There are a bunch of theaters on the edge of town that I know have arcades but have never been to. Whenever a movie comes out that I want to see, I take it as an excuse to make a trip over to one of them. Hmong Village just happened to be on the way to Carmike Oakdale 20. The Lego Batman movie is as good an excuse as any to check it out.
Sure enough, there was a rather sizeable (for a theater arcade) one sitting right in the middle of the place. It was pretty impossible to miss. I’d go as far as saying this is the most attention-grabbing one I’ve ever seen. They’re usually tucked away in some easily missed side wall, but not this one. When I say it was in the middle of the lobby, I mean it was in the middle. To get to the actual movie screens, you had to walk either to the left or the right of it.
Let’s get this one out of the way first. Since the theater is way on the far eastern side of town, I doubt most local Pump It Up players even know this one’s here. For those keeping track, this is Pump It Up NX2 and the third version of PIU I’ve come across. I don’t know a lot about Pump, so I’m not sure how many songs get removed in each version, and I’m also not sure if there are any popular NX2 exclusive songs or modes. I like playing older versions of DDR, but for all I know, Pump players are happy with their Prime machines. This town has SO many Pump machines.
I’m unsure whether I should be surprised that this game caught on as it did. Nintendo probably was since they weren’t big on arcade tie-ins before this. Games like Luigi’s Mansion arcade and Pokken probably wouldn’t have been a thing if this one had flopped. I wonder why Nintendo was reluctant to bring their A-list titles into the arcade scene in the 90s. A Pokemon arcade game probably would have been in EVERY arcade if they had released one during the peak of the franchise.
Hell, even now, it’s hard to find an arcade of any sort that doesn’t have some form of Pokemon sitting around in it. Battrio/Tettra/Ga-Ole weren’t going to work in America, so I wonder if Pokken was some attempt to capitalize on the franchise finally? If so, they probably should have considered that fighting games are a niche thing in the states. Maybe then Pokken wouldn’t have failed at its US location test. Dave and Busters had pretty high hopes for it, too.
Flappy Bird and Hipster Vinyls. Two things I’ll never understand brought together in one machine. These are higher-end prizes, so the machine is probably set to be potentially winnable once every 10-20 games. I wonder what this game does to ensure you can’t win the other times? Maybe it speeds to the point where it’s impossible to descend fast enough to make it through the next gap? Perhaps it tells you to fit through a hole that looks big enough for you to pass but isn’t.
I complain about this one, but I don’t think I’ve ever really commented on the game itself. One thing I hate about modern rail shooters is that they tend to use machine guns rather than handguns. With handguns, low-level mooks tend to fall in one or two shots, while machine guns make you focus your weak fire on them for a few seconds. It feels less precise when you don’t get immediate feedback on whether your shot killed the guy. It’s the same reason I wouldn’t say I like the Transformers arcade game.
It’s those photo booths you see at the mall. Why did they feel the need to have two of them? They have different gimmicks, but it still seems a bit redundant. If someone were to use one of these, they would do it regardless of the selection.
Remember how I bitch about the whole “showing people playing the game on the attract screen” thing? I feel like this is the game that popularized it. I thought this series was related to Cabella’s Shovelware console games for the longest time, but they seem unrelated. I’m not the only one who makes that mistake since googling “Cabella arcade” pulls up a bunch of Big Buck Hunter images. If I ever mistakenly referred to this game as “Cabella Big Buck Hunter,” take this as my formal apology. Of course, I doubt anyone reading this would even notice.
This theater had a lot of racing games. You always see a lot of them in theaters. I guess it’s because the games are easy to sit down and play once, so they’re an excellent way to kill time while waiting for the movie to start. I’ve never thought about it, but why are dance games so standard in theaters? The machines are usually expensive, so most arcades expect frequent players to compensate for the cost. The theater probably makes so much money from concessions that they don’t give a damn whether the arcade turns a profit.
I’ll admit it. This game surprised me. Among all of the newfangled machines was a lone San Fransisco Rush 2049 from 1999 sitting in the corner. This game came out around the same time as Hydro Thunder, so it was common to see at least one of the two at any given arcade. More Hydro Thunder machines seemed to have lingered at arcades due to their unique concept, while 2049 machines are comparatively rare. The turn of the millennium was also around when saving data in arcade machines was becoming more mainstream. Virtua Fighter was popularizing data save cards on the Japanese side of things. At the same time, in the states, you had games like NFL Blitz’s compatibility with Nintendo 64 memory card and Gauntlet Legends’ username and password system. This game opted for a payphone (a type of public telephone you used to put quarters in to use) style number pad where you punched a seven digit PIN. When I was younger, I thought it went online through dial-up, and the game would call your phone to confirm your registration.
It’s not my fault it was explained so poorly.
So this game is called Dead Heat. It ran on the same hardware as Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 4 and came out around the same time. Except WMMT4 never came stateside. Given how vaguely similar the two are, I’ve heard speculation that this somehow replaced MaxiTune 4 in the west. I’ve even heard people toss around the rumor that it’s built on the same engine, but I’ve never been able to confirm it one way or the other.
Life Finds A Way
So after an hour of waiting, I saw The Lego Batman Movie and headed home. I’m sure I got off the bus at the wrong place because I didn’t know the transfer bus. I stood out in the cold for like 40 minutes before deciding to go further up the street. Google Maps told me the bus was around here, but maybe I was just on the wrong corner. After another 40 minutes, I was tired and cold. In the distance, I faintly saw a yellow gear painted on a building and chuckled about how similar it looked in another place I knew. Finally, the bus arrived, and I went home. Then, the bus got closer to the bright, gear-painted building…
What?
Two minutes after getting on the bus, I had to stop and get back out. When did this get here? I’ve obsessively cross-referenced every arcade map I could find, and I’m confident this was never on any of them. As I later learned from the staff, it was built in late December. It was a sheer coincidence that I missed the bus and found it.
I’m sure everyone who’s not from the Twin Cities is a bit confused at this point. Big Thrill Factory is a pizza place and arcade way on the west side of town. It’s pretty well known by the local DDR community for having one of the few local Supernova machines and easily the cheapest. That place was one of my more frequented arcades a few years back, but it’s out of the way enough that I haven’t been there lately. This east-side location is new, so they must have been doing good business there.
I haven’t written about the main location yet (UPDATE), but it’s kind of small and homely compared to this one. The food court at the other place feels like the kind of thing you’d see at a minigolf parlor, but here it feels like a legitimate eatery. Experience tells me their pizza sucks, so I’d never eat here if I didn’t have to.
Another thing that stood out right away, and was hard to get a clear picture of because I really don’t like photographing kids, was the play area. It’s massive. Even the ball pit had some high-tech mechanism that would sometimes shoot a bunch of balls into the air. It reminds me of Discovery Zone. It’s nice to know kids these days can still experience this.
As for the games… Well, there was no DDR, that’s for sure. There were only three or four games that weren’t just ticket dispensers. This was a new location, so it had a LOT of ticket games I’d never seen before (or, if I had, they were at an arcade with more exciting stuff, so I ignored them). I’ve got to give this place credit for finding not one but TWO gear-themed ticket games to match this place’s motif.
There’s more I want to say about this place and its factory theme, but I’ll save it. I might return to Omaha someday.
It was hard to get a picture of this game and its gimmick, but it was easily the coolest-looking one here. See, each side of that pyramid has a hologram-like project in the middle that works as the screen. You can only see the screen from the side you’re looking at, while other players see something completely different. The trick here is that the monitors are above the pyramid facing downward, so you’re just seeing the screen reflected in a way that makes it look like a hologram in the middle of the pyramid. It’s still really cool-looking.
Is Crossy Road mainstream enough that people know what it is without me explaining it? If not, it’s a mobile Frogger clone that uses Minecraft-like graphics. I knew it was popular with the younger generation but didn’t know it was a big enough deal to spawn this. These mobile games remind me of the Atari years, when very popular arcade game had a million reskin clones. The cycle continues.
I’ve always wondered what the deal with these fuzzy-headed clowns is. Circus Circus has had a carnival booth since the 80s where you shoot balls at things that look nearly identical to win prizes. Was the Circus Circus arcade game based on some pre-existing carnival cliche that this one’s also ripping off, or is this machine based on that specific game? The world may never know.
EDIT: Now that I’ve gained more experience, I do know. A lot of carnival games were adapted into ticket games.
This was disorienting. For whatever reason, they have a few duplicate machines in different parts of the arcade. A few times, I’d walk passed one and think, “wait, I was just here.” It took me a moment to realize that there were two of them. I think there were also a couple of other duplicate machines, but I might have just been exhausted to the point of losing my orientation. It was a long day.
Our old friend Big Bass is finally married. Congratulations!
So with the recent resurgence of Ghostbusters, two arcade games were released. This is the one of the two that’s a ticket game.
The Toto cards have been held, hostage. Instead of winning them from the machine, you win them here now. I don’t think the Wizard of Oz distributors would like it if they found out. Then again, who would opt for Toto over just taking the 6,500 tickets?
The dump is a bit longer than usual, because this place is nothing but mildly interesting ticket games. Show me a generic-looking racing game and I can probably find at least something to talk about. Giving commentary on “Hit the button at the right time to win 7 tickets” is a significantly harder feat.
EDIT: I’m very sorry about the vertical images.
Today we saw one record store whose dream of having an arcade was crushed, one mall arcade desperately hanging on to its last few games, one theater pridefully displaying its unknown arcade as a centerpiece, and one arcade seeing enough success to open a new location. Some arcades die, some will struggle, some remain resilient, and some have just started to write the exciting story of their lives. Every arcade I find feels like a new experience. I can’t finish a blog post without itching to go out and see what I’ll discover next.
As long as arcades continue to exist, I’m sure whatever I find will always be interesting.
Update: All four of these arcades are now dead. Thank you for playing!
