I drove my car around, looking for a place to park it where I could sleep for the night. When I was using my laptop at the local Mcdonald’s, one of the employees said I could sleep in the lobby overnight as long as I was out before they opened in the morning. He clarified that the manager didn’t care what happened in the lobby after hours since employees had done dirty deeps in that lobby after it closed a few times.
I ended up sleeping in a Walmart parking lot instead.
I may have been wrong in my last post. Before I left the mall with the Zonkers, I did make a quick stop. This was the first time I had seen a Lego store, so I had to buy a souvenir. Now that I’ve lived in Minneapolis with the Lego store in Mall of America, this is pretty underwhelming in retrospect. It’s not like I have reason to go to Lego stores often, but competing with the giant Lego Gundam is still hard. I’ll do a blog post about Mall of America someday, I swear.
They were doing a sale on Build Your Own Minifigs, so I made these three. I wanna say I named these guys “King Bling,” “Chef Badass,” and… the third one escapes me. She struck me as the type of character who sits around griping about the other two, anyway.
Here was the first stop of the day. This place was right across from 7-11. Much like 7-11, I always seem to live in areas where these don’t exist. Hell, Omaha got two of them right before I moved away. The donut gods hate me.
Onto the other Zonkers, where this is the first thing greeting you when you walk in. As I mentioned in the last post, the two “Zonkers” were so different you’d never know they were part of the same chain. While the other Zonkers was a small hole-in-the-wall place, this one was massive. It had an oversized eating area and…
You know what? I only got pictures of the machines. Let me grab a few images from Google to illustrate my point.
It was akin to a small amusement park tucked away in a mall. Kansas City has such beautiful arcades that I regret not getting more pictures. Both Zonkers have since permanently shut down, so I can never return and fix that mistake. If you ever wonder why I’m so compulsive about taking arcade pictures, Kansas City is the reason.
Well, enough about that, let’s talk about this. This here is the bizarre Dancing Stage Featuring Disney’s Rave. “Dancing Stage” is what DDR is usually called in Europe, but this game uses that name in every region. Nobody’s really sure why.
I’ve found that many people mistakenly label DDR’s music as Eurobeat rather than Eurodance. This game is the one case where most of the soundtrack is Eurobeat. Most of this game’s soundtrack comes from a gimmick album where they had prominent Eurobeat artists do Disney-related songs. It is an oddball entry in the series.
From what I’ve read, this machine would sometimes rotate in 3rd and 5th mix on different days. God bless Zonkers.
While we’re on the subject, this is the Plug and Play Port of Disney Rave. I got it at Savers for five bucks. Looking carefully in the background, you can also see the DDR DVD game.
This Zonkers also had an older version of Beatmania. This is the same cab type as the Hiphopmania from the other day, but with the actual Japanese software.
When people say Beatmania, they almost always refer to Beatmania II rather than this game. Beatmania II, more commonly known as IIDX, was a 7-button “sequel” currently up to 20+ entries. It was popular enough that the classic 5-button version seen here was discontinued shortly after.
On a side note, they tried to make a Beatmania III at one point, but it flopped. I’d like to see one someday.
There was yet another arcade in the same mall, or perhaps a different one altogether. This one was primarily a skating rink with a reasonably modest arcade attached. Half of the machines inside were broken down (including one of these!). I remember leaving an “I don’t think this place will be around much longer” comment on this arcade’s Zenius page. The owner replied, “we’re not going anywhere.” A year later, the mall was closed, so I returned one last time to get in a final “called it.”
I’m such an asshole.
Jesus Christ, what happened with this photo? Luckily, I remember exactly what it was.
This is the third and FINAL classic Beatmania machine in Kansas City. It’s the eighth and final classic Beatmania game, appropriately titled: “Beatmania THE FINAL.” The reason it’s much bigger than the other two isn’t that they put more money into the final entry or anything; it’s just because this happens to be a version 2 cab. As far as I know, all classic Beatmania games can run on either.
This arcade also had another DanceManiax machine. I wonder why this town had so many old Bemani games floating around. At least the two were running different mixes.
Yeah, this place also decided to get onto the ITG3 bandwagon. I wonder if these machines moved elsewhere when these arcades shut down.
And that was pretty much the end of my trip to Kansas City. Good times were had. I’d love to make a second trip, but nearly all these arcades are long gone. I’m glad I got to archive them in some form, even if only a few pictures I took by chance.
I originally had a part 3, but it was mostly random images that had nothing to do with arcades. I decided to leave it out of Token Crow 2.0.
