I love love love the idea of this map! The pallette, zig-zaggy wall pattern, and ESPECIALLY that floor texture took me right back to my childhood. I felt like I was 8 years old again, impatiently waiting for the laser tag game to start.
I love the creativity of the arcade games, too. Sonic is a ball, so that opens up a lot of possibilities that you take advantage of. I seriously can't believe I haven't been Sonic Bowling in SRB2 until now. Same goes with the pinball machine - genius idea that should've been thought of a long time ago! I was particularly impressed that you made the water actually wavy. I could nearly smell the chlorine...
Nearly...
Which brings me to the hangups.
First, I think the music is a major misfire. For me, a level like this lives or dies on how well it takes me back to pleasant memories of places like it. This one is supposed to make me feel like I'm hanging out with my friends at Chuck-E-Cheese, but the music makes me feel like I'm high as hell in a seedy strip club. It's a pretty bad disconnect. It has too much of a sinister clubby-dancey vibe for a childhood funhouse. Even the tackiest, most questionable of Family Fun Centers didn't make me feel this way.
Second, as Roger sorta mentioned, the level is on the abstract side. Too abstract for a hangout map. In hangout more than any other "gamemode", there should exist little details from real life that you normally wouldn't bother with in a level. Areas filled with chairs and tables, so you can pretend to eat pizza while your idiot friend pretends to be the waiter; a cash register so you can pretend to buy snacks and shoot the shit with the cashier; a broom closet you can steal off to and "make out" with your internet crush - all the stuff that makes you cringe looking back at as an adult, but stuff you wish you could do as a kid but may not have opportunity to do because of social anxiety or whatever else.
In fact, I've always thought of the boundary between abstract and realistic as boiling down to one simple criteria: does your level have chairs and/or benches? If you include chairs and benches, you have to picture people sitting in them (which is something you often CAN'T do in games), which means you have to picture how people get to those chairs, why they would sit in them, etc. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I saw any chairs in this level! Where's my stupid sonic-themed avatar supposed to have a late-night heart-to-heart with a stranger's stupid sonic-themed avatar?
That's why I couldn't smell the chlorine.
That's my take, anyway. I'm sure there are plenty of kids having a blast in this map with their friends, and if I still had hours to waste in servers, I think I would too. But I think it could've been a whole lot more.
Still gets four stars for all the creativity and effort.
