After last week’s weighty blogversations about cars, bikes and state funding (topics we’ll keep talking about in coming days), Roadguy was looking forward to a relaxing weekend, so he was pleased to be invited to a fundraiser for a tutoring program called A.C.E.S. The event was held at GameWorks, a video-game palace that, instead of taking my mind off transportation…

… immersed me even further. The CrapCam photo above is from a six-player game based on the Indy 500. It’s just like real driving, except that if you flip your car at 125 miles per hour, you don’t have to call your insurance company. It was just one of a variety of motor-vehicle-based games, like this movie-themed one…

… and this one that zipped through some streetscapes that looked more or less like Miami:

There were also games involving motorcycles, snowmobiles, and, for the alternative-transportation crowd, horses. But my favorite, which I actually only got to watch, was called Hyperbowl, in which players guided a giant bowling ball through the busy streets of Tokyo and San Francisco toward a set of pins sitting in the middle of traffic:

The scene at the left had a definite “Hennepin Avenue Bridge” feel to it, and in many ways, the game seemed the best at conveying the feeling of actual driving.

Of course, when it’s time to go home, the toughest part is leaving the arcade mindset behind — in the real world, no one gets double points for rolling over pedestrians in the parking ramp.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Scenes and stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.