DISCLAIMER: These early Las Vegas entries were the first blog posts I ever did. They’re VERY antiquated compared to the rest of the blog.
This is the Sunset Station casino’s arcade. It’s part of a series of four casinos with “Station” in the name. Supposedly they have some gimmick where you get bonuses if you play at all four, but I’m not much of a gambler. They are all standard Namco arcades, meaning they have roughly the same games as every other.
Earlier I mentioned having a conversation with a local outside of Press Start Gaming. When I mentioned Sam’s Town, he told me that their machine had somehow ended up at Sunset Station. I really wasn’t planning to bother coming here, but I really wanted to see that old machine again.
The very first machine I ever played DDR on. I can’t believe it survived. I want to know how it’s doing.
Haha… what?
This… This is Dance Dance Revolution MegaMix, a rather infamous bootleg version. For a while, we had the other notorious one, Extreme Plus, as my local arcade, but I’ve never seen this one in person. The title screen looked like it was made in PowerPoint, and the warning screen was white with random clipart of gun mechs in the corners. Besides those bizarre graphical changes, the game seemed identical to Extreme.
By the way, notice that the machine seems to have salvaged parts from different models. That bottom panel was taken from a Supernova machine, while the rest was a 573 cab.
When I got here, someone else was already playing MegaMix. He mentioned that he came for In The Groove, but the machine was messed up somehow. He was talking about a second arcade in the building that I’d have missed otherwise. This trip was before I was thorough with my arcade photos, so this is the only one I took.
Since I was in the area, I figured I’d take a run down to Joker’s Wild. It’s right on the edge of Las Vegas, so I wasn’t planning on coming here. This is usually the casino we’d stop at on our way out of Vegas because it had cheap breakfast. I was pretty sure they got rid of the arcade at some point, so heading there wasn’t much of a priority…
I can’t believe it’s still here.
As you can see, this arcade is a small room that can only fit about eight or so machines. I’m always happy to see Crazy Taxi, but nothing here is very noteworthy.
In the early 90s, this arcade had The Real C.O.W.boys of Moo Mesa Arcade, a game based on the oft-forgotten Ninja Turtles spin-off. Moo Mesa is why “giant scorpion” always comes to mind when brainstorming video game bosses.
Since it’s on the way back to my hotel, I might as well make one last stop while I’ve got time. Boulder and Sunset Station are both on the far right side of town, near Sam’s Town. The four Station Casinos have a small arcade, movie theater, and Kid’s Quest. The main thing I remember about this one is seeing Pokemon the Movie 2000 here as a kid.
Not much to say about this place. There’s a 50-cent DDR Supernova, but otherwise standard stuff. Truthfully, there was never anything spectacular in this one other than Soul Edge at one point. I’m not a big fan of Namco arcades since they’re everywhere and almost always have the same handful of games.
I wanted to keep Sam’s Town on its own page. Otherwise, these three places wouldn’t have gotten their own post. Only two days left on my trip.
