Twin Cities Log: Maplewood Adventure (part 2)

With my business done at the mall, it’s time to stop and grab something to eat before trying to find my next destination. As I wandered around the circumference of the mall parking lot, trying to remember which direction the food place was in, I noticed something in the distance. After debating with myself for a while, I ultimately decided to make a rather lengthy detour across the street.

This is VIDEO GAMES (BUY-SELL-TRADE), I guess. I’ve got to give them credit for their straight-to-the-point name.

Seriously though, this place is called “Toyriffic,” though you wouldn’t know that from looking at it. Hell, I had to look up the name when I got home. It’s written there on the window below the OPEN sign, but it’s hard to tell that it’s the store’s name and not just a random blurb. The windows are so full of video game posters and such that it drowns out anything else.

Before I say anything else about this place, I have to point out that getting a good establishing shot of the inside was impossible. The two shelves of games on the right are positioned so that they’ll block half of the store no matter what angle you try to take it from. The store is about twice as big as it looks in the above image.

I guess I’ll have to go through it piece by piece. I think this shot perfectly captures what kind of a place it is. Every inch of the walls is littered with video game posters, fliers, and pages cut out of magazines. On the left is the anime section. I’ve got to give them credit for still having an anime section since most places phased them out back in the 2000s. They still embrace it wholeheartedly, with anime wall scrolls for sale hanging up all over the place. If my apartment allowed me to hang stuff on the walls, I’d be tempted to get that Accel World wall scroll. Accel World doesn’t get enough love. Chiyuri is probably the most accurate depiction of a girl with issues I’ve seen in an anime. I’ve known SO many of those types.

Oh damn, sealed NES games. Not just any NES games, but both Startropics games! Admittedly, the second game isn’t great, but the first one is one of the system’s underrated classics. Think of it like a more action-oriented version of the original Legend of Zelda. It’s probably best remembered for the puzzle where the game came packaged with a letter to the main character, Mike Jones, from his uncle Steve inviting him to the island. At one point, the game needs a password to operate the submarine and tells you to pour water on that letter to reveal it. Unfortunately, I had to throw mine out before I got to that point. You see, I have a cousin named “Mike” and an uncle named “Steve” who both happened to be over on the day I got the game for Christmas. Afterward, Grandma kept finding the letter, assuming it was something they had forgotten to take home. Finally, I just threw the thing out because I got tired of trying to explain what it was.

This place makes the cart at the mall across the street look like nothing by comparison. When I asked the guy working here if I could take pictures, he initially seemed confused as to why I’d even bother asking. Then I explained that the guy at the cart gave me dirty looks the whole time, even after I got permission. The guy working at the store burst out laughing, going, “oh yeah, I know Jerry. That’s hilarious”. Since there used to be another used game store in the mall, I wonder what it was like to have three retro game stores right next to each other competing. That’s probably why that one had to close down. Or maybe this IS that store, and they just moved?

I’d be all about Pokemon Sundays if this place wasn’t such a pain to get to.

He’s one of many shots behind the counter, where they keep the good stuff (and more wall scrolls). How did this place end up with so many boxed games?

For some reason, it had a rather sizable wall of Star Wars figures. Do these things seem out of place to anyone else? Given that the place is called Toyriffic, I wonder if it was initially a store that dealt more with this kind of stuff before switching to a used video game store. We have two or three used toy stores in town that sell a lot of old action figures, so that wouldn’t surprise me.

(I spent the next 20 minutes trying to look up where that used music and collectables store was)

Look, Nintendo Power. I’m sure I checked a few of these out from the school library as a kid. Of course, I didn’t have a subscription to it until a couple of years after these issues, but I had quite a few back issues I’d accumulated from swap meets over the years. I had an entire dresser drawer so full of video game magazines that I had to start putting them in a second drawer. That NBA issue strikes a chord with me whenever I look at it, but I have no idea why.

I take a bunch of pictures thinking, “there’s enough stuff here to talk about for hours,” then realize that I have nothing to say about most of it. I’m terrible at talking about anything that isn’t an arcade. Either way, this is a nice used video game store I stumbled onto. Check it out if you’re ever in the area.

Why is this one sideways? Why doesn’t WordPress have the option to rotate pictures you’ve already uploaded? Well, whatever.

While still wandering around trying to figure out where the hell the food place was, I came across this tiny place tucked away in the side of an automotive business. It’s about two big rooms filled with the stuff older women decorate their houses with. I did like that their entertainment section looked like it was built to be a closet or fitting room, but they just fit as many shelves as they could in there and filled it with VHS and DVDs.

Anyway, I finally found the place in Best Buy’s parking lot, across the street from one of the only ToysRus in the city. While there are a surprising number of these places in the area, they’re always on the outskirts of town. This is the only one not off in the middle of nowhere, so it’s the only one I ever get to eat at. I used to eat at Pizza Ranch in Sioux Falls all the bloody time, but mainly because I lived a block away from a huge one. Since leaving Sioux Falls, I’ve found myself in places where Pizza Ranch is hard to get to.

Pizza Ranch is a western-themed all-you-can-eat Pizza Buffet. It’s a regional chain that the poor saps on the coasts can’t experience. The one in Sioux Falls even had its arcade and basketball court in the building (why?). Now that I think about it, I only discovered Pizza Ranch because they had an advertisement on a bus bench that said something like “Food – gym – arcade,” and I was looking for a DDR machine. That was like five years ago. I’m a man with a one-track mind to the bitter end.

Oh, right. So the buffet varies depending on when you go. I picked a rather lousy time and everything tasted like complete shit. Lunch usually tends to be better. What makes Pizza Ranch shine is that spicy sauce of theirs. It has a robust flavor. That sauce can make even the worst crust and cheese taste good. The real stars are on the left. I have a massive weakness for cheese bread, or “Cheesy Ranch Stix,” in this case. Back in Sioux Falls, I used to go to Cici’s Pizza and sit around eating their cheese bread, to the point where they knew to start making more of it when I came in. Granted, I was in there all the time primarily because their internet was fast and I had none at my apartment.

I dub these “The Neon Nightmare.” Still, images don’t capture how damn annoying these things look. They’ve got flatscreen monitors full of trippy visuals, everything inside of them is flashing like they’re trying to give onlookers a seizure, and to top things off, the yellow wheel in the middle is spinning at high speeds. There’s no way to walk into this place without immediately seeing these things, especially when the rest of the store is brown.

Sadly, Pizza Ranch has gotten expensive recently, so I don’t think I’ll be coming back any time soon.

With that out of the way, it was off to my actual destination. It’s about a mile away. By this point, it was getting dark, and the weather had just dropped below freezing. By Minneapolis winter standards, “just below freezing” meant it was thankfully warm out because I’d spent the day getting lost and wouldn’t have felt like making the trip otherwise. After a long (not really) journey, I finally made it. Which is good since I hate having to write about things other than arcades for too long.

Here it is. LAN World Gaming. Despite what the name suggests, it’s not a LAN cafe. It’s a…

Hold on, what do we have here?? When walking to LAN World Gaming, I walked by this place without seeing it there. Imagine my surprise to look up and see a full-blown game room on the other side of the window. LAN World can wait; I want to know what’s in here.

Haha, oh wow. This is what I live for. Just look at this place. The Pinball machine is from 2006, but everything else looks like it’s either been sitting here for decades or they bought these machines for 100 bucks each from some guy who was remodeling his basement bar. I love it!

Just look at their drink machine. The last time I saw one of these, it was sitting around a temp labor office. I want to point out that this thing has a button for V-8 juice. If I had three quarters, I’d buy a can to see how far past its expiration date.

“Who’s turn was it to refill this thing?”

“Don’t worry, I just bought one of those 24 pack boxes of chips last month.”

“What about the candy?”

“There’s still some Mentos in there. It should be fine.”

It took me a while to identify this, but it’s Wizard of Wor. Or, at least, it WAS Wizard of Wor at some point. Wizard of Wor didn’t have six buttons, so either this machine was converted into something else at some point, or someone repaired it by splicing on parts from a six-button game. Either way, I can’t know since the thing wasn’t working.

Don’t let the marquee fool you. This game’s title is “actually “Task Force Harrie,” but it was apparently “Task Force Harrier,” but it was spliced with another machine at some point that didn’t have room for the rest of the banner. Unfortunately, this game’s such a hodge-podge of parts that I can’t identify what it was before. However, Google Street Map shows this game was working as of 2012. Not so much these days.

Every single arcade machine in this place was out of order. At some point, an older woman working in the dry cleaner section came up to ask what I was doing. I thought she would tell me to stop, but it turns out she was just bored because it was slow. Once I explained, she wandered outside to have a smoke. I wonder who, if anyone, is in charge of repairing these things?

Let’s see, where was I before I got sidetracked…

Here it is. LAN World Gaming. Despite what the name suggests, it’s not a LAN cafe. It’s a card shop. You know, Magic the Gathering, Yu-gi-oh, Pokemon, and other things. It looks small, so it should be easy to pop in, grab some pictures, and get out.

Oh dear god, I walked in on Yu-gi-oh night.

At a convention a while back, I bought a deck of some Haruhi card game (“Weiss Schwarts” or something) that I’m told was quite popular, despite having never seen anyplace that seems to carry it. Those posters covering the wall seem to suggest that I’ve stumbled upon its central nest. I don’t see anything about it on their website, but it also looks like it hasn’t been updated in the last four years (it still has a major banner for Naruto cards at the top). The website also says this did use to be a LAN cafe/hobby shop hybrid, but it looks like they mostly phased out the former. There was one PC that some kind was playing League of Legends on, but I think they keep it in the store so they can hang onto their “computers and entertainment” listing in the yellow pages.

Here’s what we came for! Say hello to the Yu-gi-oh Duel Terminal!

As I mentioned in part 1 of this entry, this game is somewhat unusual in that it was only distributed to card shops in America. Well, I suppose it’s not that unusual considering its Yu-gi-oh, but it blows my mind that Konami would bring something like this to the states. This is like the Yu-gi-oh Equivalent of Pokemon Ga-ole.

As for the game itself, I couldn’t play it because it was broken. The guy working at the shop assured me that it was not a machine that broke down years ago that they keep around as a decoration, I just had bad timing, and the replacement part was coming in two weeks. Since hobby shops aren’t equipped to deal with arcade machines, many of them get tired of fixing these things and getting rid of them after a while. It’s nice to know that this one is still around (the one in Omaha met a grim fate).

While I’m not exceptionally versed in Yu-gi-oh outside of playing it with the kids I sometimes babysat, watching the first season of the show, and playing a few of the video games, I have occasionally been tempted to play the game so that I’d have an excuse to say “SUPER DREADNAUGHT RAIL CANNON GUSTAV MAX” over and over. Yu-gi-oh has the best card names ever.

I couldn’t play this game today, but they had it back in Omaha so that I can give you the general gist. It’s just a bunch of minigames themed around Yu-gi-oh cards, followed by the battle phase. The battle phase is a significantly dumbed-down version of the main card game made to be played in two minutes. Every time you play, you’re given a special Yu-gi-oh card that you can use to scan in a monster. When I was researching this game last week, I found it interesting that 90% of the mentions about these cards online were talking about the lore surrounding them. I don’t think any of this stuff ever happens in-game.

Well, that’s one thing I can cross off my to-do list. I’ve been saying, “I’ll see if any of the Duel Terminals are still around,” for years, but I’ve never gotten around to it. Maybe I’ll play it next time I’m in the area, but just knowing it wasn’t thrown out is good enough for the time being. Also, Toy*riffic’s PS2 games were 75% off, so I got myself a cheap copy of Beatmania for the PS2. Of course, it’s not of any use to me without a controller…