A few weeks ago, my friend Steven and I were driving around downtown Chicago looking for a place to buy pants. More specifically, we had five hours to kill so pants buying became our agenda, and that meant we had to 1) find a place to buy these pants and 2) park the car within 2 miles of said place while 3) paying less than $28 an hour for the luxury of doing so. Obviously, we were on a mission.
In a freak turn of events we found just what we were looking for in the same place: a store for buying pants down the block from a parking garage attached to a sports bar. Better yet, we learned that if we had our parking ticket validated at the sports bar we would only have to pay $7 an hour for the privilege, and we even got to keep our first born children! This was way better than the time we went to Navy Pier in the middle of winter to find everything closed and out of service and then had to fork over $43, 12 pints of blood and donate all our body hair to Locks of Love just to park there. So $7 and a beer at a sports bar seemed like a steal.
But if you didn't know, Dave & Buster's isn't a sports bar. It is in fact something entirely different, something that can't even rest itself near the spectrum of being a sports bar. It's actually a casual dining experience tucked inside a 2-story arcade, packed to the gills with mozzarella sticks and flashing, whirling video games and the occasional skee ball thrown haphazardly across the room by a child whose hands were too greased up by his sampler platter to get a good grip. We ascended the stairs into neon signed oblivion, and all Steven could say was, "I am absolutely beside myself."
Dave & Buster are apparently the meth head cousins of Chuck E. Cheese, and they've made a corner of downtown Chicago their own private crack house.
We fought out way through the crowd to find someone, anyone, who could help us. Imagine the drone of penny slots combined with the continuous knocking of a bowling alley and the high pitched squealing of 500 children with single-digit ages and you'll know what it was like, and while normally we wouldn't put ourselves in that kind of environment voluntarily, we had to accomplish getting our parking validated before we were free to leave. As we waited, I spied something that would bring us to our doom. There, only ten feet away from me perched on the edge of a mahogany bar was a touch-screen video game console hosting the only thing that could get me to hang out in an arcade in the middle of the day: A MegaTouch Force 2006 with Castle Bandits.
I told Steven immediately, "Oh my GOD. We have to play, this is the greatest game ever!" Steven was incredulous until I explained to him that this game was ridiculously amazing and addictive, and that I would routinely go to bars in the middle of the day just to play it and sometimes never even had a drink! The fact that I could be in a bar and be so distracted by a video game that I could not have a drink drew Steven into submission, so we ordered a Dave & Buster's Player's Club card full of $10 in $.25 increments and sat down to play for a bit.
Three hours or so later, we'd been sitting there high-fiving each other to sheer victory over Castle Bandits and hadn't even realized that we'd racked up over $50 in Dave & Buster's Player's Club credits. But it was worse - I'd turned Steven into a Castle Bandits addict. While I was in the bathroom he was secretly playing games without me. When people would come up to the bar to order drinks, Steven would reach over and steal the Player's Club cards they'd set down and replace it with his empty one. When I found out that Steven was trying to bribe small children to trade their Player's Club cards for his bowl of pretzels, we obviously had to leave.
We left the place shaking with stimuli like it was 1978 and we'd just been freebasing in a dumpster behind Studio 54. If you've never played this game, you don't know what it's like, waking in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, wondering where the closest MegaTouch Force 2006 is in proximity to your bedroom, how many quarters you've got at the bottom of your purse, if the neighbors would look at you funny if they saw you scavenging under the seats of your car for more. It's the most ridiculously out-of-control feeling when just one fix leaves you entirely feigning for more, and you can't shake the craving out of your head for weeks. All. You. Think. Is Castle. Bandits.
It's been a month since then and I'm still getting text messages from Steven in the middle of the night that proclaim, "I"m in a bar and this place doesn't have Castle Bandits and I'm about to GO OFF ON SOMEONE!!!!"
