Celebrating Ian and Alli's Half Birthday - Arcade Pt2

The kids had a great time with the first half of their birthday celebration at the bowling alley section of The Summit. Now it's time to move on to the part that they've been talking about at home for the last few days. The arcade! They've been explaining all the different games they played, and talking about their favorites. Now they get to play them again!

After having so much success on this giant claw machine, the kids were excited to give it another try. 

And had similar successes! They have so many of these balls now. 

It doesn't earn any tickets, but air hockey is always fun. 

Depending on how aggressive you are, half the time you accidentally score on yourself instead of your opponent. 

A different take on how to hold your air hockey striker. 

The kids have loved watching YouTube videos of people playing arcade games, especially Arcade Matt. This Quik Drop game is a regular feature on his channel, and he's really good at it. The object is to drop ping pong balls into the rotating buckets below, but it's a bit deceptive. There's a countdown clock, but it doesn't have any numerals on it. That way they can change the duration of the timer. If someone has recently won a jackpot, it goes a bit faster. If no one has won in a while, it gives you more time to make all 50 balls in the buckets. 

And so, after a couple tries, I was the big winner! Hoorah!

And then the game resets back to hard mode. That's okay, because Avery likes to press the button as fast as she can and drop all those balls quickly!

Ian really likes this game where you try to knock the ticket pucks over to the side to win them. But it's really easy to burn through a lot of credits because each attempt only takes a few seconds. 

Aunt Megan was really good at this one, figuring out how far back to pull the striker to get the ball to land in the jackpot. 

Skeeball, or IceBall, is always fun, but it's difficult to get a high score. Those 10000 point circles are really small. 

They need to turn up the belt speed on so many of these games! Half the time you're waiting to get beanbags to throw. 

Same with the clown knockdown game. There's a short timer, but you're waiting on balls to throw half the time. 

This Whack & Win is a game of skill. You don't try to hit it hard. You try to hit it with a certain force. It usually takes a few tries to dial in the correct speed. 

Smaller claw machines are fun too. 

This Monopoly game is really big and has a giant die to roll. I don't love these types of games though that seem more random versus skill based. Roll the die and the screen can decide to show you whatever it wants to. 

Trying to get footballs into the holes was difficult when you're shorter than the screen. 

So close to that Monster Jackpot. 

A giant Space Invaders game! And you can even win tickets from it!

Avery enjoys this Speed of Light game. She recruited all of us to help hit the buttons as they lit up. 

We tried too many times to pick up these random bouncy balls. Some machines just don't have a good claw. I would later show them a video about how operators can program different settings into the machine to have a claw with such a weak grip that it's impossible to win anything until you have played a certain number of times. 

This Piano Game really reminded me of a Magic Tiles game. Theresa jumped onto the leaderboard. 

And Megan crushed it, taking the #1 spot!

Patrick says it reminds him of Dance Dance Revolution. He can put up a high score too! 

A few video clips of our time here.

Now for the fun part. Redeeming our tickets!

There's so many toys!

Or maybe some candy!

A few Nerf guns, frisbee, plus some candy to round it out. 

They had a great time at The Summit today! Now let's go home and celebrate!