Itinerary: Arcades

Although their glory days have long since passed, video arcades are still popular--and not just with kids playing hooky. In the Westwood Arcade, necktied businessmen on their lunch breaks battle terrorists in the game Dark Silhouette: Silent Scope 2, while at X-Cape at UCLA, crowds of students gather around to watch nerds duke it out on Marvel vs. Capcom 2. In the decades since Pac-Man, arcade games have grown sophisticated, providing loud, visceral and semi-realistic thrills that surpass those of home entertainment systems.

Today

Dark, cavernous and filled to capacity with blaring video games, Pak Mann Arcade (1775 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, [626] 449-2834) has been in business for 19 years and is likely the largest video arcade in the L.A. area.

Recently, Pak Mann has cleared out a lot of its older games to make way for a bunch of PCs, where you can play games for a few bucks an hour. A few old school favorites remain, including Robotron, Centipede, Donkey Kong, Frogger and Super Sprint. They also have a few games that are difficult to find elsewhere: Carn Evil (a delightfully sick, House of the Dead-like game set in a carnival run amok) and Radikal Bikers, in which you race to deliver a pizza through the traffic of Rome and Naples. Enjoy them while you can. Pak Mann is currently being targeted by some of its neighbors. They want to curtail its hours or shut it down, and have asked Pasadena City Hall not to extend the owner’s conditional use permit.

Friday

Friday night is free play night at X-Cape (Ackerman Union, A-level, 308 Westwood Plaza, UCLA, [310] 206-0829), where for $6 you can play anything you like from 7 to 10 p.m. (Also, Wednesday, 8 to 11 p.m., Saturday, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 7 to 10 p.m.). Perhaps the most crowded arcade in L.A., X-Cape has three pool tables, foosball and air hockey, as well as the new car racing game Rush 2049, the popular 3D martial arts game Tekken 4 on a giant screen, and Chocolate Factory, where you pick up candy bars with a metal claw.

Open until 1 a.m. on weekends, the Westwood Arcade (10965 Weyburn Ave., Westwood, [310] 443-4316) gets all the latest games and replaces them frequently. Punks used to hang out around the entrance back in the ‘80s. Today, you’ll still occasionally find them there. Otherwise, the clientele includes groups of exuberant Persian guys and their bored girlfriends, parking attendants, office workers and students.

Saturday

On the site of the old Brown Derby Restaurant, there’s now a Korean mini-mall where you’ll find Arcade Cyber Zone (3377 Wilshire Blvd., Store 104, L.A., [213] 380-1216). Close to numerous nightclubs and bars, including the HMS Bounty down the street, Arcade Cyber Zone has a wide assortment of Japanese games including the very silly Power Up Baby Hero, where a multicultural selection of babies competes at sports such as catapulting a rhino across a soccer field or trying to balance on a balloon while being tormented by a monkey. They also have five different games that are way popular with the kids.

Sunday

Keeping with the carnival theme on the Santa Monica Pier, the Playland Arcade (350 Santa Monica Pier, [310] 451-5133) has all sorts of neat, antiquated games, including Feed Big Bertha, where you toss balls into Bertha’s mouth, Wack a Mole, where kids pound moles on the head with a mallet, and several variations on the shoot-the-clown-in-the-mouth game. Playland Arcade also has a couple of obscure, new arcade games: Club Kart European Session, a go-karting game, and Smashing Drive NYC, where you knock cars out of the way of your New York taxi.