My Visit to Sega’s World Sports Grille
A few months ago, Sega opened a new concept restaurant in Tucson, Arizona. It was being billed as a combination of fine dining, sports bar, and arcade. That’s kind of cool, right? Sega is still the market leader when it comes to arcade hardware, so I suppose it makes sense. I know that the arcade market has been hurting in the United States. It’s kind of nice to see Sega taking a risk and trying to revitalize the industry. Arcades may be nearing extinction, but they’re still an important (albeit small) part of American history and I’d love to see them become relevant again.
One of my complaints about arcades has always been the children. Every arcade I’ve visited over the past decade or so has been swarming with small children who can barely reach the controls of most games. I don’t hate kids or anything, but they’re loud and small and you shouldn’t swear around them. How much fun can a game like Street Fighter II be if you can’t scream “FUCK BALL SMACK KHAKI MOTHERFUCK!” when someone breaks your winning streak? The arcades of my high school years were highly competitive environments filled with trash talking, amphetamines and tearful back-alley handjobs. That is no place for a child! Or, um, anyone really. Eastern Pennsylvania was kind of a shithole in the early ’90s, but that played a strong part in defining my arcade experience.
Also, if I wanted to be owned by an eight-year-old in my favorite arcade game I’d just play it on Xbox Live.
So when I heard about Sega’s idea for World Sports Grille, I was thrilled. An arcade that serves alcohol? Awesome. I envisioned old men in cardigans crowded around import cabinets, chewing cigars while a cocktail waitress brings them all whiskey sours, then retiring to a smoky dining room to talk about the stock market and tell dirty jokes. That’s what I want my life to be! That’s my life dream! I look great in a cardigan!
I had to try it before I left Tucson. A friend and I made the fifty minute drive to check it out. We figured that we would grab some dinner, maybe a drink at the bar, then cruise the arcade area and play a few games.
Upon walking in we were greeted by… no one. Three employees stared at us for a few minutes while blabbering into their headsets, never addressing us directly. Normally this wouldn’t be so weird, but in this case the mezzanine was completely empty: Just two customers standing in this massive area waiting for someone to acknowledge them. I had to go up to one of them and make it clear that I wanted a table, which required the guy to talk into his headset for several minutes more, apparently checking with every other employee in the establishment. “Table for two, table for two… hmm hmm hmm… table for two, table for two… chk-chk-chk, table for two… let’s see, table for two…” Maybe it was a new business tactic meant to define the unique experience that World Sports Grille stands for. Like, everyone’s supposed to act like Sonic the Hedgehog and be all about the ‘tude or something.
The host guy finally told us there’d be a 45 minute wait and we were handed a plastic device thing that would play disco music when our table was ready. So we decided to check out the arcade while we waited.
It was not what I was expecting. The arcade was completely segregated from the bar area. Children were everywhere. I immediately realized the concept at work here: mom and dad get drunk at the bar while video games babysit the kids. I was way off base with this one. It was actually really hard to take pictures, because every shot I lined up had a little kid run into frame at the last second (and I don’t want to be one of those people).
Most of the games seemed to be of the racing or light-gun persuasion, with a few rhythm titles near the entrance. I didn’t see a single fighting or puzzle game. Maybe those aren’t in vogue anymore?
RAMBO! I think this title is pretty new. They only had one machine and it was set up in the center of the arcade. The screen was really, really big. Probably sixty inches or so. Scenes from Rambo III played when we started it up and then there was the expected stream of soldiers to pew at. I actually had a lot of fun with this game; it’s a license that lends itself well to a fairly simple genre. Wired’s GameLife blog has an in depth write-up on it if you’re curious.
Worth noting: the guns for the Rambo game were huge, heavy and vibrated violently when fired. It was pretty badass. I really wanted to Rambo it up and use one in each hand, but that would have cost me eight dollars. Screw that.
Another light-gun title, Primeval Hunt, had a little touchscreen for navigation. The game is about shooting dinosaurs with pump action shotguns, as far as I could tell. Two frat boys were glued to the machine the entire time I was there; I don’t think they even so much as glanced at the touchscreen.
There were tons of UFO Catcher and Stacker machines all over the place. I really wanted a Martian Manhunter plush from the machine on the left, but the claw only had two prongs, pretty much guaranteeing no one will ever win a prize. The Stackers had DS Lites, PS2s and lots of autographed sports memorabilia. It cost twelve dollars for one go at the Stacker machine, so you’re probably better off just buying a DS Lite.
Side note: I keep referencing how much each machine costs, but it’s worth mentioning that my math may be way off. See, all credits are purchased using a rechargeable card that players can buy for two bucks (I think it’s called a ‘World Sports Grille Membership Card’). So you pay two dollars and then load additional money onto the card, which gets translated into credits according to some invisible algorithm. I put about twenty dollars on my card and got something like 56.7 credits. That struck me as something of an odd number, but maybe that’s just me. I like to imagine there’s a constantly shifting USD to Arcade Credit exchange rate responsible for this.
I spotted Konami’s Drummania V4: Rock×Rock machine. Kind of intimidating, but I was amazed at how solidly built the hardware seemed (compared to other Konami products). I skipped it and chose a drum simulator a little more suited to my skill level…
Taiko: Drum Master! It’s so Japanese! I had played this on the PS2 at one point, but never with a big ass taiko controller. This is the best game at World Sports Grille, hands down. Even thought one of the drums was smashed up, the Japanese text was perplexing and the ’90s alt-rock from the bar drowned out the music, we had a blast. This is a good example of a video game’s presentation trumping all other elements. I mean, it’s a rhythm game and we couldn’t hear what we were performing, but we still had fun. Those cartoon taikos are just so cute that it’s impossible not to have fun playing the game.
After successfully running through a few songs, a QR code popped up for each player. Since I’m a red-blooded, God-fearin’ American I lack the technology to decipher such forward thinking nonsense. Any idea what function these serve?
At this point the weird gadget in my back pocket started vibrating and playing a monophonic version of Gregg Diamond’s “Take The Boogie Home”, so we made our way to the restaurant area. A host silently lead us to the quiet section, which was located approximately ten inches from the not-so-quiet section. Once again, the experience was not at all how I envisioned it. The main dining room had projectors mounted on the ceiling, covering the walls with various baseball games. I can’t really fault the establishment for that; it’s called the World Sports Grille, after all. But every few minutes the entire dining room would erupt into cheers when something happened in one of the games, making it impossible to have a conversation or even focus on the menu. If I was more into sports I may have found it charming or something.
The Menu: I know this is not that sort of blog, but I feel obligated to talk about the food offerings. The menu is basically identical to what you would find at any American chain restaurant. Everything screamed “pre-packaged,” which I thought was odd considering this was a concept restaurant and not a chain. We ordered some tex-mex rolls for the appetizer, which was supposed to be marinated chicken, corn, avacado and some other junk in crisped flour tortillas. What we got looked like this…
Those aren’t crisped flour tortillas… they’re deep-fried, frozen, then tossed in the fryer once again. Seriously, look at how shiny those things are. There wasn’t a single distinguishable flavor other than grease. The filling was nothing more than a paste that may or may not have contained the items described on the menu. I can’t even come close to describing how bad these things were. Maybe it wouldn’t be so offensive if we were anywhere other than Tucson, where one could walk twenty paces from the restaurant and find a similar item prepared properly for far cheaper.
I was surprised to find tajine on the menu, which is a sort of Moroccan slow-cooked feast. It seemed really out of place alongside the rather plain burgers and salads. I was curious, but didn’t want to wait an hour for my food. Another concern was that it was billed as “authentic Moroccan tajine,” but their prime offering was a shrimp and white fish version, which is about as unauthentic as you can get. Moroccan tajine usually contains lamb or chicken because the fat is an important component for proper braising when using the tajine pot. Maybe I should have made Muderblog 3D a cooking blog. I know way too much about this sort of crap. My parents thought teaching me such things would give me a strong cultural background, but instead I just ended up being a food snob.
Another surprise on the menu was that every letter ‘L’ was bolded. I know I’m just nit-picking with this one, but it really bothers me when a print job is botched because someone got lazy during pre-flight and didn’t properly collect all the fonts before rasterizing the document. That, uh, might just be me, though.
We decided to order entrées that worked with the atmosphere of the World Sports Grille: I settled on the double burger, which was actually a single burger with onions and coleslaw, while my friend got a brie and shiitake mushroom burger, which was exactly what it sounds like.
I grew up in Pennsylvania, so I imagined ‘coleslaw’ to mean a bit of shredded cabbage (Dutch style, y’know?). I’ve had burgers like that and they were quite good. In this case it meant some carrots in a mayonaise broth plopped on the bun. It was not good. The burgers were obviously packaged, as they were identical in form and weight. Really, they were both quite terrible. Neither of us could finish, but not due to fulfillment.
This entire time I had not seen a cocktail menu, which was one of my main reasons for visiting the damn place to begin with. I think I asked our waitress for one, but she had a tendency to forget that she was a waitress and disappear for long periods of time. We saw her maybe twice during our dinner: once when she took our order, and once when she dropped off the check. Maybe she was sinking her tips into the Stacker machines.
After dinner, we hit the arcade again to try out anything we had overlooked.
This race car thing looked pretty cool. It’s on some sort of hydralics so it flies all over the place whenever you make the slightest motion. They even have a fence around it that screams “Hey, I’m Dangerous!” I had to give it a whirl, even though it cost 15.889 credits.
This is a picture of me in the machine. I’m not sure if it’s clear (and I couldn’t tell from a distance either), but it was definitely not for people of my size. The steering wheel dug into my crotch and my legs bowed out so far that it was hard to reach the pedals. I didn’t think this was so bad until I actually started racing and the whole thing began to lurch around violently. It felt like someone was punching me in the testicles over and over again, which, FYI, is a terrible feeling. I did one turn before hitting the emergency shut off switch. Oh God, it was painful. Maybe I’ll try it again if I ever become four feet tall.
There was a similar machine that may have been more accommodating to my height, but it displayed a Windows desktop on the main screen throughout the entirety of our visit. I remember reading that Sega had started using Windows XPe for all of it’s arcade games, which appears to have turned out exactly as one would expect it to. I felt bad for the drunk woman who paid the ticket price, then sat in the cab pressing the ’start’ button on the screen for twenty minutes. It’s worth noting that any ‘arcade technicians’ could not be located.
A weird Japanese table tennis game sat by it’s lonesome near the bar area. I had four credits left on my card so I gave it a shot. Either it was amazingly easy for an arcade game, or I wasn’t playing it right and somehow ended up cheating the system. I seemed to win effortlessly: just swing the paddle, and then move on to the next round. It was also not a very good game, so I simply put the paddle down after my third victory and walked away.
During that last game, I started to feel not very good. I wasn’t sure if it was the food or being kicked in the balls by a racing game. My friend also felt not very good, so I’m guessing it was the food. So we left. On the way home, we stopped by Safeway to grab some Pepto-Bismo. We both felt not very good at all.
The next morning, I had some serious issues. I consider this a family blog, so I’ll just leave it at this: do not eat the food at World Sports Grille. It will result in very bad experiences.
That’s my experience at Sega’s flagship concept restaurant. I wish it had been better. If I had to sum it up into a single sentence, I suppose it would be: “This is the Sonic the Hedgehog of Restaurants.”
Way to go, Sega.