The new arcade game that makes Star Wars fun again

[Administrator]

Arcades, despite reports to the contrary, can still be sticky-floored palaces of splendour, where bright blazing machines happily gobble up your loose coins in exchange for experiences you'd never be able to get at home. They still exude a certain magic, though perhaps not at 10am on a wet Wednesday morning, which is when I find myself traipsing along London's Embankment to Namco's Funscape park.
The arcade feels like it's blinking into life, the only clients a handful of those strange men who carry around their personal effects in flimsy orange Sainsbury's bags and gather around fruit machines, and a thinly dispersed group of schoolchildren, all wondering why there's a tired-looking 33-year-old man on the OutRun 2 cabinet shouting 'Eleganza!' as he nails the tricky switchback on Cloudy Highland.
It was a brief, essential diversion before checking out what I'd come to see: Bandai Namco's Star Wars Battle Pod, the monumental new cabinet that started making its way in to arcades last month. Placed towards the back of Namco Funscape, beyond the dodgems and the bowling alley and all those ticket redemption games, it's an imposing machine, the colossal cabinet putting you in mind of sit-down Sega classics such as G-Loc, OutRun or Space Harrier.
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