Go back in time about 25 years. While you're there, tell the eight-year-old version of me running around Chuck E. Cheese that, in your time, there is a virtual reality device that can transport you to a "virtual arcade" in your own home. Tell the young me that this virtual arcade has dozens of recreated 3D cabinets that you can play endlessly, without having to insert any quarters.

I'm pretty sure the young version of me would die from excitement.

Fast forward to the present (the future?) and the 33-year-old me is having a bit more trouble getting excited about the current beta version of Oculus Arcade for the Gear VR headset. The app, first announced in September , launched earlier this week with 22 retro titles from Sega, Midway, and Namco. Each game can be played for a free 20 minute demo or bought individually for a few bucks each.

To be sure, there's an initial giddy thrill to playing these classics in virtual reality. Seeing an apparently life-sized cabinet in front of you and staring at a screen that more than fills your immediate vision is a heady experience, especially for young'ns who may have only experienced these titles through a PC emulator or the like. The slight "screen door" blurriness of the Gear VR actually works to its advantage here, evoking the low-fi fuzziness of an old cathode ray tube well.

As I played in VR, I found myself unconsciously turning my head to focus on different parts of the screen, emphasizing the appeal of the large-as-life experience. Of course, that illusion was broken if I ever tried to lean my head in towards the screen to get a closer look; the entire world would tilt sickeningly forward with my movement instead. And fiddling with a handheld controller is never going to match the feeling of leaning on the solid joystick and springy buttons of a real arcade cabinet—I'm very sad that I wasn't able to get my iCade unit synced up with the Galaxy Note 4 via Bluetooth.

A sterile arcade museum

I had trouble really immersing myself in Oculus Arcade's retro-infused world. Part of the issue is that the appeal of some of these games has withered over time—I'm not really eager to pay a few bucks to buy yet another copy of Sonic the Hedgehog, especially when I've had the opportunity to purchase and play the game endlessly on at least a dozen other platforms over the decades (while we're at it, it's a bit weird seeing Genesis games, including RPGs, set up in virtual arcade cabinets). But that doesn't apply to all the games in this collection: cabinets like Pac-Man, Joust, and Root Beer Tapper are as timelessly fun as they ever were in this new environment.

Part of the problem is some surprisingly weak emulation work. The sound effects and background music popped in and out frequently in the emulated Genesis games and some arcade titles (Spy Hunter in particular). I was also surprised to find the games only supported the analog stick on my controller, mapping functions like coin drops and the start button to the d-pad. This could be due to the vagaries of the Ouya controller I used, but I was still upset there was no way to remap the buttons to get a more digital input.

But a large part of my problem with Oculus Arcade is the presence-busting effect of playing in such an artificial and empty environment. The world of Oculus Arcade resembles a sterilized arcade museum, something set up by an alien race from the far future trying to recreate a pastime of long-dead humanity without any real knowledge of how it all worked.

Cabinets sit perfectly positioned in neat semi-circles under bright flood lights, and they're separated into different rooms by manufacturer. Each room is adorned with some extremely generic neon and dull looking "outer space" carpeting. When you "walk in" to a room, these cabinets sit completely dark and silent with none of the visual and aural cacophony of the attract modes that beckon in a real arcade. There's no way to simply wander around this museum to admire the cabinet art, either. The best you can do on that score is warp over to a cabinet then glance left or right to see the art on the sides of the games sitting nearby.

If you do decide to look around while playing at a cabinet, you'll probably get a feeling of intense and chilling loneliness. There's something about looking at all those dead cabinets with no one standing at them in a completely still and lifeless virtual room that made me feel incredibly isolated (and this from a guy who spends entire days completely alone in a home office). It's also about as far from the loud, bustling, classic arcade experience as it's possible to get.

Hey, where is everyone?

Sure, previous arcade game compilations on PC and console usually fail to capture that arcade experience too. But they rarely if ever even try—those re-releases are content just recreating the game itself, letting you play in the comfort of your own living room or office without any pretensions to the artifice of the arcade. By literally surrounding players with the trappings of a virtual arcade, though, Oculus Arcade highlights just how artificial the whole experience is.

It doesn't have to be this way. Emulator-powered indie efforts like NewRetroArcade (and, to a lesser extent, MemoRift Arcade) on the Oculus Rift capture the feel of a classic arcade feel much more richly (if less legally). It's the little things that really make the experience feel authentic: streamable retro music; realistic cabinet layouts; classic movie posters on the wall; a two-lane bowling alley in the corner; a table littered with a CRT and Super NES games (and a playable Game Boy); and a general dark, musty, neon-tinted aesthetic that really captures the '80s arcade feel.

Despite this window dressing, both Oculus Arcade and NewRetroArcade don't capture the social experience of the arcade. Being at a real arcade is all about the sights and sounds of other people playing beside you. It's about about craning your neck to watch an impressive game over someone's shoulder, or sliding up next to them and putting a quarter down to join a multiplayer game.

Virtual reality has the potential to recreate this original "social gaming" situation with multiple players walking and talking and milling about a shared gaming space (and without the need to wait for limited cabinet space to open up for you to play). Yet every instance of Oculus Arcade is currently a completely isolated experience, siloing players into their own personal, lifeless museums. And while eight of the 22 titles in Oculus Arcade are built at least in part around simultaneous multiplayer, there's currently no way to play alongside another user either over the Internet or locally.

This kind of VR connectivity might seem like a silly thing to ask for given the relative newness of VR and the paucity of Gear VR headsets in the wild. But since at least its acquisition by Facebook, Oculus has been talking up the potential for VR to be a new kind of social connection ; a way to come together with others not just as words or images on a screen but as a physical presence in a shared space.

An app like Oculus Arcade could be the perfect showcase for this new kind of social VR gaming, using a familiar setting that would be immediately understandable and accessible to many gamers. We hope continued work by Oculus can turn what's currently a sterile showroom for dead arcade cabinets into a bustling virtual metaphor, where gamers can watch, mingle, and play alongside each other just like they did in dark, musty basement arcades decade ago.