by
B.J. on
8/29/2002 09:21:00 PM
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[Edited 11/07/03 because this post is just whoa]
Redondo Beach: Then and Now
After licking the salt off the watermelon seeds and eating lunch at some structure near a parking lot, I raced down to the super-populated arcades. They had a mind-boggling amount of games, which left my head twisting and shaking. The ride even looked mad cool there. I hassled someone for tokens and wasted them on some useless slim pickens game. Still holding my last token, I took a curious glance at some new game. The graphics blew the competition. The NBA players looked more true-to-life than some neatly-drawn cartoons. All the random and out-of-this-world tricks lit my eyes to a fire ! Everything moved with such fluidity that I thought I should give it a shot. Caught up in the piss-my-pants excitement I didn't really care that I blew a whole quarter on the half quarter of play on trying to figure out what button was to shoot and pass and do all that crazy shit. . .and yeah. The fading memory, however, came at the beach with me shouting and touting "Fun ! Excitement ! Adventure !" as if I was Barnum to some Bailey. Oh wait. Haha !
A Sega Genesis, Playstation, Playstation 2, a hundred bowls of digested spaghetti, and a hundred gallons of milk later, I walk back to the scene of the this childhood conflagration. For a quick second there, I wondered where all the people went. The sand was stabbing its sharp perils on my freekin' feet with each g-damn step. It didn't get better going inside the water. That arcade with the cool basketball game looked as big as that Coffee Bean by Albertson's and as sanitary as the toilets in Griffith Park. . .during Waterfest. The rides weren't as extravagant and we ended up just riding that little merry-go-round that you could find at any local K-mart. Disappointment setting in.
But there was one positive.
I walk in and see some stupid play-with-your-money-and-get-tickets games. The arcade games were in the back, and the first thing I notice is a nice wooden arcade station of pong. It was probably the first game ever installed there. I'm guessing 1968 with it's black and white colors, it's futuristic-at-the-time print, and simplistic one-button play. I can't believe that I was going to blow a quarter on that over every other high-tech game there. Oh, but I didn't, and here's my 25 cents, but I wasted a lot more than that in making the trip to that beach.
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