Let’s Bounce (LAI Games)
The game: Armed with a bevy of ping pong balls, your task is to hit all 45 panels in front of you. As you do, they’ll change from orange to blue, and if you hit all of them within the allocated amount of balls, hooray! The tiles turn flashing rainbow colors and you get a bonus 10 seconds to try and hit as many as you can again.
Your reward, lots of tickets and the kind of self-satisfaction that can only be achieved in an arcade. You done good, son/daughter. You done real good.
The issue: Aesthetically, Let’s Bounce is one of the most appealing games you’ll find out there. Upon its release in 2017, it won the AMOA Innovator Award and netted a silver for BMI’s Best of Show. Because yes, it’s kind of fun to play. Had any of the people handing out the award stuck around for more than five minutes however, they’d have changed their minds real fast…
For starters, and this is a mind-numbingly stupid design flaw, there is no ball guard at the front of the cabinet. You have people frantically flinging ping pong balls around the place, and they’ll end up everywhere. They bounce backwards, forwards, upwards, even occasionally getting stuck within the cabinet lining. Should you be unfortunate enough to have two of these infernal devices, they’ll frequently all end up in just one machine, leaving the other empty.
When ball games run out of balls, they get very cranky. The machine will go into lockdown mode. No games, no happiness, no way for unsuspecting customers to actually know that the game is down, short of a tiny LED screen and a pathetic voice that proclaims there is a ball error.
Once you open this sucker up, you’ll be left flabbergasted as to what’s going on in there. The balls move from place to place via tiny little ramps that are inexplicably built at far too level an angle. Because of this, they often refuse to roll into their proper place, lodging themselves under the dispenser mechanism. Then you progress from a ball error to a ball gate error, which isn’t much more fun, either.
Navigating through the menu should be straightforward, but do you remember that LED screen I alluded to? When you open the machine to investigate the ball area, you lift up the panel that that LED screen is sitting on. Unless you categorically remember exactly how to navigate through the menu or you happen to be eleven feet tall and can just peer over at it, you won’t be able to scroll through while diagnosing faults.
As always, adding the human element in makes things even worse. The front few panels are within arm’s reach, and people will frequently reach in and smack them with their fists. Funnily enough, those panels aren’t exactly sturdy, and once they’ve come detached from their rubber basing, they’ll pretty much stay loose until the end of time. I’ve tried all kinds of industrial-strength adhesive (read: super glue), but it never seems to work.
And you know that bonus round I mentioned? Nobody ever knows it’s taking place until it’s already over. Come on manufacturers, stop assuming people understand these things.
