Buy Arcadecraft

Good game but feels incomplete. I made it to 1987 with 30 games and $120K in funds. Then the game announces that I can play through 1987 but no new games will be available which basically means that you arcade has nowhere to go but down. The base gameplay is solid but is lacking details. During my play session, I did find a few things annoying and a few things I would add:

1. There is a "clunk" sound that seems to be reused too much. It sounds like the same sound when your machine is full of money or some kid is bashing on it or the coin slot is jammed. The problem is you have some kid running around breaking your games (that you have to pay to fix) but that sound could also be something else far less serious. It should be a unique sound like a kid yelling or something.

2. The one employee you can hire is almost useless (but still costs you $800/mo). He will stand around while your machines are full of coins and unable to accept more. You will still have to run around 30 machines emptying the coin boxes over and over and over and over. The jerk won't even re-fill the soda machine. I should be able to pay an emlpoyee more money and have him do a better job. Where are the security guards? Repair techs? By the way, what does the guy at the counter actually do besides nothing?

3. Time passes too fast. True in real life too I suppose.

4. Not enough games or variety of games. There really is no reason this game should end in 1987. Arcades were still viable up through the mid-1990s. The game should start out in 1970 with pinballs then b&w paddle games then on through the 80s with videos and laser-disc games, and end in the 90s with fighting and gun games. It would be nice to see the evolution of the arcade over a 25-year arc. All games over 6-7 years old should be considered classics.

5. There are no redemption-type machines.

6. Why am I limited to 30 games? There is floor space for more as it is but you should the option to expand your space.

7. Why can't I advertise? Even lemonade stand on the Apple II had this feature. Radio? TV? Flyers? I want to spend some of my scrilla to promote my arcade to make...more...scrilla. How about holding tournaments?

8. There should be an option to set the games to free play or nickel play and maybe an option to charge an admission.

9. When I saved my game (oh yeah.. why only 1 save game slot?) I had a 5-star arcade. When I loaded it back, I had a 3-star arcade. WTF? I am anxiously awaiting the day when a computer game can have multiple save slots. If only that technology existed. I tell ya, we can put a man on the moon...

10. Where is the air hockey table? Seriously guys, there is no such thing as a respectible arcade without an air hockey table.

11. Why so few pinball machines and cocktail games? Should not be hard to change the textures to make more. While on the subject, there should be several newly released games to choose from each month including uprights, cocktails, cockpit, pinballs, etc. One measly new game option per month (or some months, none) is not compelling.

Anyhow, this is a good game. It is fun but ultimately the lack of content and very limited flexibility (oh boy I can buy a pumpkin head and a christmas tree) does let it down. In my case, once I got to 1987 and had a successful arcade, there really is no compelling reason to play it again. Recommnded but just barely.

Arcadecraft has a lot of potential to be a good fun game, but unfortunately a great idea with a poor execution. The idea of having your own arcade is probably a fun idea for a lot of us that enjoy playing video games and this is supposed to provide a good fun simulation of it.

Unlike another similar store simluation game, Recettear, Arcadecraft unfortunatly suffers from almost all aspect of what you should NOT do in this type of game. The idea sounds simple, buy arcade cabinets, set a price and hope you will make a profit from it. But in this game, it seems none of what you do matter and all it is becomes a repetitive dread of hitting spacebar, tab, and enter.

Unlike Recettear, there is no point in choosing which cabinet to buy or to find an optimum price or placement of the machine, despite what the game tells you that it does. All you need to do is to save up enough money to buy one of each cabinet, set it in the store, and start smashing spacebar to collect money. Any price/difficulty other than the default will result in an un-optimum pay rates and it seems like cabinet placement gives little incentive/consequence to how popular it will be.

Unless you are aiming for a high score to compare to other people, there is really no point or incentive to keep on playing the game. If you can surive the first year with any profits, then you can't possibly lose the game if you just sell the old machine and replace them with new machines. There isn't even any reason to decorate the store as it makes no impacts to the store's popularity.

TL;DR, Arcadecraft is repetitive and boring, if you want a good store simluation game, go buy Recettear

I wish I could get my money back. I played for part of an evening and now the game crashes after naming my arcade. It seems like it would be a lot of fun but NOT until the bugs are worked out.

Fun idea and premise. My only complaint is the game won't let me name my arcade whatever I want. Keeps telling me the neighborhood won't like it.

If I choose to name my arcade "SEXY TIME" thats my decision. Don't tell me how to run my arcade, game!

Fun, but not really much to it. The game is really hard to start but after you get going it's way too easy. If you get it under $5 and can enjoy it for a few hours, I'd go for it. At full price ($10 currently) I'd pass.

Pure fun and nostalgia! This is one of my favorite indie games -- after a few minutes, when you've purchased your first few arcade cabinets, players are streaming in through the front door, and the arcade is alive with the ambient bleeps of classic games, you'll recapture that feeling you had as a kid when the arcade was a magical place. You can tell this game was lovingly built, with homages to all the classics. from Pac Man and Donkey Kong, to Missile Command and Mario Bros. As you progress, you can customize your arcade with neon lights, wall graphics, different color schemes, jukebox machines, vending machines, and even limited Japanese import cabinets acquired through a special dealer.

Not a bad game. The game is fun and brings the past come alive as the arcades used to be the place to be. It can be hard at times but for the most part, it's just an easy going simulation game that passes the time. None the less, worth playing for some easy fun.

I mistakenly believed the Steam tags when this game was called a "simulation". It is not, in fact, a simulation game. It is very casual, and is more a button masher than a simluation.

As a kid who grew up in the 80's and the heyday of arcades, I always wanted to own an arcade. Being able to pick the games you place, the atmosphere, decorum, ticket prizes, food/beer selection, advertising and promoting it, being able to throw private parties at one...these are all exciting and intruiging ideas to me. I would quite enjoy the ability to make a custom arcade and to see how well it could actually do based on these choices.

Unfortunately, this game only scratches the sruface of those ideas. You do not serve food/drinks, you have an extremely limited number of games you can purchase, and the decoum is nice looking, but limited. "Maintenance" on a machine involves picking the machine up and hammering the button several times until it starts to work again. You do not build an arcade, you have a pre-defined space with limited choices on what you can do. Want a huge two-story mega-arcade? Can't happen. The layout of the arcade is the same for every game, so the replay value is extremely low.

On top of the lack of building options, there isn't really much of a simulation happening here. What you see on the screen is not what is occuring behind the scenes, and machines will generate money all day, even when no one is playing. There seems to be little strategy involved other than "get the best machines in different genres" and you win.

Overall I was pretty disappointed, and hope one day we can in fact get an arcade simulator. Unfortunately, this is not it.

Overall fun game.

Recieved Arcadecraft through @IndieGamerChick, and the #Gamesmatter event Here is a video review. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-UujW7eCfA

Short and simple. The game is a lot of fun. It is evident that is is a console port through the control interface. Game could use some more depth. Left me wanting more, but had a good time with what is there.

1/4 thumbs up

It's too difficult to build up capital in the early stages of the game. I've never made it past the two year mark (or whenever the loan repayment is due) because you need to spend all of your profits buying new games because people stop playing old games after a few months. In that regard, it's difficult to build up a large amount of cash on hand, so you end up forced to sell off a bunch of games to pay off the loan, after which the games you have left aren't making enough money to allow you to build back up and you go bankrupt. On top of that, the games break, or are broken, occasionally and need repairs, so the games aren't very profitable in the long run.

I'm sure there's a way to figure it out and make it work, but i bought this for a casual game of mind-numbing fun, not a tedious game of intricate book-keeping.

If you're looking for a fun build-a-company style game, I prefer Game Dev Tycoon. If you want a build-a-company style game with a little RPG adventure thrown in, get Racettear.

So... I'm not exactly sure what I expected here. I've been a fan of both management style games and old school arcades for some tame. This game barely delivered either.

On the first point, the management in this game is minimal making the entire game too easy by far. Ultimately all you do is make sure you buy a new game or two every month, upgrade the few upgrades you can when you can, then spend the rest of the time clicking on machines as they fill with quarters/need a repair. The scant challenges and decisions that don't involve your machines are either mundane or just a break in the flow of... well OK it's a welcome change from just draining quarters from stuffed machines.

On the second, unless you know the history of arcades there is very little to glean over your scant seven year run as an arcade owner. It makes nods to the video game crash, gives a few details when certain games got popular and declined, and does little else to educate a younger crowd into the way things were.

This game is certainly something that would be better off staying on a tablet or mobile phone. If it expanded how you interacted with the arcade, let you manage more employees, expand your shop beyond the definitions of your initial arcade, let you run your arcade as long as you choose to the current day (And of course adding more examples of arcade history, through parody of course), then you'd have something for PC. As it stands, only buy this as a curiosity for a few hours entertainment. And even then only deeply, deeply discounted.

Hunter for a good managerial/tycoon game? Keep looking.

The basica mechanics of this game works, but that's just it, the mechanics are very basic. You put down some machines and they'll start generating money based on the set difficulty and price, whether anyone is using them or not. Customers teleport (you'd think with fancy 3d graphics it might have some walking animations but nope) in to a machine, play a bit and then back out, occasionally one will hit a machine and you'll have to throw him out, that's as far as the customer interaction goes.

Sure, you can tweak the apperance of the arcade and some other stuff to make it more popular and thus increase the rate at which money is generated by your machines but still, mechanics are far too simple to be worth your time.

Certainly wouldn't blame anyone for mistaking it for an early access title. I suspect what it really is though is a hasty job to put a simplified management style game on a console, haven't bother looking it up but with the way the controls work I highly doubt putting it on PC was more than an afterthought.

Can't recommend the game in it's current form. Hopefully upgrades will be made.

- Can't rotate the shop = can't see behind the corners/posts. So rotate is defo needed. Adding transparency option wouldn't hurt either.
- So far only one coin monkey (need more staff) this game is more of an frantic empty machines, then actually managing the arcade
- Bigger shop / more machines / custom store would be bonus
- Can't pause and actually think for a moment (except when you click outside the game).
- Storage for old game titles (and no - 4 isn't enough).

+ It's an Arcade game
+ You can kinda put 1+1 on the changed game names

Was hoping for a business simulator like the Tycoon games, what I got instead was a mobile styled game where you set down machines, watch for irate customers smacking machines, click on them, and click on machines to empty their coinboxes every 20 seconds.

Pretty good game. It's remarkable what this game is really, considering this would have been a HUGELY popular SNES or n64 game, it's still going to find a market because of how connected you get with your little arcade. :)

Sadly this game doesn't have much fun left to it after 1982 where you just collect money and nothing else happens.

I'm dying to see the ability to upgrade further than 30 machines, bigger storage space or even a bigger arcade choice! I had the money just sitting there waiting to see if that was a possiblity but it wasn't.

Really fun the first 2 years though. Please make more of a challenge, more milestones or customisation :D

I don't know where to begin... it feels almost like a free2play android game ported to PC... and I really have no good words to describe it.. below I'll put a few things that put me off..

Bad Port(or bad design if designed for PC)
Bad controls (hope you like the arrow keys)

Not sure if a bug but the game WANTED me to fail and I had a player break ALL my games because I'd put my square on them push enter to pick them up and instead pick up a random object on the other side of the arcade... they broke all my machines then I wen't bankrupt...

So not sure if that was intentional to make it challenging (in this case impossible) or a very bad bug but this game is HORRIBLE... I got it in the sale and even that was to much!

Is this really a complete game? I thought it was early access but it is not listed there..... I would recommend wait until more content is added or it is on sale for 99cents..

I did a complete playthrough and it is just a time management clickfest, there is only 1 single strategy you need to figure out at the beginning; and then the entire game consists of nothing but clicking a machines to collect coins or occassionally repair and purchasing new games every couple of months until it ends. Essentially there is no story or endgame to be had.

There are some in game notes on implementing some future additional features, but as they are selling this as a complete game and not early access I'll keep my fingers crossed.

There is a core here to build a fun little game around but needs a lot more content to be more than a single playthrough disappointment.

Also, no edge scrolling for the mouse is supremely annoying.

The one positive I can think of is the jukebox will play "your songs" from music files found on your computer, that made the tedium slightly more bearable.

3 out of 10 as of the current build on 5/22/2014

Edit 1: I went back and looked at the store page , and they do say "6 hours of gameplay" so while they forgot to preface that with " mind numbingly boring " I guess they did deliver what they promised... I think I must not be the target audience although my 7 year old nephew might be. Oh well, if you were hoping for something more like "game dev tycoon" or slightly 'simulation like' stay away from this one. Less depth than the Facebook games my wife plays.

So after playing this game I have come to the following.
1) It is a fun game to play FOR THE FIRST RUN THROUGH. There is no replay value what so ever other than
trying to obtain a better high score.
2) There is a lot to be desiered. I had no struggle what so ever with the game. I just kept getting the newst game
and it was fine. I even got board and bought all the custimizations you can.
3) There is no indepth system. Now on this i dont blame them cause after i played "Game dev tycoon"
I relized that they had the same flaw. You see to me making a simulation game needs to be indepth. A drag and
drop or a slide meter (in the case of game dev) does not really make it a simulation. Yah you can change how much the
games cost to play. However that leads me to 4
4) no matter what happens if you rasie the price it seems like your doomed. I had 5 Star popularity from like year to
and all i did was drop each game diff. to easy and made it a quarter thats it.

In counclusion. This game lacks what makes a sim game a sim game. Its more of a place your machine here and thats
really it. There is no indepth system for you @ all. I would of like to see some of the following
Marketing. Choosing your building (maybe certin areas have a preff. to certin genre). People accepting harder diff. games and not making it so your game becomes unprofitable if you do that. These are just a few things.

Oh by the way the guy you hire to collect your money Hes lazy. Had to do alot my self.

However it is a fun game to play. Like i said the first run through thats about it. I still will recommend the game but at a 5$ tag