With Sizzling Service

Elissa Maudlin, Angelica Gonzalez Morales

Editor-in-Chief, Digital Managing Editor

Kamara Heier, an employee, stood at the front podium of SunShine Cafe Muncie. She watched customers come in and helped them pay out. The cafe wasn’t new to her; she’s been working on and off there for the last 14 years.

She’s also not the only one in her family who does. Her mother, fiancee, sister and niece work there too.

“I always call this home,” Heier said. “I’ve branched out [to other jobs] and ended up not liking it. Couple of other times, I left and tried to do other things, and [it] just didn’t work out.”

Her mother, Ronda Sweat, has been working there for 18 years and is the head cook. At first, she just needed a job, Sweat said, but she has stayed because she likes the people working there and gets along with them, especially owner Jarrod Buck.

Buck was originally a mechanic but took over at SunShine Cafe Muncie when his dad wanted to retire. His dad wanted to hand the business over to someone he could trust and knew the cafe was going to be taken with care.

“My dad did an amazing job here,” Buck said. “I mean he worked his butt off and built relationships with customers, and that kind of stuff gives good service.”

SunShine Cafe Muncie sits at 3113 N. Oakwood Avenue and started in 1972 as a Waffle House. Twenty-five years ago, Buck’s father made the decision to change the Waffle House into SunShine Cafe Muncie, and the cafe has been in the same location for 50 years. Buck said the decision to change the name came from wanting to get more people for lunch and dinner.

At a table in the front corner of the room at 1:18 p.m., Sandra Ellis and Dallas Ellis were eating a plate of cornbred, ham and beans. They come here a couple times a week, oftentimes on Mondays.

They’ve been coming, “since it existed,” Sandra said with a laugh, “because I love it.”

She described several things at the SunShine Cafe Muncie as wonderful: the people that wait on you, the food and the service.

“And we all hug and kiss our customers,” Cheryl Schut, a waitress, said as she rushed toward the table, giving Sandra a hug.

For Gayle Skowronski, another customer, Schut is her favorite waitress because she has “great compassion,” Skowronski said via email. Schut is often referred to as the “crazy cat lady” due to her love of cats.

Skowronski comes in one to four times a month, she said via email, and she found the cafe while driving around Muncie.

“[It] just feels like a comfortable, welcoming place,” she said via email.

Skowronski’s favorite thing about the cafe is the “friendly” staff and manager.

Sandra agreed. She said the wait staff is friendly and doesn’t make you wait longer than you have to. When the food comes, she said, it is how she wanted it.

“It’s our favorite Muncie restaurant,” Skowronski said via email, “and when we take our grandkids out separately, two say it’s their favorite too.”

On their Facebook page, the cafe has 1,300 likes and 1,400 followers. It showcases food items including beef and noodles, french toast, breaded tenderloin, pancakes, waffles, country fried steak, BBQ pulled pork and fries, spaghetti bogo and other items.

Their rating is a 3.9 out of 5 on Facebook, a 4.5 out of 5 on Grubhub and on MenuPix, it is 4.8 out of 5. The Muncie Visitors Bureau describes SunShine Cafe in Muncie as “a well known breakfast and lunch hotspot with a wide variety of home cooked meals. [It] feels like Mama comes there everyday just to cook for you, down home cooking and family friendly.”

Ball State students get 10 percent off of their order at SunShine Cafe Muncie.

When asked what makes SunShine Cafe different, there was a slight pause between Sandra and Dallas.

“Well, they take your stupid jokes,” she said to Dallas across the table, referring to his sense of humor.

Dallas also agreed SunShine Cafe Muncie is a good place to eat.

“The employees’ attitude[s have] a lot to do with it,” he said. “They’re usually really nice, joke with you and everything.”

Ella Howell Reporter

From the outside, the strip mall on West Fox Ridge Lane may appear as a typical building in Muncie. However, once you step inside, you’re faced with countless possibilities.

The Rizzo family opened the virtual reality arcade, Reality Bytes, in July 2022, and their novelty idea has taken entertainment in Muncie to a new level.

“We really call it entertainment of the future, and it’s an opportunity to not just sit and watch a movie or just play a game, but you’re completely immersed in the experience,” Beth Rizzo said.

The Rizzo family got the idea for the arcade after a day with their son, Reality Bytes’ tech wizard, didn’t go as planned.

“My 13-year-old with autism, he had earned going to a VR arcade for good behavior, and so my husband drove 40 miles to go to the nearest one, and they were completely booked,” Rizzo said.

They decided to hatch a plan to remedy this problem for East Central Indiana residents.

Once the plan was in place, they still needed to come up with a name, so the family of six sat down and began brainstorming.

“We just kept hollering out different names, and my husband jokingly said, ‘Well, reality bites,’ and we were like, ‘Wait a second, that could actually work,’” Rizzo said.

With the family’s research of the area turning up empty with affordable VR options, and the convenience of their proximity, the Rizzos knew Muncie was the ideal location for their new business.

“We actually live in Delaware County, and we know that people talk about how there’s not that much new stuff to do here in Muncie, so we said ‘Well, this is certainly new,’” Rizzo said.

The Rizzos love they can provide a fun, multigenerational space for the community.

“Elementary-school-aged kiddos come in, and they have a ton of fun,” she said, “but adults come in, and they have just as much fun, so we have something for everybody.”

As members of the Muncie community take notice of the unique business, positive feedback for the family is beginning to appear online.

Jeremy Rees has lived in Muncie for over a decade and has been to Reality Bytes a couple of times. He enjoyed his time and left a five star review of the family business on Google.

“I’ve played Angry Birds, and it was kind of fun,” Rees said. “It’s just a different take on the normal mobile game, but you actually hold the slingshot. My daughter really likes [the game] where you get to be a store clerk.”

The arcade runs weekday specials occasionally and around significant events, such as 50 percent off for students in August. One of Rizzo’s highlights since Reality Bytes opened was when they were running their Free Time Friday special, which allotted 15 minutes of free game time for the community. Rizzo, who has four high-needs kids herself, was happy to help out parents with disabled children/young adults.

“They would drop them off to play, and the parents would go out and have a date night, which is really cool that we could provide them with an opportunity for them to get away and for their kids to have so much fun,” Rizzo said.

The systems Reality Bytes uses are the HTC VIVE Focus 3 headsets for quality and convenience. They’re known for their comfort, and they were a finalist for the virtual reality hardware of the year in the 2021 VR awards. They can be completely wireless, but if there’s a high volume, they can be tethered to fix latency issues.

“They’re pretty cool,” Rizzo said. “They have like eight cameras built into them, and they can track exactly where you are and where your hands are.”

One of Rizzo’s sons, Nathan Rizzo, works about 15-20 hours a week at the arcade, and he loves seeing people enjoying themselves.

“There are a lot of little kids that come in, and just seeing the smiles on their faces and seeing how much fun they have, and they’ll be talking to their parents like, ‘Do you see this?’” Nathan said, “and it just warms my heart.”

Beth invites everyone to head to Reality Bytes and experience a VR game for yourself, today. She also has a few tips for someone who has never experienced VR.

“Start slow. Don’t pick games that have a lot of movement and motion in them because if you’ve never done VR before, you don’t know if you get motion sick from VR, so we have barf bags,” Beth said. “Start easy, and then just try a bunch of different things.”

When it comes to game selection, there are over 1,000 different games to choose from.

“We really do have anything for anybody,” Nathan said.

Beth’s personal favorite game is a cooking game called Clash of Chefs.

“I also like Rhythmatic and Dance Collider, but I get motion sick really easily, so some of the shooter games, I like them, I can’t play them,” Beth said. “Hyper-Dash and Arizona Sunshine are some of the other staff members’ favorites. But I like to race the clock on cooking different things, and it really does feel like you’re there. It’s crazy.” Nathan, who doesn’t get motion sickness, personally enjoys Hyper-Dash.

Reality Bytes is open Friday through Sunday, and you can call to reserve any of their eight pods for a party, to play as a group or just to escape reality for a little while. You can access a full list of their available games on their website. With inflation and the current state of the economy, the family business is experiencing some hardships. As one of the only businesses of its kind in the area, the Rizzos hope to keep the business alive for people residing in East Central Indiana.

“The first thing to go is entertainment, and that’s totally understandable, it just also hits us pretty hard,” Beth said.

The Rizzo family dedicates a lot of time to their business to bring unique entertainment to the people of Muncie. In order for a small business like

Andrew Hopkins Columnist

Andrew Hopkins is a second-year political science major and writes “Bread and Roses” for The Daily News. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the newspaper. Gaming is a great way to explore new worlds, take a trip to another world, another universe that allows the user to put themselves in a new environment they would not otherwise be able to experience. Video games can teach us lessons through their stories, their characters and their game mechanics that teach us how the world around us and the people in it operate. But they’re also becoming as difficult and time-consuming as possible.

From as early as I can remember, I was playing video games, my first one being the very first “Star Wars: Battlefront,” which I played with my dad as a little kid. I have continued this hobby throughout my entire life, and it has connected me with some of my closest friends who live in other states and countries, playing some of our favorite games together. They have created memorable moments I still remember to this day, and I continue to make new memories every time I get online to play with friends.

Updates to graphics and processing power that allows game worlds to be bigger and more detailed have increased people’s enjoyment of games with the Entertainment Software Association, the trade association of the video game industry, stating that “more people are playing video games than ever before,” even allowing for gamers to play with others across the world, sometimes up to 60 players at a time to create some truly exciting and fun experiences set across a variety of settings.

Over winter break, I sat down and completed the newest Lego Star Wars game, “The Skywalker Saga.” The game is expansive, covering locations and missions from all nine films and beyond, with characters from the movies and shows as well as over a thousand extra puzzles and challenges players can do to earn upgrades and complete the game. At a glance, there seems to be nothing to complain about. It’s an up-to-date Lego video game about one of my favorite film series of all time that has a lot of content and is fun to play with a lot of humor.

However, as I worked my way through the different areas of the game, trying to collect every single secret to complete the game, it became dull and boring. Many of the same puzzles and challenges were repeated throughout the game and set in different locations. By the time I finished the game, I checked how long I spent playing the game, and I was shocked to see I had spent just shy of five days trying to fully explore the galaxy.

What had it all been for? Just to see the number on the pause screen slowly tick up until it reached the triple digits?

This reflects a trend I have seen in increasing frequency in video games, with them being difficult and time-consuming. It almost serves as bragging rights if a studio can make their game super difficult. Looking at data from video games released over the years, the time it takes to finish video games has significantly increased, with “Elder Scrolls 3,” “Fallout” and “Resident Evil,” games released in 2002, taking less than 20 hours to beat. Jump to 2022, “Elden Ring” is released, and the average time to beat the game is listed at around 55 hours, according to HowLongToBeat.com.

Software’s “Dark Souls” games are a good example of this trend, including the most recent installment, “Elden Ring.” The game looks beautiful, and they are easily the most realistic graphics I have seen in a game.

My problem with this game and so many others like it is that it takes such a long time to progress, requiring the player to grind and kill enemies for hours, so they can level up and make their abilities better. When they go to fight powerful enemies known as bosses that serve as gatekeepers located around the world, many of these bosses are designed to have attack patterns and certain moves used in battle that require them to die time and time again until they learn the multiple attack patterns of the bosses, only to forget them after the boss has been defeated. According to Rock Paper Shotgun, a popular video game website, “Elden Ring” has 238 bosses, a majority of which have their own move sets, characteristics and special attributes that the player learns, so they can beat the bosses. In comparison, one of “Elden Rings” competitors in 2022, “God of War Ragnarok” has 66 bosses according to another popular video game website, The Loadout. The game isn’t blind to this fact, as it places you in control of a Tarnished, a creature able to respawn every time it is killed, as is explained in the lore. Even more so, the first true boss of the game is what I like to call a “weeder.” It is meant to filter out the players who are willing to put in the hours of work to level up, find better gear and learn how the game wants you to play, versus those who are unwilling to learn to do these tasks. My first time playing the game, it took me around 80 attempts before I finally was able to kill the boss and progress onto the other 11 bosses of this game.

What happened to the video games that used to be centered around the idea of just having fun? Growing up, the games I played were not made to be hard just for the sake of being hard, even if sections of them were meant to be difficult. Video games were simple and fun, not full of menial tasks meant to increase the playtime and provide “content” to the player. Satisfaction and enjoyment from video games should not come at the cost of dozens of hours and smashed controllers but from just exploring the game world and having fun through meaningful progression. Gamers have become too comfortable with the grind in videos, and game studios have been increasingly filling their games with repetitive tasks to keep the player busy and distract them from the true lack of content within the game. Progression should be a thing that happens simply through playing the game, not something that happens after the player has poured hours upon hours into killing the same few enemies continuously. A good example of the kinds of games we should be expecting and demanding from video game studios is “Halo 3.” This game had an arena style multiplayer, meaning that players would spawn in with the same or randomized weapons to use, but they could find power ups or better weapons lying around the map. The game did not require hours of grinding to unlock certain guns or perks that make you better.

As a whole, we need to demand better quality products from these studios, those that are actually enjoyable, as the current state of video games is almost dehumanizing. The fact that video game developers have continued with this theory of development is borderline offensive as it regulates this style of storytelling, art and puzzles to doing repetitive tasks for hours. By buying and supporting these games, it shows developers this kind of treatment is not only OK but encouraged, especially with “Elden Ring” winning Game of the Year for 2022 at the Game Awards. It shows that we are OK with this standard of game development, that we do not value our time playing these games designed to be time-consuming and incredibly difficult just for the sake of being so.

Contact Andy Hopkins with comments at andy.hopkins@bsu.edu.

Continued from Page 06

“[We want to make] sure that people know [the Multicultural Center is] a safe space for [people] to voice [their] opinions for [them] to feel heard,” Lloyd said.

Lloyd said the Multicultural Center is also connected to Ball State’s Counseling Center. She said this provides students who come into the Multicultural Center with a resource to make sure their mental health needs are getting met. She said there is a student of color support group in connection to the Counseling Center.

“It’s a students of color support group where students can come together and have conversations about what’s going on and what it feels like to be a student of color on campus,” Lloyd said. “[They talk about] how [they can] use their voice in ways to promote awareness but also get some of [their] mental health needs taken care of too.”

When it comes to dealing with being Asian at Ball State, Avila said it can be difficult at times. However, he said he isn’t letting that hold him back