I’ve said before that the Twin Cities have around 60 arcades and game rooms. That may sound like a lot, but that number is significant because the Twin Cities area encompasses many territories. Today, we’ll be hitting up a couple of arcades that I’ve been putting off for a while because of how out of the way they are. These two are on the very north outskirts of town, right about where civilization starts to end.
Minnesota has over 10,000 lakes. Once you get this far out of town, you start to understand just how many there are. Every time you walk around a lake, you’ll discover another lake on the other side. I hate navigating this area on foot because many businesses have tiny lakes between them, which makes cutting through difficult. Expect to wade through a grass field if there isn’t a lake.
There’s a reason I live downtown.
Since the other place, although closer, doesn’t open until 4 PM, let’s head over here. I usually start with an establishing shot of the building, but this sign sums up the nature of the place much better than I ever could. I have no idea how long Blainbrook Bowl has been around, but it’s been here a while.
On second thought, the building itself is pretty indicative of what’s inside.
The local drinking hole is the first thing you see when you walk in. As I came in, the guys at the bar were calling out, “see you tomorrow” to a man on his way out. Despite primarily being a bowling alley, this is the type of romanticized bar where everybody knows everybody else. There’s such a calming, lived-in feel here.
Blainbrook is a pretty big place. The bowling alley is the size of most small, dedicated bowling alleys but only takes up about half of the building.
I don’t take pictures of arcades just for the games, but for the place, they’re housed in. Sure, the random prize games are neat, but I took this photo for the thing sitting next to the elaborate gumball machine. It’s a standard coffee maker seated around a small table. The employees seem so at home here that they have their coffee machine set up in the open. Hundreds of people probably come through here a day but most likely don’t take a moment to consider the coffee maker and how much personality it adds.
Enough about the small appliances, this is what we’re here for. You wouldn’t know it by the first few photos, but Blainbrook has a surprisingly large arcade. It’s a bit hard to see, but there are two rows with about 20 pinball machines each. Unfortunately, I’m not well-versed in pinball, so there’s little I can say about them, but it’s still an impressive collection.
First up are the three retro machines. These feel more like part of the bar than the arcade. Here we have a Pac-man machine, an older Pac-man machine converted into a Ms. Pac-man machine, and an Aero Fighter machine converted into a Donkey Kong machine converted into a multi-cade. The middle one’s seen better times.
And there’s a Ms Pacman board shoved into a classic Pac-man machine.
The other two games are in the “bar corner.” Even though these two games are in nearly every bar with arcade machines, I’m not sure I’ve ever played either. I’ll have to remember to make a point to do it one of these days.
Oh, one of these! This mechanical redemption counter is usually used at places like Cici’s Pizza that don’t have room for an accurate redemption counter. You put your tickets in, then use it like a vending machine to dispense your prize. It’s a cool idea, but I’m not sure why they have one here, of all places. The building’s certainly big enough to have a proper redemption counter. Maybe they don’t feel like paying someone to stand behind it.
This place has an absurd amount of prize games, many of which I’ve never even seen before. This looks like a vending machine, but I believe it’s a ticket game where you can win prizes if you score high enough. I doubt anybody ever wins them, but you have the chance to.
I’m not going to bother looking this one up, but it wants the Fruit Ninja audience. Behind it is Raptor Captor, one of those old games where you shoot a token and try to make it land in a particular hole. Those used to be common but died out when arcades started moving away from token games. Some arcades use an awkward solution where a machine can convert your card credits to physical tokens specifically for games like this, but they’re so much trouble that few places bother.
Here are five more examples of those kinds of games. Both involve shooting the physical token at a goal, so you’ll never see these in any arcade that’s switched over to cards (unless they have the aforementioned token converter). I assume Blainbrook got these machines dirt cheap from some arcade that didn’t want to put up with them anymore.
As I said, I’m not the biggest fan of pinball, but there’s one pinball machine housed here that I had to see in person. This is the legendary Hercules pinball machine. It’s pretty hard to tell what’s so special about it from this photo, but luckily our old friend Big Bass is here to help!
If you’ve ever seen Big Bass in person, and I’m sure you have, you know it’s a pretty big machine. Hercules is bigger. It’s a really, really, really big pinball machine. In fact, it’s the largest pinball machine ever mass-produced! It’s so massive that it has to use a pool ball instead of a pinball! I think this machine belongs to the arcade at the state fair, but they’re so proud that they keep it here for everyone to see during the rest of the year.
I wasn’t kidding when I said this place has a LOT of pinball machines. There are two other pinball-focused arcades in town, but this is the biggest of the three. Some of them look pretty old, but I’m far from qualified to go into detail about them. On the off chance someone reading this is enough of a pinball nerd to find significance in any of these, I took photos of them. Enjoy.
If it wasn’t apparent that many of these machines were bought second-hand cheaply, this Pizza Zone should hammer in the idea. When do you EVER see this outside of small pizza places?
Life finds a-
Okay, I’m just going to come clean. This is an excellent arcade, but my heart’s not into it. I can’t get too excited about pinball. While there are other games, they’re mostly just ticket games and things like the above that you can see at any arcade. I’m still glad I got to document it.
Before we go any further, I wanted to grab some pictures of something else. This area is full of huge, empty lots you need to cut through to get where you’re going. This particular lot is between a Walmart and the other bowling alley in this area. The last time I came here, this place was a small forest that was pretty fun to navigate.
Hidden within that forest were this now-exposed house and its collapsed garage. I’m glad they haven’t torn it down yet, even though it’s less mysterious without the surrounding trees.
For the longest time, I didn’t see the house and thought this was the only structure in the forest. With the surrounding foliage gone, it’s much more a garage than a shack. Strangely, whoever owned it never tried salvaging anything from it when it collapsed. Among other things, you can see a can of long-dry white paint, a bunch of windows lined up near the wall, and an old bedspring.
My first instinct is that this garage collapsed in the middle of the construction, and those windows were meant to be added later. However, a bunch of twisted frames from a completely different type of window arescattered around this area. There’s also no sign of anything resembling a garage door. Another thing worth mentioning is that there are a couple of tractor tires nearby, so this may have originally been meant to house a tractor. But there were so many trees that I can’t imagine why they’d need a tractor. Maybe one of the adjacent lots, such as the Walmart, was once farmland?
The world may never know.
Here’s the house proper. As you can see, it was boarded off years ago. Trees once hid this whole area, so someone could smash a hole in the side without anyone seeing. Let’s take a closer look.
If those tags are any indication, this must have been a popular hangout for the local gangs. I was afraid to go in on the off chance that someone was still residing here. I have to wonder why they tore the side off the house instead of just taking an axe to the board covering the door…
It looks like they also broke into the basement. Don’t be fooled; that pipe is just a random piece of debris and isn’t connected to anything. Looking carefully, you can see a container of snack crackers on the table inside. Considering there were still a few inside and no animal crawled in trying to get at them, they’re probably pretty recent.
I suppose there wasn’t much point to that diversion, but I’m afraid the house will soon be cleared like the field surrounding it. A strange place abandoned in the (former) woods is interesting. I wanted proof that it was there when it inevitably gets torn down. Let’s get back to the arcades, shall we?
This is Bruns-
Wait, what?
The last time I was here, this was a Brunswick Zone XL. We used to have four local Brunswick Zones, but Google says three are now Bowlero. One of them is still a Brunswick Zone, so it doesn’t seem like they went under. They must have just had to sell off most of their locations. Luckily, very little has changed.
Here’s the first thing you see when you walk in. I don’t know what mood this is supposed to establish, but it makes a solid first impression. Maybe this is meant to be a bowling alley for manly men? Could that be the theme?
They also have an entire sports bar area standard for trendy bowling alley entertainment centers. Each eating booth has its TV built into the wall, so they can show off how fancy they are compared to the other local bowling alley.
The way in the back of the bar is a ping pong table, sack-throwing game, and darts. Pool tables and darts are expected at bars. Ping-pong is a bit weird, but okay. The sack-throwing thing feels kind of tacky at such an otherwise upscale place. It was even hand painted…
If you get bored of the sack-throwing game, there’s also a Game Box full of board games that look like they were pulled out of someone’s basement. I can’t figure out what this place is going for.
The main draw, the bowling alley, has huge monitors above the lanes so that you can watch sports while you play sports (bowling is still a sport, right?). Fancy bowling alleys like this have been popping up all over the place in the last decade, but I think Bowlero/Brunswick Zone are the only ones in the Twin Cities. Omaha had like four of them owned by different companies.
…and I forgot to take an establishing shot of the arcade. Take this instead.
This arcade is nothing special. If you’ve seen any modern arcade, you’ve probably seen nearly all of the games here at some point. Thankfully, it doesn’t throw all of its eggs into the ticket game basket like SOME arcades, so it’s still possible to have a good time here.
This used to be a frequent haunt of mine because it houses one of the best DDR machines in town. Most local DDR machines border on unplayable, so that’s not much of an accomplishment. If someone wants to play DDR and the free machine doesn’t cut it (or if I don’t feel like playing Extreme for the hundredth time), this is the machine I always suggest. When my friend Tom came into town, this was the machine we went to. Unfortunately, I was out of practice and slightly buzzed, so we drove all that way for like two rounds.
I walked about 6 miles total today, so my legs weren’t up for DDR. I had a card full of credits, so I thought it was high time I played some of the more common machines I’ve never bothered with before.
This, for example, is Batman. I usually see this one in tiny arcades where I’m not in the mood to spend much money, so I’ve never bothered to play it. I’ve always assumed it was a Batman racing game of some sort. It turns out that it’s akin to Spy Hunter or Lucky and Wild, where your goal is to shoot down enemy cars instead of passing them. There’s a large variety of missions for what it is, ranging from “destroy a specific enemy car” to “fly around in the Batplane and destroy the anti-air guns” (wouldn’t it make more sense to shoot the anti-air guns from a non-air vehicle?). Damage to the Batmobile carries over between stages, so you’re not going to last more than a few missions without putting more quarters in. I’ll have to play more if I find a cheap machine.
It’s also worth noting that you can play as nearly any non-comics incarnation of the Batmobile. I was surprised to see the Brave and the Bold cartoon version included.
If you’ve played one sit-in rail shooter, you’ve played them all. For how expensive the deluxe cabs cost to play, I generally ignore them in favor of the smaller versions. I decided to give this one a go out of curiosity. It was exactly what I expected: a pirate-themed rail shooter. This game’s gimmick is that there’s a ship’s wheel between the two guns you occasionally need to use to steer the boat. It’s fun enough, but not worth the 1.50 they were charging to play it.
Oh my god! I’ve wanted to run into this game all year! This is the all-new Cruisin’ Blast that came out a few months ago. After Raw Thrills lost the license to the Fast and the Furious, they talked Nintendo into letting them continue the Cruisin’ series (remember, Raw Thrills mainly consists of Midway’s old arcade division). I may give Crusin’ a hard time for its shallow mechanics, but it’s still fun. Except when the first-place car scrams into you right before the finish line to stop you from passing them. That happened to me.
While working on my racing game article, I realized I didn’t have a clear photo of this game. The Fast and the Furious is so infuriatingly common at arcades that I usually ignore it. Today I felt generous, so I decided to play the poor game. It was a lot more fun than I remember, right up until the first-place car decided to again ram into me before the finish line to stop me from passing him.
Remember Sink-It? I said I’d talk about it more someday. That was a kid-friendly edition of this Beer Pong arcade game. It’s a Tapper vs. Root Beer Tapper situation. A place like Big Thrill Factory doesn’t want beer-pong-themed fun in an establishment made for eight-year-olds, but Bowlero has no such reservations.
This Walking Dead arcade game came out last year, but this is the first time I’ve seen it. According to the Walking Dead wiki, the TV show added some guy with a crossbow who wasn’t in the comics, which is why you shoot zombies with a crossbow instead of a gun. I think Raw Thrills is just trying to move in on House of the Dead’s turf.
Speaking of House of the Dead, here’s House of the Dead 4. The House of the Dead series is most known for being a cruel game where the final bosses have so much HP that you’ll never kill it without continuing 10+ times. Nobody wants to quit at the final boss, so the determined will keep putting coins in until they inevitably run out. Some take around 10 minutes of continuous shooting before they go down. It’s ridiculous.
Now, THIS is a neat spin on the classic coin pusher. In the Price is Right coin pusher, there are no cards to collect to force you to keep playing. This game’s gimmick is that each seat has a different Price is a Right game-themed gimmick. For example, the Plinko seat has a bunch of Plinko pins that your coin has to pass through, while Safecracker gives you a bonus if you drop your coin down the target-numbered slot. If you fulfill any gimmick challenges, you can spin the big wheel up top to decide your bonus. It’s one of the coolest takes on a coin pusher I’ve ever seen.
Oh, I saw the smaller version of this game at a theater a while back, didn’t I? I’m glad I didn’t play it back then since it’s not very good. I’ll discuss it more when I finish my racing game article. I have three games left to write about before it’s finished. (and a LOT of proofreading) UPDATE: The racing game articles were awful, so I got rid of them.
One good thing about this arcade rebranding is that they ordered a bunch of new machines, so they have a lot of really recent ones like Walking Dead, Cruisin’ Blast, and this thing. I’m sure I will get sick of seeing this thing soon, but I’ll enjoy being happy to see it. This is Raw Thrills’ successor to those Super Bikes games you see everywhere. Since they didn’t have the Fast and Furious license anymore, they needed a new one to slap on their generic motorcycle racing game.
Those cab lights are really, really cool.
As expected, this Time Crisis machine is expensive as hell. I think it was nearly two dollars to play. I will take this opportunity to say that Time Crisis 4’s lights also look fantastic when working correctly. They usually aren’t.
And with that, I’m done here. There’s not a lot to see at this arcade, but damn, was I glad to finally find Cruisin’ Blast. Maybe I can find Daytona USA 3 or Maximum Tune 5 next? Come to think of it; I wonder why all of these old racing series are suddenly getting new installments this year…
Every once in a while, I go to arcades that are just a pain in the butt to write about for one reason or another. Today we saw two bowling alleys that fit that description for entirely different reasons. Both were interesting enough to write about, but neither gave me much to talk about.
Don’t worry; there will be LOTS of interesting arcades soon. Just wait.
