Reitz Union Game Room

The Reitz, as it is affectionately known, can be seen as a three-in-one entertainment center for students and locals.  It offers pool tables, an arcade, and a bowling alley with a decent number of lanes.

The pool hall is the part that I use the least but arguably the most popular.  It has a not insignificant number of reasonably maintained pool tables with tons of generic cues available for casual players.  It's pretty much a pool hall, minus the smoking and shouting, which is a major plus to me but perhaps merits a penalty from the more traditional pool-playing crowd.

The bowling alley has enough lanes to support a pretty big crowd, but does get very busy at night, particularly Fridays because of all the peripheral events going on at the Union.  The lanes aren't particularly great and I never see them doing the oil patterns, but they do run several leagues for students and they're apparently good enough for most of the league bowlers to be happy.

The arcade falls well behind the standard set by the other two parts of the game room.  The selection of games is very poor, and the maintenance of said games is dreadful.  There are certainly bureaucratic issues taking place with this, but you know it's bad when numerous light gun games are rendered unplayable by the calibration (or lack thereof) and a Soul Calibur 2 machine sits frozen for seemingly an entire year.  The DDR Supernova pads are surprisingly well--maintained, probably due to the army of students who will perform Operation Shutdown and cut off 95% of the arcade's revenue when the pads are unplayable.  Unfortunately the machine is terribly old (originally a 3rd Mix, I'd imagine) and the monitor is FUBAR, making everything a strange purple color that is always hard to look at and often impossible to play.  One would hope that the Union, recognizing dance gamers as their major crowd, would lend them a hand in the future.  Similarly, the Marvel vs Capcom 2 machine has terrible joysticks and buttons on both sides which make it hard to play in any serious capacity.  These things are incredibly cheap to replace and require very little effort; people mod controllers at home all the time, yet a professionally-run establishment goes months without fixing simple problems.

The Reitz Union Game Room serves most of it's purposes well enough, but the horribly used potential of the arcade is a definite downer.  Don't expect much from that circle.

UF's Reitz Union Game Room is truly as good as it gets. USF used to have some arcade games in the old Marshall center, but they are no longer used since we upgraded our student union and UF students are so lucky to have their arcade, bowling alley, and all those pool tables located right on-campus. I have to say I'm quite jealous and when I'm up in Gainesville visiting friends, it's nice to stop by here for a little while and play a quick racing game or check out the area. The free movie, popcorn, and soda upstairs is one of the things that makes me wish I was a UF student. USF has Movies on the Lawn but this is just so cool.

They have Dance Dance Revolution Supernova (DDR) in their arcade games section. It's the most popular machine with lots of crowds. There are excellent gamers. Currently the price is two quarters for one player, one dollar for dual or two players. (It used to be three quarters for one or two players.)

The bowling area is very clean and cheap. They have near new balls and the shoe rental is not so bad. Their pool tables are pretty nice as well. Much better than any other place in Gainesville I've been to.