Nickelcade=fun...and exercise?

One of the more ignored things on our Bucket List this summer was going to Nickelcade - mostly because Lisa wasn't that excited about going, so we waited until she went back up to school to head to this semi-shady hangout for middle schoolers, high schoolers and a few post-graduates of college.

My hazy memories of Nickelcade involve Skeeball, basketball games, tons of luck games, semi-dirty carpet and lots of younger kids, so I was interested to see if it had changed at all. Mostly it hadn't - even from what I remember.

Although there were a lot more "knock the nickel off the edge of the precipice to get tickets" games than I remember from before. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll try to explain: you put your nickel in the slot (usually at the top of the machine) and it usually went through a series of pegs and such, until it dropped at the bottom, where various machines were going back and forth (but not over the entire ledge), pushing nickels off of the surface your nickel just dropped onto. But sometimes yours wouldn't push other nickels off - just get stuck on top of the pile that was right on the edge of where the machines were pushing. Also, you couldn't shake the machine or jostle it in any way, or your tickets were forfeited.



(This is the best picture I could find to represent the game- except instead of giving you your money back, it gave you tickets.)

I was the best at the soccer one - you could knock nickels off or shoot them into a hole for extra tickets - or both. I got the grand prize of 80 tickets for shooting it past the goalie into the barely-nickel-size hole. And I was proud.

Caryn was pretty good at the driving/flying/shooting games, and Becca was amazing at the game where you hit a button right when a moving light was in a certain place - she won the jackpot three times at that game. She was also really good at air hockey - she beat Caryn and me for the title of champion. Also, through her dedication she won a Harley Davidson-shirt-sporting stuffed eagle from a crane game - which she doesn't know what to do with now. But she won it all the same. ;)

Something else Caryn was good at was something I'd never tried: DDR. I was worried that I was so bad that I couldn't have anyone watch me do it for the first time, much less keep up with Caryn and play with her. But I did both - I bit the bullet and attempted to dance to six songs. It was a lot of fun - and a pretty good workout, too. My only sad thing is that they have nothing between novice and easy - and it's quite a leap in skill.

I've been trying to figure out what I'm going to do for exercise, and I think I might try DDR...I've found some TV-hookup ones that don't require a PS or XBOX - but are they any good?