Arcade Club Bury/Leeds/Soon to be Blackpool (Blog Post)

Anyone been? I diverted to Leeds on my way back from Sheffield today and spent a good few hours here. Pretty damn good! You pay sixteen quid to get in but then everything's set to free play. Tins of Irn Bru are only 80p too! Yum.

Ground floor is half modern arcade curios and half classic Sega and Capcom. Thunder Blade, After Burner and Street Fighter III 3rd Strike share space with Dariusburst EX, House of the Dead Scarlet Dawn and the best racing game ever (Outrun 2 SP DX), as well as a load of curios like music/rhythm games, the new Elevator Action (It has real life lift doors you can operate! ) and an excellent Japanese game where you get angry and flip a table - it has an actual table you physically flip!


I AM THE TABLE

The machine the club was pushing the hardest was a Namco light gun game called Quick and Crash. Great for bitesized plays while waiting for another machine to free up, each game only lasts 60-90 seconds and takes no more than twenty shots. It's a weird one this: it's a light gun, yet the targets are real, including a cup that actually shatters when shot! Not sure how they do it but it was mightily impressive. It's a quick-draw game where you holster the gun between rounds (much like Fast Draw Showdown which they also have, but faster paced and much shorter).



(I am number one on the second of the two machines they have as of the time of writing. )

The first floor is a mezzanine and has a lot of excellent games and a few big surprises! Around half is 1989-1997 era stuff: Golden Axe, the first four Mortal Kombats, all variations of Street Fighter II, Outrunners, R-Type, Space Harrier, a couple of Neo Geo MVS machines, that kind of thing. Oh, and some of the best beat-em-ups ever in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons, as well as two honest-to-God machines for Splatterhouse and Wonder Boy in Monster Land! I may have slightly messed myself when I spied the 'House cab. Uncensored version, too!
The other half of the mezzanine consists of older games, such as Tron, Tapper, Sinistar, a Nintendo Playchoice 10, Punch-Out!!, Dragon's Lair II(!), Wizard of Wor, Gauntlet and even Baby Pac-Man, a strange machine that is half real pinball table (but tiny!) and half Pac-Man. Fun! What really caught my eye though was the genuine 1972-model Pong machine in perfect condition! The analogue control is much more responsive than you'd expect.

There's also a small but not-unsubstantial room of older light gun games on this floor. Silent Scope 2 (still ace), Terminator 2 The Arcade Game, the first two Point Blanks (arguably the best light gun games ever), Time Crisis and such. It also has the aforementioned and wonderfully hammy Fast Draw Showdown featuring the ever-moustachioed Wes Flowers.



The top floor has rooms dedicated to Fortnite, minecraft etc but also has an N64 with Goldeneye, a Mega Drive and a SNES as well as the newest Tekken and a whole host of Sega Astro City machines mainly playing scrolling shooters: Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, Vulcan Venture, R-Type Leo, that sort of thing. Oh, and Marvel Vs Capcom 2. Yiss. Turns out I'm better than I thought at Silvergun.

Back to the ground floor though, because special attention needs to be drawn to the number and quality of their driving/flying games. Sega Rally, Sega Rally 3, original OutRun, Space Harrier and After Burner machines with full mechanical motion, Ri(iiiii)dge Race(rrrrr)r, Crazy Taxi, Power Drift, F355 Challenge, a nifty dogfighting game where the screen is a big ol' dome (made me a bit motion sick. Hell yeah immersion!) and of course Super Mario Kart Arcade, in addition to the aforementioned Best Driving Game Ever, OutRun 2 SP DX. There are others too which I'll no doubt remember as soon as I click submit. Oh, and After Burner Climax (teehee!), which really needs to be seen running on arcade hardware to appreciate just what a feat of programming it is.


Pictured: Me

The thing is, though, I expected to spend all my time on the mezzanine burning through Ghouls'N'Ghosts or Smash TV et al, but I actually found myself playing the rhythm games loads more (almost as much as the light gun games). I'm no Guitar Hero nut or anything (which they do also have) bu these were great fun. Most are Japanese and so you have to muddle through the menus and most of the songs are high pitched sugary j-pop stuff but once you get through, they're great. Taiko No Tetsujin in particular to the point where I'm probably going to get one of the console versions. Hell I might poke my head into the local taiko classes. It helped that the machine had the best J-pop-slash-eurobeat song ever, which is of course Night Of Fire.


(I'm not that good unless you don't require any proof)

There were others such as Groove Coaster (sort of an audiosurf/Vib Ribbon hybrid?) that had the excellent track Daddy Mulk from The Ninjawarriors, the arcade version of Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, which had the boss theme from Live-A-Live and the final boss theme from Secret of Mana(!), and a curious but very enjoyable touch screen thing called Reflec Beat, the something something of something which was sort of a cross between Samba De Amigo or maybe those Hatsune Miku games, air hockey and typing. Strange but good fun, and I even recognised the song it picked as the Evangelion theme. This machine made me feel really competent when I got the hang of it, like some ultra-modern Rick Wakeman.


I'm this good if you speed my attempts up several percent.

There's loads I haven't mentioned - didn't even get to the row of pinball machines, or the Sega Versus City cabs, or the cocktail table machines. Excellent stuff.


When I started this post it was basically supposed to be "Good innit, anyone been?" but I got a bit carried away, heheh.

Now back to pestering Sega for a rerelease of Outrun 2006.

The Bury one is one of my absolute favourite places.

You can't beat a proper Taiko machine (Well, you can- that's the point), it's just a shame the ambient noise is so loud that it drowns out the belting songs.

That table flipping game is a brilliant laugh with mates, too.

I'd been meaning to go to the Bury one for ages, and just as it looked like it was being arranged lockdown hit. Probably be next spring at the earliest at this rate.

I've had mates who have been and say it's pretty great. Apparently it was doing such good business they extended to another floor in the mill they're in which is promising.

sounds absolutely brilliant! You've named at least 20 games is definitely go there just to play.

Sounds excellent, hopefully I can go next time I'm in Blackpool

I love the Bury one. Great night out, especially if you go on Thursday or Friday when there aren't any kids.

I’d love them to expand up the road, these look exceptional.

RJ Badman wrote:The machine the club was pushing the hardest was a Namco light gun game called Quick and Crash. Great for bitesized plays while waiting for another machine to free up, each game only lasts 60-90 seconds and takes no more than twenty shots. It's a weird one this: it's a light gun, yet the targets are real, including a cup that actually shatters when shot! Not sure how they do it but it was mightily impressive. It's a quick-draw game where you holster the gun between rounds (much like Fast Draw Showdown which they also have, but faster paced and much shorter).

I'm sat here wondering how that shattering cup works and the only thing I can guess is that its pre recorded footage of real items being shot cleverly displayed (via some kind of prismatic lens) to look like you're shooting them.

Either that or a wizard did it.

Ironhide wrote:

RJ Badman wrote:The machine the club was pushing the hardest was a Namco light gun game called Quick and Crash. Great for bitesized plays while waiting for another machine to free up, each game only lasts 60-90 seconds and takes no more than twenty shots. It's a weird one this: it's a light gun, yet the targets are real, including a cup that actually shatters when shot! Not sure how they do it but it was mightily impressive. It's a quick-draw game where you holster the gun between rounds (much like Fast Draw Showdown which they also have, but faster paced and much shorter).

I'm sat here wondering how that shattering cup works and the only thing I can guess is that its pre recorded footage of real items being shot cleverly displayed (via some kind of prismatic lens) to look like you're shooting them.

Either that or a wizard did it.

Mystery is solved:



There's a Quick and Crash machine in Bury as well. I'm not quite as good as the player in that video.