Just for a taste…
7PM after driving all day to get to Chicago having checked in to my hotel and picked up the ticket for graduation just before walking inside. Proof I had arrived!
This. Game. Is. Insane! Never even knew it existed. Had an absolute blast.
I had never seen nor played the actual Monkey Ball arcade cabinet. I’ve played so much Super Monkey Ball and its sequel that this was a huge highlight. Banana controller is awesome!
As you all know, I love the Neo Geo. This was heaven.
Two rows!!
My brother was a huge Omega Race guy… I’ve only seen a sit down cabinet once or twice. Amazing.
This entire room is almost all horizontal and vertical shooters! I honestly could have stayed in here the entire time. Brilliant!
One of the few 3D shooters… which is actually a 3D version of 2D shooters in the Gradius line! I feel like I knew this existed but I certainly had never seen nor played it. It’s quite an experience if you enjoy Gradius!
Finally, I got to play Twin Cobra II (Kyukyoku Tiger II) for the first time in my life. Twin Cobra has always been a favorite arcade game of mine. It’s that perfect mix of shooting, powerups, bombing, and dodging that we’d get before bullet hell became a thing. Twin Cobra II did not let me down. It’s amazing! I now need to own this on Sega Saturn.
More observations…
The way they put two games in many cabinets is rather brilliant. They have what I think is a video switcher in there and a button on the coin box that lets you switch between games. Essentially, both boards are always running but when you push the button, the video wipes to the other game. It allows you to cram many more games into the space they have, which is HUGE.
The controls on nearly every cabinet were excellent and working perfectly in almost all cases. I had a little trouble with their Zaxxon and one other game I can’t remember now, but everything else was right on. Some monitors were in need of recapping (you can see it on the Metal Slug machine above) but that’s ongoing maintenance that definitely takes money and time and an electrician. For the most part, everything was just plain great, which is a feat that isn’t easy to pull off with this many cabs.
I honestly will go back specifically to visit this arcade again for an entire day. I paid $20 for the videogames portion but if I had more time, I would have spent the $30 total to add the pinball too. Pinball is two blocks away and I knew if I didn’t leave by 10, I’d be dead the next day for graduation and sightseeing downtown. I left around 10:15. :)
I wish I had taken more photos, but you can find them online. I had to make a conscious effort to go play things I had never seen before and investigate the whole place even though I could have probably pipped some third place scores on some of the machines. They keep scoring on top of every cabinet in the place including the World Record and the top three scores at Galloping Ghost. I loved that! They run a Twitch channel so you can tune in there sometime to see folks going for records. Apparently they add one new game every week too!
If you are within any kind of reasonable driving distance. Go there. It’s truly a treasure for fans of arcade games. This lit my fire even more than Funspot has. It’s definitely a little bit less “historical” in the sense that it doesn’t have a lot of super old stuff Funspot has and acts as an excellent complement to that place. Pinball Gallery in Malvern near me is superb for pinball so I knew I could do that more easily locally too, but I imagine that’s as good at GG as it is there.
Highly recommended.