Hilton Coylumbridge, Aviemore

There was no specific plan to visit the Hilton Colyumbridge in Aviemore at this stage of the YouArcade journey, but it certainly worked out tidily from a narrative perspective. Seeing the selection of games on offer here was a little depressing, but not in the way many of our previous visits have been. 

Hilton’s Colyumbridge’s arcades aren’t depressing in terms of washed out screens and shattered light-guns or swathes of fun-time real estate given over to slightly seedy fruit machines. Instead, the selection of games available in Aviemore was a blunt reminder that the days of OutRun 2 and Crazy Taxi being arcade kings was over, and the days of Golden Axe and Shinobi were prehistoric. This isn’t necessarily a slight against the cabinets on offer there, but is a little painful to see that Sega’s arcade golden age has ended in such harsh terms.

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Elgin, Arbroath, not Lossiemouth but almost Nairn

One common theme shared amongst the arcades we've visited is that most of them are only notionally arcades. They're bowling alleys or fun-fairs quite often, but the idea of a building dedicated to video games is as alien to Scotland as it is exciting to me.

The upshot of this is that the places you find video games often seem pretty confused about what to do with them. Elgin's Bowl 2000 only had two games during our visit, one of which was Ford Racing (ugh), awkwardly placed right next to the children's play area making any adults who want to play it look really creepy. Putting aside that wanting to play the charisma-free Ford Racing: Full Blown is actually kind of creepy, what's the message here? These games are for children? Are they for families to play or groups of people out together? The placement and selection of many of the games we've found seems to suggest that arcade owners aren't really sure.

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M&D's (Motherwell)

From the perspective of a blog seeking out Sega arcade games throughout Scotland, M&D's is frankly disappointing. Two Sega games in a complex as large as M&D's couldn't be anything but disappointing, especially considering that the main arcade area is mostly dominated by fruit machines. That's not to say it wasn't great to find and play good condition Scud Race and Daytona USA cabinets in the bowling area (indicating to me that increasingly, arcades perhaps aren't the best place to find arcade games), but it did mean that M&D's had a pretty flimsy roster of Sega games.

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