The cocktail table arcade game in the living room

My wife, a gift-giver extraordinaire, bought me this for Christmas. It is an authentic, cocktail table-style arcade game unit that includes several versions of Pac-Man along with my second-favorite video game of all time (Galaga), as well as Galaxian and both versions of Dig Dug.

It has been a hit in our house from the moment it was unveiled Christmas morning.

Actually, I should clarify that it has been a hit mostly with me, Terry, and Melanie's boyfriend Jason. We're the ones who play it the most.

It should also be clarified that, while it's technically "mine," Terry logs the most time on it. She has always been very good at Dig Dug. Over the last couple of months, she has progressed to expert level.

I enjoy it not only because it's so much fun, but also because it takes me back to the years when I was a regular visitor to our local game rooms...say roughly 1981 through 1984.

I remember Tuesday nights at Food and Games (later Fun and Games) at Willo Plaza where, for a $3 cover charge, there were unlimited credits on all games in the arcade and you could play them to your heart's content for three hours, no quarters/tokens needed.

We also frequented Up to Par and the game room closest to home, Galaxy Gardens.

Whenever I wanted to go to Galaxy Gardens and lacked the funds to support my video game habit, I would simply stop at the home of one of the customers on my paper route and collect whatever money they owed. For those who received the newspaper every day, the amount was $3.10. I could last a full 90+ minutes at Galaxy Gardens with three bucks, depending on the games I played, so it worked out nicely.

That's assuming I remembered to mark the customer from whom I collected as "paid" in my records once I got home. That wasn't always the case, which led to more than a few embarrassing visits to collect from customers who had already paid me that week.

Anyway, my quest on our new machine is to get to 200,000 in Galaga. Once you get past level 20 or so in that game, it is nothing but chaos. The best gamers back in The Day could get way past that, but it's a challenging and worthy goal for my 51-year-old self.

Well, that and breaking the habit of trying to insert a token into the machine when I want to start a new game. Even 40 years later, that's a tough adjustment to make.

Don't give the controller to Daddy!

There was a time when I was pretty good at video games. This was approximately 1982 to 1984. Then I started a long, slow decline that continues to this day.

The result is that my kids make fun of my gaming skills, or lack thereof. This actually happened: Jack was playing "Super Mario Bros." on the Wii the other day, and when I asked if I could join him, he hesitated for a second and then said, "OK, but don't be sad when your guy dies."

Slightly offended, I asked what he meant. And he said, "Well, it's just that you're not very good."

Please note that I had never actually played Super Mario Bros. on the Wii before. Jack was just assuming my incompetence.

It turned out he was right, of course. Back in The Day (I find myself increasingly referring to The Day in conversation), I was pretty good at Super Mario Bros. on the old Nintendo NES system. But this new version of Super Mario Bros. is much more complex. Whenever I play, my character must look out of the screen, see that it's me controlling him, and decide it would be just as easy to commit some form of electronic suicide.

Now if we were playing the old Atari 2600, it would be a different story. I could play me some Atari 2600. Didn't matter what the game, I was probably pretty good at it. Combat? Pac-Man? Air-Sea Battle? Basketball? I was The Man at virtually every Atari cartridge.

The main reason for this was that I actually had time to play and practice. You can get good at just about anything if you have time to work at it. When I was 12 years old, I had time for everything. Teachers hadn't yet started doing that thing where they give two hours of homework to elementary school children every night, so time is the one thing we had in abundance (of course, my generation is also functionally retarded when compared with a lot of kids today, so maybe that homework thing would have been a good idea).

Do you remember that scene in the movie "Groundhog Hog" where Bill Murray is teaching Andie MacDowell to flip playing cards into a hat? He tells her, "Six months, four to five hours a day, and you'd be an expert." That's how it was with my friends and I when it came to video games.

It helped that my dad was a Gadget Guy. And by that I mean we had most of the cool new electronic gadgets of the 70s and 80s before anyone else had them. I was playing pong on my TV in 1977, thanks to the Radio Shack console Dad brought home one night. We also had the Atari 2600 long before most of the families in my neighborhood. So I was able to get pretty good at almost everything.

Then came the arcade craze. I spent a lot of paper route money pumping tokens into everything from Space Invaders and Centipede to Donkey Kong and Galaga. My friend Mel and I would ride our motocross bikes up to the game room and blow $3 to $5 (that's usually as much money as either of us had at any given time) in an hour or two. We would be wearing our 80s-style painters caps decked out with metal pins of our favorite New Wave bands like Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls. We thought we looked cool. In reality, we must have looked like The Incredible Dork Twins.

My favorite game was one called Track & Field. You would participate in a variety of track events by repeatedly mashing a pair of buttons in rapid fashion to make your onscreen athlete run faster or jump farther. I was good at this game. Good to the point that I once played a game of Track & Field for a full hour on a single quarter.

Once I started high school in the fall of 1984, the time I had available for gaming dropped dramatically. There were sports practices, extracurriculars, actual homework assignments, etc. And the video game world quickly passed me by. I lost track of what was new and hot, and sadly the arcades started going out of business. By the mid-90s, video games cost upwards of a dollar to play and could only be found in the lobbies of movie theaters.

Now I'm reduced to the role of Inept Daddy. We'll be playing Super Mario Bros., and when I inevitably fall off a ledge or run into something I thought was friendly and die, one of the kids will give me the ultimate insult: a condescending head shake, a small laugh, and the words "Oh, Daddy." The message being: "We only let you play so we can laugh at you. You're more entertaining than the game itself."

Whatever, you little brats. Once they invent time travel and we go back to the 80s, I'm dragging all five of them to the arcade and I will school them. And I'll make them wear painters caps, too. Then my revenge will be complete.