BEST ARCADE

All true arcade rats know an arcade is only as good as its service technician. Joysticks get jiggly, DDR dance pads crack, and occasionally a sore loser will even take a swing at a defenseless video screen. When games go bad, gamers go elsewhere -- unless the arcade has a tireless technician like Robbie Fenwick, the geeks' go-to guy at the Golfland-Sunsplash arcade in Mesa. Fenwick presides over the hundreds of driving and fighting games, pinball machines and especially the music-oriented games that are Golfland's specialty, ranging from three DDR machines to instrument-simulation games like Drum Mania, Guitar Freaks and Keyboard Mania, motion-sensitive dance games like Dance Freaks and Para Para Paradise, and even a Korean DDR competitor called Pump It Up. As a bonus, Golfland's proximity to the Sunsplash water park also makes it the only arcade in town where you can catch girls in bikinis dancing on the DDR machines -- which is not always a good thing for Fenwick. "A good portion of the problems we get here happen because we're right next to a water park," Fenwick says. "So people get all wet and then they're playing on the machines. Water and electricity -- not always a good mix."