My husband and I have been
together as boyfriend and girlfriend, then engaged couple, then married for just over ten years now. Our “getting together” anniversary is April nineteenth. To celebrate, we left the kids with my mother, and headed out to AFK Gamer Lounge in San Jose.
It was perfect timing, too, as I’m neck deep in the audiobook of <u>Ready Player One</u> by Ernest Cline, read by Wil Wheaton, so going to a geeky, gamer lounge was the perfect date for me.
If you haven’t seen or heard anything about AFK Gamer Lounge, you can visit their website, or follow them (@GameAFK) on Twitter.
The first thing we did when we arrived was talk to some of the staff about the servies they provide, then wander around the facility to get a feel for the place. I suppose we could have done a little more research into figuring out what AFK Gamer Lounge was all about, but as soon as we saw the pictures on the website we knew we had to go. And what better way to learn than to go visit? Jump in with both feet, or whatever the expression is.
Our evening started with a couple of cocktails from their drink menu. While I was enthusiastic about the names of the cocktails, and couldn’t wait to try one, my husband and I don’t do a whole lot of drinking. So we stuck with one each. I had the “Press Start” and he had the “Watermelon Block Moonshine” but we switched after sipping each other’s drink.
It was our older daughter’s 6th birthday that day, so we’d gone out to eat lunch
and to have a late afternoon ice cream. (We shared a piece of pie, a la mode. What? It was a celebratory weekend, okay?) So neither my husband nor I was very hungry. We opted for Sliders (makes me think of Jerry O’Connell every time) and a side of home-made potato chips. And goodness, were they good. Served with ketchup. I did some dipping.
While waiting for our food and during the meal, we played on the GameCube that was positioned at our table. Granted it wasn’t the best system, nor the best table. It was hard to see the tv screen from my seat, so I had to shift my chair around. And we were craning our necks to get a good view. The selection needs work, too. The only two games we could play were Sonic or Tetris. We played both. Then we paid for our meal and headed downstairs to check out the basement.
One of the main things we wanted to do was try out the PS4 or the XBoxOne that you can rent by the hour at the facility. We paid for an hour’s worth of computer time to wait for one of those systems to become available. The computers have really comfortable chairs and awesome, noise-reduction headsets. They’ve got Steam, Minecraft, Blizzard, and a few other things already installed and ready to go. We’d only just started fiddling around with them when the guy came over and said we could try out the PS4.
Again, we found the problem was that it didn’t have any games we might be interested in. We played a little Mortal Kombat, some First Person Shooter game (Call of Duty? Which made me think of Wreck It Ralph. Heh. Duty.) and then a Soccer/Fifa game. Somehow, mashing buttons, my husband and I won our first match on the soccer game. Then we decided to get back onto the computers to spend the rest of our time playing something we were actually interested in.
Hubs introduced me to League of Legends. We played that for a little under an hour before deciding it was time to head home. Of course, we’re old, and we have two young kids. So we left right when AFK Gamer Lounge was starting to fill up with people–around 10:15pm.
I did notice how there weren’t a whole lot of girls downstairs. There were plenty up in the restaurant/bar upstairs–one even cosplayed as Daenerys Targaryen, and believe me when I say she was rockin’ that outfit. But downstairs was a different story.
All of the employees were cheerful and super helpful. We didn’t have any problem asking for help or getting additional services. They went above and beyond, actually, seeking us out to share when the PS4 was available to rent, spreading our unused PS4 time onto our computer time. It was wonderful.
All in all, I think AFK Gamer Lounge is a fantastic place for a geeky, date night. Hubs and I will definitely be going back there some day when we have in-home childcare. (When the girls spend time with Maga and Paga or Oma at their respective homes, we do in-home date nights with our own computers!) I would love to drag some of my other friends to AFK Gamer Lounge, so that we can have a LAN party without all the set-up and clean-up!
