There comes a time in every man's life when he must poorly graft together stolen images of Super Soakers and inflatable Tiki party supplies. That time...is now.
Welcome to the X-Entertainment Summer Megaparty, where the drinks are strong, the women are easy and the nerdy blog gets updated every damn day from now until August 1st! Consider it a virtual barbecue. Only, instead of everyone running off to play bocce ball with beers in tow, we kind of just sit around talking about toys and potato chips.
Combing my head for something that could serve as an identifiable symbol for a "summer megaparty," it seemed like the classic arcade claw machine was the way to go. Quarter in, claw down, bootleg Fred Flintstone doll out. You know the drill. While I could spend this entry debating whether or not we should be calling such devices "claw machines" or "crane machines," I'm instead going to reach way back into the recesses of my filthy office and pull out something even better. Claw Machine: The Home Game.
I picked up this Grab-A-Prize game back in 2004. Originally, I was going to include it as a special bonus in that vending machine prize article, but the article ended up not really needing special bonuses. Since then, it's sat on the back of a shelf collecting dust, which is not something I say figuratively. There was enough dust on the top of the box for me to legibly fingerwrite entire haikus.
Grab-A-Prize was on clearance for twenty bucks. At the time, I thought it was because the box was kind of beat up. After all, how could a home version of the arcade claw machine possibly suck, especially when it came with prizes? Unfortunately, I've found that home versions of arcade claw machines can suck in at least ten different ways. That doesn't steal the game's charm and conceptual awesomeness...it just means that I'm not hiring a calligraphist to draw up invitations for all my friends to come play it with me.
Getting the thing started is a fiasco. You've gotta unscrew a bunch of panels and rip out different wires and stuff, and I'll give you just one guess as to which kind of screws they used. Yup, those impossibly tiny Phillips-head screws. The ones that can't be undone by anything short of an eyeglass repair kit. I don't wear glasses. Instead, knives, nail files and screwdrivers in every size but the correct one were implemented, and even then, I ended up just having to break the thing open with my hands. The last thread on the blog had everyone listing their personal quirks. Here's another of mine:
- Whenever I see a tiny Phillips-head screw, a piece of me dies.
Once you get Grab-A-Prize going, it seems to work well enough. Wacky carnival music blares while little lights twinkle, and it's up to you to guide a weak claw around, trying to pick up one of eight included toy prizes. The prizes come in taped-together plastic eggs, I guess because plastic eggs that could stick together without the aid of tape would've put too much of a strain on the production budget.
Picking up one of the eggs isn't easy, but it's not impossible either. That's pretty consistent for arcade claw/crane machines, so two points for realism. Course, it would've helped if the company made the prize slot large enough for the eggs to actually fit through them. When you grab one and bring the claw over to the hole, the egg just sits on top of the entrance, totally defiant. So, every time you win, you've gotta open up the back door and pound the egg down the slot. If I'm going to do that, I can pretty much skip the whole clawing process. Maybe they just wanted everyone to have a chance to feel like one of those arcade dudes with the 400 keys who has to come over to retrieve trapped Pink Panther plushies whenever there's a machine malfunction.
Wondering what the eight included toy prizes are? I'll bet!
They're all keychains. Pretty lousy keychains. There's planes and tanks and stuff, but more interestingly, there's a robot who has half of a car for a head, and a toy cell phone with a picture of a knockoff Barbie doll on its call screen. I guess the money prize is the fireman figure, if for no other reason than the fact that he looks like a cherry flavored Megaman fruit snack from the neck down.
Grab-A-Prize is far from perfection, because you can't buy perfection for twenty bucks unless we're talking about those gigantic containers of Twizzlers found at wholesale outlets. I'm still pretty happy with it overall, mainly because it plays weird music, and because it let me write haikus out in dust.
Posted by Matt on 06/20/2007. E-mail me!
Chestnuts roasted by 
First, but probably second or third by the time I finish writing.
Crane games don’t work in the arcade, why would you want one at home?