Tuesday 15 February 2022

NQ64 Arcade Bar


60–61 St Mary Street, Cardiff [map]

Previously the site of bizarro sports compound The Bunker, 60–61 St Mary Street is now home to the Instagram-friendly retro-future arcade games cyberbar of your dreams. Or nightmares. Depending on how you look at it.
There's a small but perfectly formed selection of beers on tap, although branding your house lager '4-Bit' Pilsner isn't exactly selling it. Obviously, we opt for the 4-Bit Pilsner.

While you're at the bar, you can also buy tokens for the parade of vintage arcade games on offer – the raison d'être of the whole place. Sundry games consoles from 'yesteryear' are also available to play for free.
Rarely will you see anyone playing cutesy shoot-'em-up compendium Point Blank 2 in as resolutely melancholy a manner as this.
Edgy.
If you're looking for what semiologist Roland Barthes – in a chapter entitled 'The World of Wrestling' in his seminal 1957 tome Mythologies – referred to as, "The primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences," via the medium of an early '90s coin-operated videogame, then WWF WrestFest is just the ticket.

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