Finishing the game room

The game room started out as just a place to put the MAME cabinet, but soon evolved into becoming a dedicated room for all manner of fun stuff. The Asteroids Deluxe game in one corner and the MAME cabinet in the other are the anchors. But I also brought in an old air hockey table that had been languishing in the basement, an electronic dartboard suffering the same fate, and a shelving unit I filled with board games from Parcheesi to Pandemic. Heck, I even threw in a cheap little over-the-door basketball hoop I had lying around.

I also took down a number of bits of art we had up. Back when we were selling a house, we bought a number of bland and inoffensive bits of inexpensive art: pastoral landscapes, for instance. Mass-produced stuff of the sort you might expect to see in an inexpensive hotel, but perfectly adequate to dressing up a room for a sale without giving it too much personality. Rather than let these go to waste we'd put them up in the guest rooms to break up the expanses of wood walls. I took all these down from the game room, however, and redecorated.

First, there's a huge poster that was already up in there (for lack of anywhere else to put it) showing the history of the U.S. air and space program in a beautiful visual timeline. It's about eight feet long and two rows so it takes up a lot of space. To this I added a Tron poster, as well as a Powers Of Ten poster that had been up in the living room (and had to come down to make room for the cat ramps).

While the game room has been taken over by Simon and River for most of a month now, and as a result, both use and setup of the games has come to a screeching halt almost since the day they went in, I've managed to finish one last part of the setup of the room. The makeshift stereo I cobbled out of old stuff for the vow renewal is now in place in the game room atop the board game shelves. It's basically a tiny little Radio Shack amplifier that still puts out reasonable sound, a pair of speakers (from the first stereo system I ever bought with my own money, thus dating back to about 1983 -- which in a way makes them especially appropriate for the MAME room -- and still making surprisingly good sound), and my Archos multimedia player. Tomorrow, I'll write about setting that up.