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Remember your arcade glory days? Losing your entire week’s allowance to Street Fighter 2, hearing the Gauntlet machine tell you that the “Wizard is about to die and needs food. Badly” for the tenth time, or even watching as missiles inevitably destroy your base in Missile Command. If that hasn’t brought up any old memories, either you grew up in a sheltered environment, were born after 1985, or your heart has stopped beating. If this is the case, then the Game Cabinets Classicade Cocktail Machine is not for you.

Obviously, the ClassicCade Cocktail Machine was engineered by a group of men who refused to let go of their childhoods. Built for the modern day working gamer, this machine is capable of playing just about any arcade game from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. At first glance, the Classicade Cocktail Machine looks like a classic Galaga table game with a few extra controllers strapped onto the side. But when you open the unit, you find a nice 19 inch monitor connected to a small PC with a wireless mouse and keyboard and a premium sound system with a subwoofer.

The machine powers up by pushing one button located under the glass. The PC comes with a 80 GB hard drive, pre-installed with Windows XP and an application called GCI Arcade. CGI Arcade is an arcade ROM emulator program. From an easy-to-read menu, you simply select which game you wish to play. Just double click and in seconds you can reclaim the fruits of your missing childhood.

Remapping keys is done through a setup menu. So if you never liked the setup for the Marvel vs. Capcom or Tekken, you can reconfigure to your hearts content. Obviously, the best advantage of playing the Classicade machine is the amount of money you save trying to beat games that robbed you of hard earned pocket change. If you want to upload more ROMs at any time, you can load a CD, DVD, or use a USB Drive to transfer more games into the system. If at any time something breaks or goes wrong with the machine, Game Cabinets will replace any part for free for 6 months. After that, all you have to pay for is replacement parts.

Overall the ClassiCade Cocktail Machine is more fun than it looks. For the time we had it at JIVE, I hardly remembered I had PC, let alone console games. This is the perfect gift for anyone who was a child of the 70’s or 80’s or for someone who just doesn’t find DDR games all that appealing.

Rating: 5 out of 5 reedemable tokens