You mightn't have noticed, and probably don't care, but some note should be made of the death of the video arcade: peacefully at home, aged about 30, dearly missed by his millions of illegitimate, misguided children. Donations, in 10p coins please, to Atari and Namco corporations.
Yes, there are still arcades in our resorts and cities, many in the same premises and bearing the same names they've had for decades. But have you been inside lately? These are not the enervating Aladdin's Caves where my generation's silicon treasures were secreted, the electronic Louvres where digital tech and human art collided in masterpieces like Asteroids, Defender and Tempest.
No, these are shiny, epicene, cash-guzzling play-malls for morons, wherein the most banal amusements conceivable are meted out in pico-measures, with reward coming not from the circumscribed immortality of a record score, or the froth-speckled adrenalin of beating that impossible final level, but rather from the puny emission of a few stinking tickets which, in logarithmic quantities, can be given to a suicidally bored attendant in return for garish plastic crap which would shame any bargain shop.
Roll a coin onto a tiny, Simpsons-bedecked conveyor belt: the prize, between one and 30 tickets. Drop another into some nihilist roulette wheel that seductively suggests a payout of 1,000; typically, you'll get four. Two euro buys you thirty seconds of shooting hoops in a mean little basketball box, with more miserly scrip your only trophy.
Excepting that old stalwart the racing game, its shaking bucket seats increasingly bulbous and erotic as its linked multi-player screens get bigger and higher-def, the "traditional" videogame is extinct. Instead we get carny-esque, 1950s Blackpool Pier mechanisms: knock over the duck, sink the ball in the hole, club the seal's brains out. You can wrap it up in blinking neon tat and charge 50c per second, but it's still a techno-evolutionary throwback, a scientific surrender, and a damned shame.
But the economics of old-fashioned arcades don't add up anymore. Home consoles have outpaced and out-muscled coin-operated systems for a decade. Gaming itself has changed too; nobody wants short, intense, meritocratic public competition when they can relax instead into a filmic two hours of Mass Effect 2 on their XBox 360 at home.
C'est la vie. But somewhere out there, in some scrapheap or collector's games room, there's a dirty, scorch-marked Berzerk cabinet with an all-time high score by "HTY" still screen-burned onto its ancient monitor. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.