I am fortunate enough to live in Chicago, where this arcade opened last August near Brookfield:

http://www.gallopingghostarcade.com/

I was there last weekend, and put in heavy hours on Vulgus, Dig Dug, SVC Chaos, KOF 97, and Commando. They have over 200 arcade games and the place was packed on a Saturday night. On the top of each cab they have a small placard with the arcade's personal top score which you can try and beat if you want your name on there, as well as the Twin Galaxies hi-score for comparison.

In addition to this, we have a GameWorks in Woodfield... with every light gun game ever (All of the HOTD's, all of the Time Crisis games, Razing Storm, 2Spicy), along with a row of actual Japanese Candy cabs for SFIV, KOF XII, and Tatsunoko vs Capcom (though I am sure they swapped this out for MVC3).

Mind you, at home most of the games I own on consoles like the Dreamcast and Saturn are arcade ports that I play with real arcade sticks like the Saturn HSS-0130 Arcade Stick; it's still nice to head out to a real arcade and put in some work on a real Tiger Heli or 1942/43 cab.

What happened to speed and efficiency?
Why remove the "News for nerds, stuff that matters" tagline?
Why remove the color coding from the content sections? (When it was purple, I always knew I was in 'games'.)
There is no contrast between the very bottom edge of the header rim and the slight drop shadow. It just looks blurry as a result.
The gray background should be reverted to black or dark gray.
The green should have its color saturation increased. It is far too muted.

I wish the old site design would return, with improved margins, and Arial or Verdana fonts:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010507000311/http://www.slashdot.org/

Before there was wikipedia, youtube, livejournal, blogger, and many of the other centralized public services; people ran their own websites. People have become too reliant on these types of behemoth CMS systems. The notion of the "fan site" seems to be a dying theme and people need to be reminded that the power is in their hands to start up their own authoritative knowledge base. Storing information in wikipedia leaves it at the mercy of ignorance, and often times, wikipedia is re-writing history rather than clarifying it.

The sheer volatility of source information on the net makes it impossible for sources based on web based material to stand the test of time. Websites die, mergers go through, and hard-drives fail. Historically accurate information is being stripped out of wikipedia on a daily basis simply because the source links have died, and wikipedia admins stroll through gutting information like mindless drones. This gradual erosion of information online has a trickledown effect.

Case in point: A while back I edited the entry on Shinobi for the Playstation 2 at Wikipedia. There is a gross misconception that the game was envisioned during the Dreamcast era, and that development had already started for the Sega platform. As it turns out, this is not the case, as specifically stated in an Interview at GamePro. However the article link changed, and a user nuked the information from the wikipedia entry, allowing the same old misinformation about Shinobi starting out as a Dreamcast game to seep back into the article.

The link to the interview still exists, but at a new URL:

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/23740/interview-with-shinobi-developers/

Noriyoshi Ohba: "That's why we [Overworks] didn't make any new Shinobi game for the Saturn or Dreamcast. It wasn't until just this last year [2001] that I had some time and thought I'd tackle the series again."
Takashi Uriu: "This initiative on our part started just as Sega was going multiplatform..."

While it's true that starting up a seperate website doesn't guarantee accuracy, at least the overseers of fansites/compendiums are more concerned about the pursuit of truth on their topic of expertise; and since the sites are within their control, it prevents outsiders from breaking their information repository.