Will admit I kind of grooved on Noovie Arcade (https://www.noovie.com/arcade). Before the movie starts, blast out aliens on the big screen? Sure, why not?
It sounds more neat in concept than execution, however, at least the first time you encounter the prompt to download the game, the action is about to start.
One problem is you have to be in your seat like 30 minutes before the movie event starts to see and experience the game, because once the movie is supposed to start, moviegoers must endure 15-20+ minutes of previews for other movies. A lot of people, ourselves included, don’t want to arrive more than 30 minutes before the movie even starts.
We also don’t like arriving in the middle of previews, either, when it’s darker in the theater and feels disruptive to the audience. This is why when we do attend movies we usually take the end aisle seats – for quick entrance and exiting.
There was a time my wife and I were seeing a ton of movies in theaters. I mean like 10-20+ movies a month. This was mostly pre-COVID, of course. We really enjoy seeing movies in theater, with popcorn, and then there was Noovie kind of there for some gaming action. Will get back to Noovie in a second, because some related side roads are necessary.
TIP: Skip the next couple paragraphs if you don’t care that much about movies and just want to learn more about Noovie Arcade.
We also maintained a movie-oriented blog from 1999-2001, when we were regularly visiting movie theaters with our Regal and AMC subscriptions. The website was called Movie Reviews By Us. I had interest and was considering becoming a Rotten Tomatoes reviewer — of which you need to be a regular movie reviewer for like 2 years to meet the criteria — but then COVID happened and, well, I got more back into gaming since we couldn’t go to movie theaters. When we could go back to movie theaters, we weren’t finding enough movies to justify paying $22/month each for the AMC pass so we let it go. The nearly 1,000 movie reviews published, as of this writing, are available on my Letterboxd for free to view here: https://letterboxd.com/tjsnk/
(Ed. note: we’ve since let the domain go and it has reverted back to being a WordPress free site (https://watchmoviesreview.wordpress.com/) littered with ads we make $0 from. Not recommending to check out, but providing reference to a movie-related site I contributed to. If you really enjoy my writing and like movies and you can tolerate the ads, there are a couple years worth of movie-related posts there. The blog is no longer being updated, as we canceled our monthly movie theater subscriptions and don’t go to many movies in theaters any more)
So, you can imagine when we’re seeing up to a couple dozen or more movies a month — again, past tense, we aren’t as of this writing any longer — we had plenty of opportunity to check out Noovie Arcade. My wife didn’t really have any interest, although she did like the before movie trivia stuff.
Retrospectively, the weaknesses for Noovie Arcade, as mentioned at the start of this article, are placement, that it only happens too long before the movie starts when few people are in the theater and the fact you need their app installed and running. The app is fairly quick to install, or was, anyway, when I first installed it, but I missed out on the first game when first prompted, because I had to get it installed.
The games themselves are fun mobile games interacting with the big screen.
The concept and execution is actually pretty entertaining for a short burst game. There is a leaderboard as well so you can see how you performed.
Friendly gamer readers, have you ever tried out the Noovie Arcade before watching a movie? If so, what did you think? The games are very basic, but something to do that’s way more fun than watching a ridiculous amount of ads and then movie previews. I guess maybe some folks enjoy the previews, but we just wanted to see the darn movie we paid to see. We can watch previews/trailers/teasers online for future or other currently running movies.