Twin Cities Log: Burnsville part 1

As usual, murky days like this one make me feel alive. After a harsh winter, it’s finally time to start exploring the arcades I’ve put off until now. It feels like I’ve been to many of them already, but I’ve only scratched the local arcades’ surface. I think I counted around sixty last time I tallied them up (although that total does include several small game rooms that only have a couple of machines).

Today, we’ll be visiting two notorious local arcades. I’ve known about them forever, but they’re so far on the south side of town that I’ve never gotten around to making the trip. First of all, let’s take a look at this one. It’s a theater sitting around in a mall parking lot. This seems like a good place for an arcade, right?

This particular theater is proud of its arcade. Look at the amazing mural drawn on the arcade’s window. I’m a huge sucker for things like this.

Pac-man counter: 1.

This has to be the most over-the-top decor I’ve ever seen in a movie theater. It feels more like a stage theater than a cinema. There’s even a second floor with a fancy French-looking dining area. I’d have taken a picture of it, but the statues make it impossible to get a good shot. Plus, I wasn’t here to see a movie and didn’t want to have to explain why I was roaming around on the upper floor.

…and the arcade is closed!

They were having some problems with the token machine, so they had to close it off for the day. The manager let me go in to take pictures, thankfully. It doesn’t look like much from this angle, but it’s two rooms. The front room is mostly the stock theater stuff: Claw machines, photo booths, etc. The second room, which you can see the entrance to on the right, is where most of the older stuff is housed.

This is the other local Namco arcade I mentioned a while back. It’s pretty underwhelming compared to the old mall arcade at Maplewood, no? Even their Pac-man ball pusher doesn’t seem to be working right. Typically, there are supposed to be multiple capsules you can push around, but it looks like the machine forgot to drop more than one. Do note the Pokemon card prizes.

Pac-man counter: 2.

As usual, with these poorly lit theater arcades, about half of the photos came out badly. This here is Dance Dance Revolution Extreme. As anyone who knows anything about this game knows, this is as common as they come. A “friend” says this is where she comes to play, so I assume the pads are alright. I wouldn’t know myself since the whole arcade was technically out of order.

This isn’t just any DDR machine! The first several DDR games had Japanese home releases for the original Playstation system. Some arcade versions at the time came with memory card slots to exchange data between the home and arcade versions of the game. Outside of letting you save your scores, you could also write your own arrow patterns for any song in the game!

They continued Playstation memory card support for a few versions after the home series moved to the Playstation 2 but never updated the Playstation 2 memory cards. That means the arcade can still read saved data from Playstation-era games but has no compatibility with anything newer. If you want to write your own charts for any song in this game, it had better be for a song that appeared on at least one PSX game. To my knowledge, you can still write new charts for newer songs via memory card hacking, but there’s no official way of doing it. Still, machines that still have the memory card slots are HIGHLY sought after so it’s pretty rare to still find them in the wild these days. The memory card slots by themselves can go for hundreds of dollars.

This one is LA Machineguns, the sequel to Gunblade NY. It’s not just any LA Machineguns cab, but the gigantic Deluxe version! I want to say more about it, but the arcade wouldn’t let me play any of these. Google tells me that Sega randomly released a home port of this for the Wii a decade after the game came out. I wonder if anybody even remembered this game at that point?

Despite how typical The House of the Dead was in Las Vegas, you don’t see it here in the Twin Cities often, do you? The other game in this photo is one I can’t identify. Had I been able to play it, I’d probably have remembered the name. The image blurs the game’s name just enough that I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be. EDIT: It was Ranger Mission.

Pac-Man counter: 3 (It’s there. Look carefully)

Look, it’s Silent Scope! I don’t even remember the last time I saw one of these. Silent Scope was a really popular arcade game in the late 90s. The game’s primary gimmick is that the sniper scope on the gun has a tiny video screen that you can use to zoom in on where the gun is pointed. You get more points for head and heart shots. Unfortunately, this is another game that’s highly prone to breaking down. The white machine next to it is Hydro Thunder’s sequel, Arctic Thunder. It’s the same game with more icebergs.

If you can’t make these games out, they’re Mario Kart Arcade, Cruisin’ Exotica, Fast and the Furious, and I think the last one was Terminator Salvation. I have a thing or two to say about that middle one, but let’s save it for later, alright?

This is a game I’ve wanted to play for a while, but I had to go and find it at an arcade that was closed for the day. This game is OutRun 2 SP, the long-awaited sequel to the groundbreaking OutRun. Why they decided to revive this franchise over a decade after the original is beyond me. I’ll come back here and play it someday.

This has to be the most run-down Air Hockey table I’ve ever seen. Seeing beaten-up machines like this sitting aroundthe corner makes me happy. I wonder how many years it’s been here? Nearly all of the older devices in this arcade are from the late 90s or early 00s, so I’d have to guess that’s when the arcade opened (or went through a major revamp).