So a funny thing happened to me a few months ago. I found out there’s a local arcade meetup group here in the Twin Cities. After much contemplating, I decided to pop into a meeting to see if anyone knew about any local arcades that may have slipped under my radar. Three things happened:
- I won an 800-ticket jackpot at Dave and Busters
- I had the sad realization that there’s a big difference in enthusiasm between me and them
- The leader quit and I ended up in charge
So now I run the local arcade group. This is far from the first time something like this has happened to me. Hell, remember Tom from the Chicago posts? He did the same thing to me with a visual novel group almost a decade ago. Anyway, this month I talked them into going to a new-ish barcade in St Paul that I hadn’t had a chance to check out yet.
“Barcades” have been opening up all over the Twin Cities since Up-Down moved in a few years ago. The vast majority of them are just bars with five games trying to draw the Up-Down crowd (I have photos of a very short-lived one that I’ll work into a blog post someday). This one is called St. Paul Tap, and it’s legitimate enough for me to deem an actual arcade. We had a group of like ten people, but thankfully it wasn’t very crowded.
From what little I could gather, St Paul Tap was formerly a tavern called Spanky’s with a small stage for local bands to play. Even though the owners and theme have changed, the general architecture still screams “tavern.” In some ways, it’s almost refreshing. Most bar-arcade hybrids either go for Barcade’s “tiny, dark underground bar” feel or Up-down’s “modern-retro hipster hangout” thing. Points for personality.
At first glance, it looks like a standard bar with a slightly larger-than-normal selection of arcade games meant for drunkards to kill a few minutes. If I had seen this photo alone, I’d have probably written this place off as not worth visiting. I had to do quite a bit of research to confirm that coming here wouldn’t be a waste of time. Especially since I had to bring so many people with me this time. Let’s take a closer look around.
The first thing you’ll notice at St. Paul Tap are these huge, super-modern games that you’d typically find at bigger Dave and Busters-type arcades. Even I think seeing these here is pretty bizarre. I mean, that place in Chicago had a few modern games tucked away in the back, but a gigantic machine like Halo Fireteam Raven is the last thing I’d expect to see at a barcade.
I’m not all that knowledgeable about Halo, so I’ve never paid much attention to this game when I’ve come across it in the past (I found out recently Tom is a Halo fan because I sent him a photo of an arcade I was visiting, and he was more curious about the Halo machine in the background than the machine I was trying to show him). I got to watch people playing this game for the first time. It turns out that this game’s gimmick is that it had two gigantic screens. It’s not a case of a screen for each set of two players, but the gameplay area takes place across BOTH screens at once. For example, a player sitting on the right can turn his gun and shoot the left screen. Multiscreen gimmicks have existed since the 80s, but this is the first time I’ve seen a game do it with screens this big, unless I’m forgetting something obvious that I’ll kick myself for later.
Life finds a way.
Note: For those who don’t regularly read this blog, the Jurassic Park deluxe machines are so bloody common that I got tired of trying to come up with new things to say about them. Now I type that quote from the movie and move on.
So for some reason, Rampage had a new live-action movie last year, even though it hasn’t had a new game in about 20 years. Rampage is a franchise that’s always existed as an arcade series first, so what better way to make a tie-in game than a new arcade entry? I’d complain about the sluggish controls and simple gameplay, but it’s Rampage. Rampage has always had wonky controls. I will complain about the graphics, though. The city is sterile and looks like a cheap mobile game, while the monsters are detailed to the point of looking out of place. I’m not sure if this is better or worse than Rampage World Tour’s awkward early CG.
The Ninja Turtles arcade games are still wildly popular at retro barcades, so this seems like a natural choice if you have modern games alongside retro ones. This one is trying hard to be a throwback to the Konami beat-em-ups of the early 90s but updated for a modern audience. Which works since the modern 2012 reboot of the Ninja Turtles show that this is based on does the same thing. That show was also canceled before this game was released.
Oh yeah, they also have Family Guy Bowling. It just came out last year, but I’m sure it found its way into most non-arcade bars these days alongside Golden Tee and Big Buck Hunter. Games like this are a perfect marriage of a license that appeals to drunken bargoers with a low-effort sport people can play with their friends. It’s the same reason The Simpsons Bowling was so popular back in the day.
So one of the guys in the group was going on a rant about how strange the choice of games were. “Like Rolling Thunder. Nobody’s heard of that.” Come on, of all the weird games they had here, you single this out as obscure? Hell, this game is, in many ways, a spiritual predecessor to the Time Crisis series. Same company. Both shooters with a heavy emphasis on cover mechanics. Hell, even the main characters are incredibly similar.
If you want an example of a D-list game, nobody’s heard of, at least use Knuckle Bash. It’s nothing but a ridiculous and crappy, Final Fight knockoff. This game isn’t fun because of how wonky the controls feel. While double-checking to make sure this wasn’t some cult hit that I just hadn’t heard of (it’s not), I found out it was designed by the same guy who made that Sailor Moon beat-em-up I didn’t get to play. Huh.
The only two fighting games they had were this Marvel vs. Capcom machine and a Mortal Kombat II on the other side of the room.
St. Paul Tap also had a row of TVs lined up playing Fortnite and Call of Duty. At this point, you’re probably wondering why this place deserved its blog post. So far it’s nothing but a couple of modern games and some pretty mediocre retro games. Well, you see…
The rest of the arcade games were hidden around this half-wall on the other side of Fortnite. I can’t figure out why they’d do this. If you’re trying to advertise yourself as an arcade, why would you make it so nobody can see most of your games when they walk in? Must be a space issue.
All of the pinball machines are back here, too. I wonder how many members of the arcade group walked into the main lobby and thought, “…this is all?”
Seriously St. Paul Tap…
The selection still isn’t fantastic, but it’s big enough that I can’t say this is a lousy barcade. Especially here in the twin cities, where we don’t have many of these games anywhere else. Like Pole Position II. I can think of two small arcades just outside of town that might have this, but you’re not going to find it anywhere in the area without doing some driving. If I came to this arcade while traveling, I’d be disappointed, but since I’m so versed in the Twin Cities arcade scene, I know that this is one of the few decent places to play for people who like these old 80s games. It’s just here or Up-down.
On that note, here’s the only Playchoice-10 in the Twin Cities. I was telling another group member that these existed the month before this because they’d never seen one before. She got to play one for the first time. Let’s see what was on it.
I’ve seen some bad lineups before, but this takes the cake.
I decided to finally play Super Punch-Out to see the differences between this and the original. As it turns out… It’s one of those arcade sequels that’s closer to an update than a sequel. No wonder I never noticed the difference before.
The rest of the back corner mainly was standard barcade stuff like Paperboy, Popeye, and the like. They did have a couple of other games sitting around the main room that I didn’t mention before, but there were only around five of them. For example, Atari’s Roadblasters is advertising a free T-shirt.
The rest of the group was surprised when I said I hadn’t seen Birdie King before. Retro golf and bowling games tend to be pretty rare since nobody wants to waste floor space on them. Plus, there are still a lot of pretty common machines that I’ve never come across. Who knows? Maybe we’ll be seeing some of those soon.
You can also see Ninja Turtles and Mario Bros in this lineup. After I finished taking photos of the arcade, I jumped into games with some of the other group members. I had a trip coming up, so I was on a tight budget, but I still felt I should play at least a few games with them. After all, people came to the meetup to socialize. That’s something I try to keep in mind when I run these meetings. Before I ended up in charge, the first one I went to was very awkward, and most of the group didn’t say much. I’ve been taking my role as leader seriously and trying to get everyone involved in the conversations.
And this is a big four-player light-up foosball table. I wouldn’t usually get to play this game since I go to arcades alone. I guess something like this can be an okay change once in a while. However, whenever I go to these meetups, I can’t help but feel wrong. I’m a loner by nature, you know. Once upon a time, I’d have killed for a group like this to go out and do things with. These days I have a much more active social life and realize I’d just be left alone. I do have enough fun at these that I don’t regret going, but that’s not really why I stay in charge. It would be so easy to leave and let someone else take control of the group.
Warning. Long, unrelated personal tangent begins here.
Once upon a time, when I first moved out on my own to a new town, I decided that I would have a social life. One day, I saw a poster for an anime convention on the door of a local comic store and decided I’d go and see what happened. It was a small, awful convention, but it was the first one I ever attended. My knowledge of the medium was a few years out of date, so I didn’t connect with anyone. At the end of the con, like the last hour or so, I did have a friendly conversation with a couple of girls who were also killing time because they weren’t ready to go home. They clued me in about a local anime shop, which would be useful for getting back into the hobby…
So there was this anime shop that was a local hangout for the types who would go to anime conventions. I know I’ve mentioned it before (and I’m pretty sure I’ve told this story before in part), but it became a frequent haunt for me after that. Everyone just sat around the sofa area watching anime and playing video games while the Warhammer guys and MtG players did their thing in one of the many back rooms. At some point, one of the older girls who always hung out here decided to get everyone together to start a formal weekly anime club. I think it may have been one of the same girls I spoke to at the convention before, but I have face blindness, so I’ll never know for sure.
The anime club. It met Friday at 4:00 PM. Its “members” (mostly anyone who happened to be around the shop at the time: guys in their early 20s and Hetalia-loving teenage girls) would gather in “the purple room” and chat about nothing in particular. It lasted a total of two meetings before the leader got bored and stopped holding them. I was already in the habit of showing up to that store on Fridays to hang out, playing video games and watching anime with whoever happened to be there, so I didn’t really care if that “club” met. However, there was one particularly awkward girl that I noticed showed up every week.
She was still a younger high school girl, around 14 or so, with a strong build and black hair covering most of her face. Every week her father would drop her off for the anime club; she’d sit at a table doing nothing for a couple of hours, then her father would pick her up (oblivious to the fact that the leader wasn’t holding the club anymore). Week after week, she came and sat in the same place. Nobody tried to talk to her. She just kept waiting for an anime club that wasn’t happening. Even I could tell how much that girl wanted to make friends.
Finally, I got fed up and approached her. “It looks like she’s not coming again. Wanna go into the meeting room and see if I have anything worth watching saved on my laptop?” So we held a pseudo-anime club where we watched a random anime top 10 list I had downloaded from Youtube. It wasn’t much, but it was something. We did something similar the following week, but I can’t remember what. I think it was that week that some tiny 14-year-old walked up to me all, “oh, I didn’t know the club was still a thing.” She hovered around me for a bit, talking about manga that she liked, then I told her to go over and talk to the other girl. She was shy and reluctant, but I pushed her into it. They ended up getting along pretty well. After that, “The Little One,” as I called her, showed up to this club every week.
A few other teenage girls started drifting back into club at this point, including the former leader. I remember scolding her for not showing up for the past two months even though she was in charge, then she never showed up again. I was a 23-year-old guy in charge of a tiny anime club full of five or six teenage girls and nobody older than that really showed up past the initial two meetings. Eventually, it became a small group of just me, The Little One, “Steve” (she wasn’t a guy or anything, just eccentric and a bit troubled), and “Rex.” Rex is what I named the quiet one because she wasn’t fond of her real name. Because it means “king” and sounds like “wrecks.” She got a kick out of it and used it as her name from that point forward. I remember she used it for her self-insert character in her comic, too. I didn’t realize she was THAT fond of my stupid joke…
That anime club ran for about a year. Every week we’d sit around killing time. We’d play Pokemon cards, shoot nerf guns in the park behind the place, discuss manga, grab some Little Ceasers from next door, and I’d even help them photograph their Hetalia cosplays during weeks they came in wearing them (it was just a thing the girls who hung out there would do sometimes. It had nothing to do with the club). Whatever I could come up with to kill a few hours. To this day, I’m still not sure whether they viewed me as a mentor or a fun babysitter.
I have fond memories of those days too, you know.
Sadly, the anime shop couldn’t sustain itself and had to move to a much smaller location. We didn’t have a private back room anymore, so it was awkward to hold our meeting out in the open with everyone constantly butting in (plus, I was really sick during the one session we tried to have there, so I was struggling not to fall asleep). I was moving out of town in a few months to live closer to my girlfriend, so it’s probably for the best that things ended naturally.
The shop closed shortly after I left. But I did see the three of them at the shop one last time before I moved, and they were still hanging out together. It was a bit melancholy because they didn’t notice me and only popped in for a moment to buy something, but I was glad to see they became such good friends during their time in our makeshift anime club.
-Tangent ends here-
I don’t know why I felt compelled to type all of that up. It’s my blog, so I’m allowed to. The point I was making is that when I told a friend from Australia that I’d ended up in charge of an arcade group, his reply was, “kek, how does this keep happening to you!?” He claimed it was because I was a natural leader. That’s not the case at all. It’s just my nature. I’ll keep running it as long as people keep coming. The people who come are just trying to make friends. I can at least help them do that for the time being by making sure the group is run fairly. At least until I can find someone better suited to it than me.
Anyway, the reason I typed up all of that is that I’ve been feeling melancholy since this arcade group business started. Again, I’m a loner by nature. Plus, I said this back at the start of the post:
I had the sad realization that there’s a big difference in enthusiasm between me and them
It’s got me thinking about a lot of things. When I started doing this blog, it was to share with some old net buddies of mine (from the same group Tom stuck me in charge of back in the day). As time went on, I had a falling out with one of them and realized the other two eventually stopped reading. I’ve just been writing this blog to keep a journal of the places I visit. Visiting arcades is a hobby that I can’t even share with the other members of a dedicated arcade group.
So why am I still doing this?
