Warning: Westmall's Arcade

Just last Saturday, Melvyn and I had the misfortune of vising Westmall's arcade. I'm extremely disgusted by their horrible service attitude, and that's saying something. I am very hard to displease. I suppose, due to the huge amount of electricity consumption by their newly added toy-catching machines, a power trip occurred. The entire area of toy-catching machines, as well as, Sweet Land, simply went dark.


The most ironic thing of the encounter was this:


Oh yes, the hook stuck in the middle of nowhere, the piglet I was attempting to capture, and judging from positioning I would have caught it. Which brings me to the part where they failed to get the power back on. There we stood, foolishly in front of the aforementioned piglet machine for at least half an hour, waiting for the horribly disorganized staff to fix the power failure. Failing to diagnose the problem and bring the power back up, the staff did not so much as attempt to address the people foolishly waiting for their money and chances stuck inside the machines, until we, the foolish people confronted them.


There's Melvyn in the white shirt, amidst the group of dissatisfied customers, waiting for the staff to render us with a suitable solution. Well then, as I mentioned earlier, I'm an extremely dissatisfied customer, horribly disgusted by their lack of service. The only solution they gave us was to record our game cards in the system and lock it down so they can return us our credit to the specific machine when we return to the arcade at a later date. As staff of a game arcade, their lack of understanding of their own services simply disappoint me.

Toy-catching is based on chance and position. It takes much more than 1 credit to get your prize positioned to the exact position for catching. Once you miss that chance, you are going to spend much more than that 1 credit you use on a capture attempt to get the toy in a suitable position once again. Not to mention, the fact that our cards are locked down, unable us to use that particular card in other arcades.

I feel more strongly towards those playing Sweet Land at the moment. Let me explain. Sweet Land's main objective is not to catch sweets, but to hit the jackpot. There are 3 stages in the road to the jackpot. The stages are labeled A, B, and C. It takes approximately 5 bubbles to reach each stage. C is the last stage. After C, it takes 5 more bubbles to hit the jackpot. At the jackpot, you get a stuffed toy. When you scoop up the sweets onto the platform, the sweets at the front line usually fall off the platform into the "hole". Only when a sweet falls at the specific tiny tab right in the middle of the platform, you then get a bubble up. There is a spinner, like the Wheel of Fortune that sees how many bubbles up you will get, ranging from 1 to 3. The machines are usually rigged and it always ends at 1. So imagine, you need at least 1 credit to get 1 bubble up, and in total, there are 21 bubbles if I'm not wrong, and there are many chances that you miss that tab. Imagine how many credits the player would lose if he was at C when the power trip occurred. Totally unfair, isn't it?

Remind me never to go back to Westmall's arcade. Let this serve as a warning and insight to their extremely dissatisfying service and attitudes.

Footnote: Who are you Arameya?