Kotaku party at Barcade: many people appear, many quarters vanish
So we just got back to our hotel here in freezing NYC from our outing to Barcade in Brooklyn to hang out with fellow Kotaku fans. The place is a cute basic bar with a dozen or so arcade machines that do provide a lot of fun, assuming you like arcade games in general and the available ones in particular (they include Frogger, 1943, Contra, Ms. Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Outrun, Arkanoid, some Star Wars X-Wingy game, Galaga, Tetris, Robotron, Punch Out, Donkey Kong, Super Mario World, Rampage, Moon Patrol, Beer Tapper, Crystal Castles, and some more). The change machine takes up to a $20 bill. Monica and I got $10 worth of quarters, which she put in a glass and carried around with her during the night.
And while she was playing Donkey Kong, some stupid jerk stole the whole glass, quarters and all, from right next to us without either of us even noticing. It all happened within a matter of a minute or two, between coin reloads during a bad stretch where Monica's plumber died pretty quickly. I doubt the person is reading this, but we have a big Foxtrot Uniform for you tonight. On the house. You couldn't just be a nice fellow gamer and not steal at all. Or you couldn't just take a quarter or two to play something. You had to take the whole thing with several dollars worth of quarters. Not cool at all!
Other than that, we got there a bit early and as a result we paid $18 dollars for two beers (granted, they were served in girly wine glasses and tasted pretty good), we missed our chances to talk to the few Kotaku guys we did recognize who later seemed to disappear into the massive crowd (the place went from empty to super packed in less than two hours), we didn't get in on any of the giveaways (when did those happen anyway?), and we didn't find out if the corner DS posse was playing anything interesting.
On the plus side, kudos for Kotaku for picking up the tab (which we didn't end up taking advantage of, despite our bloody looking Barcade hand stamps) and organizing such a shindig in the first place. Also props to Matt (or Mike) who works for some sort of cellphone game development company, and actually talked to us.