The Game Is Afoot

If you’re an old mall rat you’ll love this place. I stopped in randomly after driving by a few times. It’s a small place but hopefully it gets some community support and grows. Is love to see arcades come back.

Totally disappointed. I have been wanting to check this place out for a while and finally made the trip. We had my sons birthday party at an arcade last year and thought this could be a cool spot for this years celebration. My son, 7 yr old, is really into all the retro games. We have original NES, SNES, 64, etc. I also brought my 15 month old with the plan of maybe getting in a few games myself, but mainly the trip was for my older son. We were greeted by an employee. Seemed as if we were interrupting him as he needed to take his headphones off and close his device. I told him I wanted to buy an hour for me and hour for my son. He kept saying we could buy 15 minutes? What a sales person! I was willing to pay $ 24 and he wanted me to just pay $ 6? While paying, my 15 month old was pushing the start button on one of the pinball machines. The friendly host told me to stop him from pushing the buttons because it could mess up the game. Is this a taste of what we are about to experience? All the games are fragile? Pushing a button could break an arcade game? Great!
We went on to play the games and there is plenty of selection. Most of the «5,000» games are emulators. Trying to figure out the navigation is difficult at first, but easy once you get the hang of it. I would have asked the friendly employee for help but he was really busy on his iPad. Assuming we would get a quick lesson was not even a thought that crossed my mind. Anyway it takes forever to scroll through the system selection, game selection, etc. Once you finally get to a game you want play the screen gets glitchy. Also the buttons don’t seem to be configured right. For example, when playing Mario bros. the jump button was on the left and the run fast button was on the right? Plenty of lag throughout the game. We were «checked on» once and I think he wanted to make sure my toddler wasn’t doing anything wrong like pushing a button on an arcade cabinet.
The best part, and another great example of a true sales person, is when our hour was up The employee came back and said «ok guys time is up». After an uncomfortable hour I was ready, but wasn’t even asked if I wanted to buy more time. We were the only two people in the place why didn’t he try to keep us there? Oh well.
I would have given this place zero stars, but he did cut our wristbands off before we left. This was one star worthy.
Needless to say, won’t be back and won’t be having a party there. Save your money.

I have never written a bad review on Unilocal before. But this place is not clear on their website that all but three of the pinball machines they claim to have are MAME emulators in pinball cabinets. So yes, they have almost 500 games, but they’re all on this extremely wonky system. And there is a delay — a small delay, but a delay nonetheless — between when you hit the flipper buttons and when they respond. As pinball is very much a timing-​based game, this makes actually hitting any shots near impossible. The three actual machines are in various states of disrepair. I hate to knock an arcade in these times when they’re such a rarity, but this place sucks. I left before my time was even up (at $ 12 an hour to play their lousy emulations!)

The machines look beautiful and the staff is very friendly. The only thing I worry about is the legality of everything. They have MAME running in a public setting, which is illegal… let alone they are making money off of it. Regardless they have 2 or 3 actual cabinets and the rest are all MAME cabinets. It would be nice to keep an actual arcade like this open in the area but I wouldn’t wanna see them get shut down for running an illegal operation. I think they should have more actual arcade cabinets with PCBs instead of MAME .
The only way the machines in the arcade would be legal is if the company who manufactured them owned the rights to all 5000 of those roms (Which is highly unlikely), but it would be ok if you had one in your house. In this case these machines are making money commercially. Which isn’t legal in the slightest bit .
Q. Can I put an arcade cabinet running MAME in a public location?
A. No. This is a commercial use of MAME and is prohibited by the license.
I just don’t think playing something that any person could download on their computer for free should be charged money to play. If you had all the machines in there be actual Arcade PCB circuit boards then I would get a rush of nostalgia. But knowing that it’s just a computer running a bunch of emulators just isn’t the same.

Machines look beautiful and the environment is very fun