Jilly’s was my main stop for Ocean City, but there were a couple of other small arcades along the beach, including Aquaport Billiards, that had recently closed down. I was looking forward to seeing it, but my sources gave me mixed reports about whether it was still around. It wasn’t.
Aquaport Billiards a bust, I decided to scope out some other small arcades on the boardwalk. Sure, Jilly’s is the Best Arcade on the Jersey Shore, but the others might still have something worthwhile.
Arcades Visited: 28
So this is Hollywood Arcade. By this point, I had been to enough boardwalk arcades to know they were nothing like I had imagined. Instead of being ancient wastelands full of games that hadn’t been touched in twenty years, they were just mediocre ticket arcades.
Except this one.
The building is a narrow one, only two walkways wide. It still manages to go back far enough to be bigger than most arcades I’ve seen in sheer floorspace. However, there’s something extraordinary about this one: There isn’t a single-ticket game in the entire arcade! Every machine in Hollywood Arcade is a REAL video game. Mostly.
The very back of the arcade features the pool hall. They have pool tables, air hockey machines, and basketball games here. A few of the bigger arcade games were also plopped back here.
For example, these odd bowling-skeeball hybrids. This isn’t the first arcade we’ve seen with a bowling simulator, but these are unique for being smaller than most skeeball tables. I love the neon pink and green color scheme. It reminds me of when the 80s were starting to transition into the 90s.
Sega’s trademark colors are blue, pink, and white. I can’t look at this machine without thinking it’s the most Sega-looking thing I’ve ever seen.
By the way, if you think skiing is an oddball thing to make a game out of, you’re not wrong. Competition for these kinds of games was so fierce in the late 90s that many bizarre ones were made. The next blog post will be a great example of what I’m talking about.
Anyway, here’s the obligatory dance machine. Pump It Up may be expected back in Minnesota, but it’s rare to see it in this type of arcade. Pump It Up Exceed, and its sequel was released three years after Extreme when DDR was assumed dead. If DDR hadn’t taken those years off, maybe PIU would have died a quiet death instead of growing into a serious competitor.
“Smashing Drive”? I opted not to play it while I was here since I had a lot of games to go through, but something bothered me. There was a tinge in the back of my mind telling me that this game seemed familiar, but I ultimately wrote it off as a cheap Crazy Taxi knock-off. Over the next couple of days, this game would pop back into my head. What is this game, and why did I know it?
Remember a few posts ago when we ran into that Ocean Hunter machine, and I said I’d keep an eye out for the smaller version? It turns out that I saw one a few days later and ultimately forgot. The same company released these two games for the same hardware in the same year. When they’re sitting next to each other like this, you can even tell they’re using many of the same parts. The standard version of the Star Wars Trilogy is about the same size but looks quite different. Maybe they ran out of parts late in the game’s lifespan and decided to recycle the Ocean Hunter design?
This is the second post in a row where I’ve had to link an image of that machine.
This is getting silly, now.
I said before there were no ticket games here. That was a half-truth. There were three of four ticket games, but none gave any tickets. They were just for fun.
This is Strike Master, a game with a very long and intricate history. I’ll spare you the details and give you the short version for once: There’s a 60+ year-old arcade game called Shuffle Alley that got re-released in a new form every few years. In the early 90s, the company that made it went under. Strike Master is technically a knock-off of it, but the original was dead by this point, so nobody called bullshit on it. The two games are pretty much identical.
It may look like a bowling game, but it’s more akin to single-player air hockey. You slide the puck at the pins; it slides under them, then bounces back so you can try again. The game uses electronic sensors to collapse the pins when they slide under them, so the puck never touches them unless broken pins touch the board, like on this machine.
Have I even run into this game since starting the blog? This isn’t a rare machine at all, so I’m surprised. It’s pretty popular at theaters in particular.
This is Carnevil from Midway Games’ twilight years. Imagine if someone decided to turn the Beetlejuice cartoon’s opening sequence into a House of the Dead clone. Not the movie or the whole cartoon, just the theme song and its accompanying visuals. There’s no better way to describe this game, especially since almost every BGM in the game sounds like they wanted a Danny Elfman score.
If you’re still keeping track, this is another one of the games my local Kids’ Quest had growing up. That’s right, the original Cruis’n USA. With each passing year, it gets rarer and rarer. Nowadays, the only places you can find them are in old arcades, laundromats, and hotel game rooms. I’m glad I finally ran into one again, even if it did start cancer; that is the Cruis’n series. I talk about it in great detail in the Racing Game Index if you want to learn more about it.
It isn’t supposed to be in this cabinet, though. This blog post took so long because I spent weeks figuring out what game this machine initially belonged to. Nobody could identify it. It looks like something from the 80s, modified to include the view change buttons. You can’t see it because of the arcade glare, but those two white squares are cartoony images of a guy’s car breaking down. If you know what the hell this was, let me know.
Speaking of Cruis’n, they had EVERY game in the series here. Cruis’n USA, Cruis’n World (the far suitable machine in the purple trio was running it), Cruis’n Exotica, and Cruis’n Blast. Hell, they even had the original Fast and the Furious. Either the owner’s a big fan of the series, or they turn one hell of a profit. This could be the only arcade in the world to have the entire series playable.
Sega had a weird thing going on in the early 00s where they decided to release a bunch of games loosely based on actual jobs: Brave Firefights, Crazy Taxi, Emergency Call Ambulance, American 18 Wheeler, and Jambo Safari. While Crazy Taxi and American 18 Wheeler had home ports, the other three never saw the light of day outside the arcade. Had the Dreamcast not died when it did, they have been bundled together and released as a compilation? Sadly, it never happened, so your odds of ever playing Emergency Call Ambulance these days are slim to none. Brave Firefighters is only slightly less rare.
However, if you’re itching to play some Jambo Safari at home, it got a Wii and DS sequel/remake nearly a decade after release. God only knows why.
I’m a very different person now than when I started this blog. There’s a sequel to this game called King of Route 66 that I’ve been keeping an eye out for. It turns out there was one at Circus Circus in Las Vegas that I ignored completely, along with a bunch of other games I haven’t seen since. Half of the reason I write up these posts is because of how much I learn along the way. The more I learn, the more I appreciate random games I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Kid’s Quest was far from the only casino childcare facility out there. Since my grandparents gambled a lot, I stayed in many of them throughout my life. This machine takes me back to one in Arizona. I’d share the name of it, but my aunt kept calling it “Aladdin’s Castle.” Aladdin’s Castle is an entirely different chain of arcades, but it’s the name I associate with that playroom. I only remember three things about it:
- They had the world’s most elaborate ball-wash machine. It would grab balls from the ball pit and take them through a car wash that onlookers could watch through the windows.
- A bunch of whack-a-mole machines played MC Hammer’s Can’t Touch This. They were the only authentic whack-a-mole machines I ever saw until pretty recently.
- They had this terrible bear game.
Use the steering wheel to move the bear back and forth. Catch apples and avoid anvils. It would be a pretty standard ticket game if the controls weren’t so damn unresponsive.
Since I’m sharing stories from childhood, here’s a unique one. If you hear me refer to my local arcade growing up, I’m almost always talking about a place called Putters. However, there was also a mall arcade that closed when I was very young, called Pocket Change. My family took me there a few times, but I was too young to remember it very well.
However, I do have one very clear memory of it. My father took me here once and had to hold me up so I could see the machine. Seeing the machine again after all these years, I can see why: The board is really deep, so you have to be pretty high above it to get a good look. I missed nearly every ball while my father was annoyed at watching me miss over and over. I don’t think he realized I couldn’t see the ball. Later that day, I climbed up the side of a ball pit to finally get a good look at this game. That’s the only reason I remember them even having a ball pit.
Because of that, I will never forget this game. This is my first time seeing it in decades. I finally had a chance to play it for real. I learned from the experience that this game is really freakin’ complex for what it is. Even if I could see the board, I wouldn’t have been able to play it as a kid. Look at how many buttons it has if you want an idea of how in-depth it is. If I find it again, I’ll explain how it’s played a bit more.
And no, the baseball cards weren’t stocked.
Back when I was young, there was a place in Indiana called Boom Town where…
On second thought, I’m not going to tell three stories in a row. Here’s the short version: “I was terrified of these things as a kid.” I could only find the specific one I remember in a Youtube video called “Creepy Chicken Vending Machine,” so I must not have been the only one.
Electric shock machines date back to the penny arcades of the 1900s. You pay them money, grab the handles, and they cause you pain. The goal is to endure the pain for as long as possible before letting go. Early versions of this game used actual electricity with wiring identical to an electric cattle prod. Modern versions like this supposedly cause pain by vibrating so fast that it feels like you’re being shocked. When humanity has died out, aliens will discover these machines and wonder what we were thinking.
I’ve always wanted to play through the entire Time Crisis series, but the first game is so rare that I haven’t seen it in over a decade. I could play the home ports, but it’s not the same.
They do have the first three House of the Dead games, though. At a convention a while back, I noticed a girl struggling to get through the Wii port of the third game, so I jumped in. We got along well enough to meet up at the next con. Through sheer coincidence, we happened to sit down at a PS3, not knowing which game was running, and it turned out to be HotD4. I wonder if she wants to play through 2 next year?
They had these, too. Usually, I try to say something about these kinds of games, but this arcade has so many other unusual games that I’m just skipping them this time. That game for sale is one I haven’t run into before, though. It’s called Sharpshooter, and it’s just another target shooting game like Point Blank or Police Trainer. Better than the latter. Not as good as the former.
Two more ticket games that don’t dispense tickets. I remember pounding on those basketballs for fun when I ran out of tokens when I was younger. See, people often stopped playing as soon as the timer ran out, so there was still a ball cued that you could shoot afterward. It didn’t do anything, but you’ll do anything for a few seconds of entertainment while waiting for your parents to finish gambling. The alternative was digging under arcade machines for dropped tokens. There was one under almost every machine, but you’d get yelled at if they caught you doing it.
Confidential Missions is precisely what it looks like. If I had to describe it, I’d say it’s a cross between LA Machineguns and Virtua Cop with a James Bond theme. Unlike House of the Dead, Jurassic Park, and all of the other sit-down rail shooters made by Sega around this time, this one has gone mostly forgotten.
I recently found out why Nicktoons Racing’s distribution is so strange. It’s one of those games that’s SUPER common at Chuck E Cheese but rare everywhere else. Unlike many Chuck E Cheese games, this one’s not impossible to find elsewhere. I’m getting ahead of myself and don’t want to talk too much about Chuck E Cheese. There will be a time for that soon. Very soon.
When I get around to it.
This is the 1990s version of El Toro, another one of those machines that have been around forever. Here’s the 1960 version. A version that’s probably from the 1970s because the owner’s manual suggests putting it in discos (no joke). And here’s what I THINK is a 2000s version (the link broke on that last one). There are a lot of old legacy arcade games like this and Shuffle Alley.
Also, it’s just a bull-themed strength tester. You squeeze the horns together and it rates your strength.
Before we part ways with this arcade, let me present one final question: Is Jilly’s the Best Arcade on the Jersey Shore? I’ll let you decide for yourself.
But we’re not yet entirely done with Ocean City, NJ. Don’t worry; the next one will be short. There are just a couple more arcades I need to show off. Maybe we’ll get off the Jersey Shore before the end of the year? Nah.
