest amount of ships you can start with in a Galaga game. If it turns out there are more on other machines, I will revise the rating system.

4. Setting/Distractions: Busy, very annoying (4/10)
This machine is smack dab in the middle of a very busy and very ghetto laundromat, so it is rife with annoying distractions, most notably the ever present crackheads/schizophrenics who hang out in there, sit by the door and yell at everyone for hours. In addition, you got screaming kids, mad mommas, and occasionally hot babes who are distracting in a totally different way.

The last time I was in there, some dude came in from the street and fucking ATOMIC BOMBED the bathroom with such a rancid pile of steaming shit that I could not tolerate being inside the 'mat, and was forced to sit outside playing Tetris on my phone instead of Galaga! 


5. Permanent High Scores: No (1/10)
Apparently, this machine is turned off every night, so there are no permanent high scores. Yargh!

6. Amenities: Abundant (8/10)
Being right in the middle of a laundromat, you can change your cash into quarters until you run out of money in the CHANGE MACHINES. If you get thirsty, you can go right next door to one of Telegraph Avenue's premier dive bars, The Avenue! Across the street is U & I liquor, actually my favorite liquor store in the area after the one on 40th and Broadway got shut down. Just one block away to the south you can get pizza and a pint at Lanesplitter, and one block to the north, you can get the $3.99 medium take out special from Pizza Nation. Eating pizza (along with wearing hi-tops, having a mustache, and listening to thrash metal) is one of the cornerstones of a serious Galaga player's lifestyle.

Also, this machine is actually a "classic arcade collection" that has a shitload of games on it. It just happens to include Galaga, so to me it is a Galaga machine. Sometimes when I get bored, I play other games, but honestly, I'm not very good at them. 

7. Wildcard: Flagship Machine (10/10)
This is my most frequently played Galaga machine, and even though it's a bastard of one, with gnarly controls and a horrendous people all around to annoy me, I use these things to my advantage. It's my training machine! I figure, if I can get good on this really crappy one, then I'll do really good on other Galaga machines that have better controls, better surroundings, etc. I'm also not playing for the glory of a high score, since they are not recorded here. Only god* is watching me! I'm playing just for myself, to heighten my own skills. This is my dojo, so I'm throwing in a 10/10 extra points wild card category for this machine.


Overall Score: 6.8 

That Magic Sword graphic on the side of the machine is really cool, but Magic Sword is NOT one of the games included in the classic arcade collection!

Pathetic.




How The Scoring System Works:
1. Cost: 25 Cent Machines get 10/10, 50 Cent Machines get 5/10, etc.
2. Standup Machine: Tabletop or Standup does not affect the score
2. Controls: Score of 1-10 depending on how well the joytick and firing buttons function
3. How Many Ships: If you start with four, that 10/10 points, start with three, that's 5/10 points
4. Setting/Distractions: Score of 1-10 depending on if there are a lot of annoying people/noises at the location
5. Permanent High Scores: If the high score list is preserved in the machine, it gets a 10/10. If not, it gets a 1/10
6. Amenities: Score of 1-10 rating the availabilty of food, beer, other cool stuff close to the machine
7. Wildcard: This is a a category where I can add extra points to a particular machine for whatever reason I want

*=figure of speech

Show Review: Voetsek: 7/13/10

I couldn't find a flyer image for this show, so here's Ben! Getting hairier each day.

Battlemaster, Voetsek, Crooked Teeth, Street Pizza: Strange Matter: Richmond, VA

Well, I'm going to continue trying to write a review, no matter how shitty, some kind of review, of every show I go to. This is of course one of the cornerstones of the content of Boca de Fuma magazine, and also of my forthcoming biography. This does not include shows that any of the bands I am in play, which includes a considerable amount of the shows that I am AT. Every once in a while in the midst of a tour, I will have day off and have chance to see another show that I'm not involved in. This was the case with July 13th.

Genesis Climber was getting rather tired of stagnating at a giant, humid artist warehouse in North Philly, so we decided to hightail it down to RVA for a change of scenery, even though our show wasn't until the next day. We made it unscathed, but shaken after hitting one of the most brutal summer rainstorms I have ever seen (on the DC beltway). We're talking pelting bitch slaps of water from the sky, almost zero visibility and semi trucks pulled over on the side of the road with their hazard lights blinking blinking doomish Sauron eyes.

When we got into Richmond, I wanted to go to the Voetsek show, everyone else wanted to go chill out at the Strike Anywhere house, so they dropped me unceremoniously on a street corner and left me to my own devices. Inside the venue I immediately ran into Joe "Van Man" Shuergar, Voetsek's Driver, and we got into debating the relative merits of the classic arcade games that filled the back room of the venue. He saved me (and my precious few quarters) from a potentially disastrous run on a Galaga machine with sticky controls.

Street Pizza was the first band I saw, they were generic grind, and a few enthusiastic fans formed a sparse but expansive circle pit that pushed the rest of the audience off to margins. I quickly grew bored, went outside and ran into Frank Bucalo, beer shotgunner extraordinaire. I exist off camera in this video that we went and shot in alley near the club:



Went back inside to catch Crooked Teeth, a band that some of the locals were pretty stoked about. A good band made more interesting by the fact that some of the kids were really young. Always a relief to see actual teenagers playing this teenage style of music we all love.

I enjoyed the weird displaced feeling of seeing a local (bay area) band in an unusual place for a bit, but come on, I've seen Voetsek a million times and this one wasn't significantly different, except that Ben had an ear infection and was emergency room bound after the show. I wandered back outside, and my friends Knifey Spoony had arrived, also on tour, also a day early for their Richmond show the next day. I pretty much spent the rest of the show hanging out with them and their crew, talking about tour, and trying to stay dry in the sudden downpour. Battlemaster sounded pretty cool from outside.