I’ve been meaning to come by this place again for a while, but last week I had to pay a sudden visit to a hotel/waterpark gameroom near Mall of America instead. That turned out to have worked out in my favor since I could take a peek at MoA’s arcade while there. Taking inventory of that place’s machines made this trip much more interesting. I’ll get into the reasons for that later, but for now, let’s talk a bit about the Twin Cities:
Let’s be clear: I didn’t even realize that half of the city was St. Paul before I moved here. I got into a bad habit of collectively referring to the entire town as “Minneapolis,” even though it’s only the red area. As you can see, I’m right in the middle of Minneapolis’ most busy neighborhood. Up-Down is about an hour’s walk from me, while the two arcades to the south are right along the bus line. Way up in the upper right-hand corner of town is this place. It’s too out of the way for me to make regular visits, so I haven’t been here in over a year.
We have a lot of malls in the Twin Cities. This place is supposedly one of the busier ones, but I attribute that mainly to being so far away from the more active parts of town. This whole place gives off an underwhelming feeling, but that’s probably because I’m so used to the vast malls we’ve got in the area. I’m sure this place is more significant than the mall I grew up near.
I’ve read that this place was revamped a few years back to make it better lit. The mall itself dates back to the 1970s and supposedly has a lot of history behind it. At some point, there was even a Sbarro’s with its own arcade. I’d have loved to see that. At least this place is always packed with foot traffic.
This thing is one of Maplewood’s biggest staples. The way they play it up makes it sound like it’s been here forever, but it was just added in 2008. It was supposedly hand-painted in Italy. I’ve been to so many malls that I’m no longer impressed by these things. They’re not exactly rare.
What I do love is the ghetto ticket booth. Look at those crappy decorations and windows filled with fliers. Right now, they’re doing a promotion where you get a free ride if you propose in front of it on Valentine’s Day. I’m half-tempted to come out on that day just to see what kind of a person would do that.
I got bored of taking pictures of these things after the first three. There are a LOT of these spread throughout the mall. I kept getting lost so I couldn’t get an accurate count, but I’d have to estimate thatbetween ten and twenty prize games were sitting around. I have a good theory of why there are so many, but we’ll get to that in a bit. In the meantime, enjoy how poorly stocked that DVD game is.
I came in here to see if there was anything weird enough to take a picture of. I mean, it’s Hot Topic; surely there would be something I’d find novel enough to ramble on about enthusiastically. I was shocked by how different this place was from the last time I was in one. Not only did the area feel a lot edgy than it used to, but I found the right wall to be far more depressing. Typically Hot Topic stores put their “dressy” clothes for weird girls on the right wall. Instead of cute poser-goth outfits, the wall was covered with Harley Quinn shit and ugly dresses you’d expect to see on a girl blogging at a coffee shop.
Kids today don’t understand the appeal of an awkward girl trying her hardest to look rebellious but being too pure to commit to anything more than a black “goth” top she got at Hot Topic.
This is a recycling truck kiddie ride. It has insane co-op action where one kid can pretend they’re driving the truck while the other can sit in the back and play a trash recycling simulator. If only I were a few decades younger, I’d be playing the shit out of this. Since it’s technically a video game, I was tempted to put a quarter in and see how the game portion in the back worked, but it would have been weird to see a grown man awkwardly sticking his hands through the back window trying to reach the buttons.
Here’s the main attraction: an “authentic” Time-Out mall arcade! The quotation marks are there because this was Aladdin’s Castle until recently. Time-Out and Aladdin’s Castle are arcade chains from the 70s that managed to linger until the 90s, when Namco’s arcade empire eventually bought them up. I’m not sure how long this specific arcade’s been here because it’s hard to find information on store history there. I wonder if it’s possible to find local phone books from the 70s?
Anyway, it’s rare these days to find a stand-alone mall arcade. I know of a couple, but they’re almost always either across from a mall theater or are just a tiny room with about 8-9 games shoved in to take up space. This place is the real deal. Just look at how the entire area is decorated with big prizes! This is probably the most arcade-feeling arcade I’ve been to since Vegas.
If you can’t tell from the Pac-man branding outside, the Pac-man branding INSIDE should make it clear that this is a Namco arcade. I ran across a few of these in Vegas, and it’s far from the only one in town. Namco has the biggest chain of arcades in the country by a long shot. You can usually identify them because they’ve got a severe case of Pac-man Fever. Just look at that wall trimming.
When I went to Dave and Buster’s, I jokingly made a Pac-man counter to mark all of the Pac-man games. I don’t think that’s going to fly here. Even the games that have nothing to do with Pac-man are filled with Pac-man. I want those Pac-man signs, but I think they’re leftover from an old ticket prize that was kept around as a decoration. I want those Pac-man plush toys, too. Come to think of it, wasn’t I saving up tickets for a pair of Pac-man headphones at an arcade on the west side of town? I wonder if they still have those.
And since I’m not going to mention it again, that is Crazy Frog whack-a-mole below the Pac-man signs. It’s every bit as annoying as you’d expect.
Instead of opting for the old-school token, Namco arcades never switched to game cards. They’ve even got their tokens with little Pac-mans (Pac-Men?) on them. I’d post a picture, but I’m going to make a post about my arcade souvenirs someday. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Either way, the tokens add to the feel of this place.
I tried asking around about the Gundam poster, but nobody I know seems to be able to identify it. I think it’s for one of the Gundam Breaker games. I’m not sure what it’s doing here.
Screw Water Park of America; THIS is how you do a redemption counter. Sure, if you look carefully, there aren’t many prizes on the back shelves, but they’re displayed in a way that makes it look like that case can barely contain them all. Take those pennants on the right side, for instance. It would have been easy to hang one up and keep the rest under the counter, but this place goes the extra mile and fills the entire wall with them. It’s all about the atmosphere.
It’s the little things that make this place great.
Okay, just a quick look at these, then we can get to the actual games. The yellow thing is a giant inflatable Gummy Bear. The other thing is yet another bottle of hot sauce. First, the plush toys in the crane game, and now this? Is there some demand for this kind of thing? I’m not aware of it. Then again, when I was a kid, there was a giant inflatable store display for a short-live soda called Citra at one of our local supermarkets. The store manager eventually gave it to me and sat around my room for most of the 2000s. I wish I still had it.
Oh boy. Wangan Midnight. Where do I even start with this one?
This game is based on a manga from the 90s of the same name. I gather that it’s about the Japanese downhill street racing scene, but it came out a decade before the more well-known (in the states, at least) Initial D manga. In 2001, Namco got the rights to make an arcade game based on it. It was a reasonably generic racing game. Later that same year, SEGA’s Initial D arcade stage hit the arcade scene and made a huge splash with its heavily technical mechanics, magnetic save cards, and competitive focus. A couple of years later, it suddenly occurred to Namco that they still had the Wangan Midnight license and released Wangan Midnight: Maximum Overtune. This game tried to compete directly with Initial D, with a similar technical focus and magnetic card-saving system. The lack of Eurobeat is probably why this game never caught on in the states as Initial D did. (its soundtrack is still excellent)
Both this and Initial D are still competing to this day. If you’re lucky, you might live near a Round 1 Arcade that houses modern incarnations of both machines (Dave and Busters outright refuse to carry them because they’re too technical for their casual audience). Modern Wangan Midnight machines can even dispense BaNa Passports (Bandai-Namco’s universal arcade save cards) directly, with unique designs based on the manga. Of course, the only BaNa Passport I want is a Pokken one.
Looking at the picture of these games I took, you might notice something strange. The two right machines are synced up to display the logo screen simultaneously, as are the left two. That’s because this isn’t a four-player game like you’d probably expect from the four machines sitting next to each other (although there is a four-player mode, these machines aren’t set up for it). Why would they have four machines without bothering to enable four-player mode? Because two of these machines were at a different arcade until pretty recently. I’m going to tell you a secret that most local players don’t even know:
This is where Mall of America’s machines go when they get rid of them.
Yep, the arcade in the center of Mall of America is also a Namco Arcade. Over the years, all of the old games have slowly been pushed out in favor of shiny new junk. I haven’t been to this specific arcade in years, but my first thought when Wangan Midnight disappeared was, “I bet I know where it went.” Sure enough, here it was, along with many other games that had vanished from MoA since I moved here. There’s a third Namco arcade in town that I haven’t been to for various reasons, but I wonder if it swaps machines with the others, too?
And here’s the proof. I’d know this piece of junk anywhere.
When I first moved to Minneapolis, I spent a lot of time on this thing because it was so easy to get to the Mall of America. I almost single-handedly got back in practice on this thing (and occasional trips to another arcade that I’m sure I’ll take pictures of someday). When the machine was first moved here, my name was still on the high score list. Whenever local players tell me they threw this machine out, I’m usually the only one who knows what happened to it.
This machine is particularly infamous around here for a few reasons. Take a look at the red decals around the screen. Those were initially stuck on machines that upgraded to Supernova like this machine once was. However, this machine was such a flaming piece of garbage that they had to downgrade it back to Extreme at some point to get it stable (This isn’t speculation. I heard it straight from the guy who runs the Mall of America arcade). If that wasn’t bad enough, the screen is so fucked up that every arrow is slightly the wrong color. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but the arrows in DDR are color-coded. The coloration problems can throw off a player who’s used to the standard arrows.
There’s a reason that this machine is such a piece of garbage. When DDR was first becoming a big deal, Namco ordered hundreds of machines to put in their arcades. They didn’t realize that whoever they were ordering from ended up giving them shoddy knock-off cabs. These machines are infamous for their pads being unresponsive, breaking down easily, and running hacked hardware. These machines became known as “Namco cabs” or “crap-o-cabs” in some circles. It’s amazing that this one is even still working…
While it’s common to put fans by the DDR players because of how sweaty the players get during long sessions, I’ve got to wonder who is playing this machine enough to bother having a fan. Is there a local player out here I don’t know about?
I don’t want to talk about that machine anymore, so let’s move on to something lighter. Here’s another refugee from Mall of America, “Bozo’s Grand Prize Game.” In this game, you get a bunch of ping-pong balls and have to throw them into the buckets. Further buckets give you more points, and you get a bonus for throwing it into the lit-up one. My cousin and I can tell you that this game has one significant oversight: The ten bucket is close enough to stick your hand in. There’s nothing stopping you from just putting your fingers near the sensors at the bottom of that bucket and continuously triggering it to get more tickets than you’re supposed to get from one quarter. I can’t believe nobody testing this game thought to put the sensors down under the bucket rather than inside it.
We walked away with glorious amounts of tickets the day we discovered it at the local Peter Piper Pizza. We’d have had way more if the manager didn’t notice us doing it and taken half of them…
Okay, remember the other day when I said that the alligator-whacking game was starting to become hard to find? Well, apparently someone decided that Wacky Gator was an iconic enough franchise to deserve a “VR” (according to the gator on the marquee) adaption. Every ticket arcade in the 90s had the game, so kids today must be able to play an incredible simulation of it.
This is absurd.
Pac-man and Pokemon have joined forces (with South Park?) to bring you this. Actually, those balls are standard four-inch capsules used in games like this, Skittle Ball, Gravity Hill, Putt Fore Prizes, etc. You usually see them at theater arcades and other places without redemption centers. Usually, the standard ones for this version are yellow to go with the Pac-man theme, but there are different versions like the South Park ones you see at the bottom. Someone working at the arcade must have noticed how damn much the generic ones look like Pokeballs and added black bands around them to seal the deal (and probably make them far harder to push up the ramp). Talk about a brilliant way to draw people to your machine without wasting money on actual prizes.
UFO Catcher Sega’s signature brand of crane games. Just because it’s a Namco arcade doesn’t mean every game in it was made by Namco. Mall of America is loaded with these things, so this one probably came from there, too. I suspect that this mall’s mysterious infestation with prize machines is because this is where Mall of America sends their leftovers. Usually, the video screen in the back plays elaborate videos advertising whatever’s inside, but generic teddies don’t have such a thing to play. I was caught off-guard at how blatantly Japanese the machine was when I first saw them in 2002-ish. They still look pretty out of place in most western arcades.
Did I mention that this arcade is wholly covered in Pac-man? I have to give them credit; the yellow gimmick sets it apart from the classic basketball games. Do you think they sell those Pac-man Basketballs separately?
This one’s yellow, too and has nothing to do with Pac-man, for once. Between it, the Pokeball capsules, and the stuffed Pikachu making dad jokes, this arcade has its finger on the pulse of current trends. I say that without sarcasm because some kid in a Pokemon shirt ran around the arcade that day and won a boatload of tickets. Hell, one of the generic preteen girl stores I walked by had trendy Pokemon shirts for girls that age. It is nice that the franchise has made such a comeback lately. (SN: This was written during the height of Pokemon Go)
By the way, this was the game he won the tickets on. Of course it’s Big Bass.
One of my favorite things about this arcade is that a handful of games will put your name on the high scoreboard if you do well enough. I remember this machine used to be next to DDR, so I usually had to wait for people to stop playing so I didn’t disrupt them. I saw a guy fall just short on Pac-man once. Hey, put one of those high-score signs on DDR for me, would you?
I didn’t notice it when taking the picture, but is that a Tekken out-of-order sticker on the coin door?
This was the hardest to get a picture of since some little girl and her dad played it the whole time. While waiting, the dad informed me that there was a used game store with a bunch of games like this. At first, I assumed he was talking about the Roseville mall store with a bunch of console fighting games open to play and does regular tournaments. After coming home and doing some research, it turns out there is a used game store near where I live with a free MAME cab loaded up with old fighting games. Huh, thanks, dad.
This here is Capcom vs. SNK, the fourth of Capcom’s crossover fighting games. SNK is a much bigger deal in Japan than it was in the west, primarily due to how much more common Neo-Geo machines were out there. We still had them in America, but their space-saving multi-game functionality made them extremely common in places like Japanese candy stores. The SNK fighting games were Capcom’s main rival in Japan (Mortal Kombat took that role in the west), so a crossover made complete sense. Meanwhile, most casual arcade goers in America were left scratching their heads about who SNK was and why Capcom was fighting them. We have a lot of different VS machines in the Twin Cities, don’t we?
And, as we reach the end of that arcade, we get the traditional dump of stuff that was interesting enough to take a picture of but ultimately didn’t turn out to be interesting enough to comment on individually. Like most other stuff here, some of these are also probably from Mall of America. My memory isn’t exactly photographic, you know. That Lighthouse game looks pretty familiar.
But before we go, I wanted to point this place out. It’s a pair of used video game kiosks that carry a surprisingly varied selection of games for what it is. They even have a SNES set up for customers to play, although someone’s almost always hogging it.
Look at all these NES and SNES games. They even carry those reproduction consoles you always see at conventions. I guess there’s less risk of them getting stolen that way? I also can’t help but wonder how long that Dreamcast controller has been in that bucket. I can’t imagine there’s much demand for those these days.
Of course, they’ve got original consoles, too. Everything on this cart is kind of on the expensive side. There used to be another gigantic used video game store in this mall. It was probably one of the biggest I’ve ever seen. They had an entire room-sized section dedicated to retro Nintendo system games in the back, where the shelves were packed with games. They even carried more obscure consoles like Atari systems. I was kind of surprised that it was gone when I came here. I remember going there once during my PS2 game hunt. I bought a tiny bootleg Pidgeot for Beth in Omaha and a grab bag of PS2 games. It was full of sports junk. I’m not sure where I put it. Maybe I accidentally threw it out?
This is the second cart. I tried not to get the guy running it in the picture (“Jerry,” as I later found out), but he still managed to get in the frame. I asked him permission to take pictures, but he still watched me like a hawk and kept asking what I needed them for. This cart is for disc-based games.
One problem I always have with these blog posts is that I try to put things in sequential, or at the very least logical, order. Sometimes something happens later in the day that makes it hard to talk about earlier events without bringing them up. When I took these pictures, I figured I’d have a lot to say about them, but then circumstances happened, and now I have significantly less to say. I guess the pictures are still worthwhile for anyone in the area who wants to know where they can get a used Guitar Hero DS add-on.
Last one. They also sell TCGs here. It looks like the guy in the background noticed me. He was sitting there playing that thing for an hour and a half.
Anyway, let’s end it here for the time being with a picture of the world’s most patriotic drier. I didn’t come all the way out to Maplewood just for this mall. In 2010, a Japanese machine was localized for release in America, but the place it was sold to in the west wasn’t arcades. Do you know what it is?
