So last night my friend and I found ourselves in a rut. Lounging around with a storm brewing outside, I was drawing in Photoshop, he had Fallout 3 going. Going stir crazy is pretty common for me, and after about 4 or 5 hours of being sedentary, I suggested we dip to a nearby bar and eatery. When I heard about this place, I was overjoyed by the sheer novelty of it all.





It's called "Chatterbox" - really just a place for night owls and college crowds. You can score big glasses of beer and bottles of wine if you really wanted to. There's some decent grub, but the magic is in the money-making gimmick they present to you.

Let me start off by saying the interior of this place is surreal. Around the perimeter of the interior, it's set up like diner booths, but the center looks like your Aunt's living room from 1989. Cheesy sofas and cushions with barf-inducing floral patterns, low coffee tables, TV's with NES and Sega Genesis hooked up....

Wait, what?

Yes! For $2 a pop you can play any cartridge from a substantial list of games, displayed in the back of their menu. The prospect is amazing, if you ask me. It's like paying someone to be your mommy for the night. Needless to say, we had the poor waitress bring us Super Mario 3, and a pint each.

There was a level of guilt involved, maybe similar to how a married man would feel at a strip club. These poor young women waiting hand and foot on a bunch of drunk man-children all night..it just felt wrong.

I felt myself regress to a child-like state as I gulped pale ale and slapped buttons on that archaic NES controller. Entranced by he glowing images of my childhood, I could not even respond to the waitress when she asked us what we wanted to eat:

"Huh??! Oh! Onion rings and the quesadilla!!!"

Wow.


Chatterbox isn't a place where you go to hit on the cute women that work there. They already think you're a loser by default. It's extremely possible to burn through all the cash in your wallet at a place like this, but man, is it fun to let your inner child wreak havoc.







PS- three pints later, they closed the place for the night and we couldn't even beat world 2 :[