Hollywood Bowl Visit
Hollywood Bowl Arcade Trip
As soon as I laid eyes on this beast of a machine I knew I had to choose it to review! ‘The Hillbillies’ is about the strangest arcade shoot ‘em up game I’ve ever seen and seems much more what you’d expect to find in a fairground than a modern arcade, sat amongst increasingly sophisticated multimedia machines. It’s huge as well, about twice the size of any other shooting game there and made a huge commotion that attracted me from right across the floor. The machine takes the form of a roughly made shack full of animatronics in a pretty shoddily made Hillbilly themed set with 6 guns laid out at the front and small targets spread out and at various heights within the covered area.
You begin by looking for the coin slot which is quite confusingly placed about two foot off the ground rather than as part of the bright yellow panel the gun sits by, even a child would have to crouch down to insert their money. However the slots themselves are standard from every arcade I have ever visited though and no-one I observe has any serious difficulties with them. No real problems starting it up either. There’s only one button on the yellow panel, it’s big and chunky and has ‘START’ written underneath it; you press it and it flashes. The digital ‘Shots Remaining’ counter switches to 20 and the digital score counter changes to 0. Visually, the panel bears no relation to the Hillbillies theme and in my opinion shows a total lack of imagination and attention to detail in the design process. It is also remarkably poor that the makers don’t deem to give you any instructions or objectives to aim for while playing the game and you can’t help but feel unsure. You know it’s going to be a matter of shooting targets as accurately as possible; otherwise, you’re on your own. It’s also unusual for an arcade game in that there is no hope of progression or award for good shooting other than the satisfaction of achieving a higher score than other users. A couple of people from our class who wanted a go asked me “so, you just shoot the targets, yeah?” After tallying up your score at ten points a hit and using up your 20 shots… the games over. In game terms you feel flat, there is no incentive to try again thus failing the basic requirement of a good arcade game ‘keep ‘em coming back for more’. No-one I observed on this machine put any more money in after their initial credits were spent.
When you first pick up the gun, it’s another element of strangeness in an arcade as the gun feels like solid metal and weighs about as much as a real rifle. It felt especially good to me as I was using a 2kg plastic machine gun two minutes previously which always feels distinctly tacky. I would imagine that smaller children might find these guns a little unwieldy because of the weight however. The targets are visually familiar from target ranges so you know what to aim for although no-one was too sure what to do with the guns and seemed very cautious before attempting their first shot. I thought, because of the thick pipe attaching the gun to the stand and the distinctly un-arcade feel of the machine that it might actually be a water gun! I observed users in quite a state of confusion at this point in their interaction with the machine, which only increases when they take their first shot and…there’s just a little click. It takes a moment to realize it’s a light gun and you just missed. You might harbour the nagging doubt that maybe it was supposed to fire pellets or water (as the weight of the gun suggests) and you just picked a broken one. People then take more time over their second shot, click again and suddenly there’s feedback although it’s still disappointing there’s no BANG, the machine is so noisy I can imagine no reason other than cost and general lack of consideration for user experience that you would have near silent weapons. A successful shot on any of the 16 targets triggers a sound to play and a bit of movement from somewhere in the shack; many of which are corny little vocal samples “that’s good cookin’ ma” and a plastic chicken pops out of it’s plastic pot, but a few of them activate more interesting and fun responses from the machine. The best of these involve the users, and any spectators unlucky enough to be within a 6 foot radius of the front of the machine being sprayed with water by the animatronic characters. The first time Chief Spitting Bull or the moonshine distillery gives you a face full of water it’s a real shock to the system. From then on you’re on edge a bit, concentrating on your aim but wary that you may have to dodge out of the way after every shot. I felt that this was The HillBillies saving grace, it’s a really novel way to involve the user and raised a laugh in every group I observed playing it.
If I was to redesign this machine I would hard to make it into a money vacuum! With more successful machines you put more money in because you were either frustratingly close to achieving an objective on your last try or because your are on your way to achieving a goal this time around and need to buy more credits to continue progressing. If neither of those elements are there users have a go to see what’ll happen, finish and move on. There was a big dial on the Moonshine Distillery which looked tantalizingly like it might move, instigating some kind of overload if you hit that target enough but it was moulded into the machine! I might introduce a bit of totally crazy, over the top animatronic action if a user is hitting all their targets, bringing the distillery close to explosion for example and making them desperate to find out what’ll happen if they keep playing, keep hitting the targets and it does explode. It could loads of water out onto the players which would be in key with the style of play and a damn sight more fun than just finishing up your shots and watching the machine fall silent again. Apart from the glaring errors in gameplay the Hillbilly models and set look really poorly designed and very cheaply constructed which is a shame because the original concept is so strong. It needs both elements putting right to really compete with modern arcade games I think.
posted by nick_gerrard @ 8:24 AM
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