If your into pinball then https://roanokepinball.org/ (Virginia) Limited paid parking, take Lyft to get there. You can play everything in 4-6 hours.
All three are free-play, pay per head for admission, ok to leave and come back same day.
Like I want the fully experience :)
Loved arcades back in the day
Two of them are basically just noisy f'ing bars with a lot of arcade machines you have to pay for and the third, which operates as per your description, has a lot of slightly-broken cabs and uses emulation for several of them.
But what's worse is that when you don't have to pay for it, it turns out most arcade games really suck.
One thing I really enjoy, as someone born in the late 80s and missing out on the arcade scene entirely, is experiencing the old games that I've heard so much about. I always try to hit up the local classic arcade whenever I'm out of town. It's fun to search for an arcade that finally has that game I've been hunting down to experience. For example just a month ago, I went to an arcade here in the Twin Cities for the first time, and they had both a Super Breakout (1976) and an Asteroids (1979). I've always heard about how eye-piercingly bright the weapons fire in Asteroids is, but never got to experience the real vector graphics machine until just last month. It was a treat! And Breakout has this huge, physical knob that you use to change game modes -- kchunk, kchunk. Great stuff, very memorable.
One day I'd really like to experience an original Pong :) But I think they're quite rare these days.
The shine does wear off if you keep hitting the same arcade, for sure. But it's fun to explore new ones in other cities, or new ones as they pop up in your hometown. And it's always great to bring along a friend who is new to the scene and show them the sights.
I've always heard about how eye-piercingly
bright the weapons fire in Asteroids is
But what's worse is that when you don't have to
pay for it, it turns out most arcade games really suck.
Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga in particular have absolutely sublime risk vs. reward scoring mechanics. They're deadly boring IMO if you simply try and stay alive as long as you can, but if you play for score it gets interesting.
This isn't true for every game, and by the mid to late 80s games had fully transitioned into "stay alive as long as possible" quarter munchers.
Emulators rarely capture this. My sense is that they more or less perfectly recreate the sound being output by the sound chips. But they are (understandably) not recreating the physical speaker drivers in the cabinets or other analog filtering steps (if any)
I agree with you: most of them get it badly wrong.
(But it's been years since I really looked into it)
Except the Sinistar game shouting at you "RUN, COWARD!"
"Wizard is about to die"