The third stop in the summer arcade tour brings us to the midpoint between my home and a lacrosse tournament in Rochester, New York...Robot City in Binghamton.
When you first walk into the venue, it appears to be a fairly large, cool retro video game store, however walking to the back of the venue unveils an enormous arcade. I had seen pictures of the location before but I was still surprised at how huge it was in person.
The prices at Robot City were cheap. For $20 I got 92 tokens and every game that I played only cost two! My son and I played as many games as we could for two hours and still would up having to give away a big fistful of coins to a kid.
The classic video game selection was incredible. They have whopping 125 Arcade games. The vids worked well and were in good shape. You name it, they had it for the classics. There was a ton of shooters and drivers, too. My son and I played a bunch of Mario Cart.
The number of pinball machines was impressive as well, but with that many pins maintenance can become a problem. Unfortunately, I found that to be the case with a number of the pinball machines. Here’s a list of the pins with notes. Keep in mind that there was so many that I barely scratched the surface...
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends
Batman 66 (Premium)
Batman Forever [amazing color DMD]
Black Rose [ball repeatedly got stuck in left inland. Cannon had intermittent issues]
Cue Ball Wizard
Demolition Man [not working]
Dialed In! (LE)
Genesis [alternate translite thank goodness]
Ghostbusters (Pro)
Home Run
Houdini: Master of Mystery
Hurricane [not working]
Hyperball [not working]
Jurassic Park
Medieval Madness (Remake)
Middle Earth [displays out, did not keep score]
Mousin' Around!
PIN-BOT
Popeye Saves the Earth
Revenge from Mars
The Simpsons
Spacelab
Star Trek
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Wars Episode 1
Super Mario Bros. [flippers very weak, upper flipper barely working]
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Twilight Zone
WWF Royal Rumble
Wheel of Fortune
The Wizard of Oz
Xenon
When I go to arcades now, I try to play games that I haven’t played much before. The pin of the day for me was probably Data East’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 🐢. That game gets a bum rap with some people, but I had a lot of fun with it.
The area that the arcade is in isn’t as nice as say Metuchen where the last arcade that I went to was, but a short five minute drive down the road across the bridge there was a number of great restaurants and bars. My son and I had Mexican food at a great place called Garage Taco Bar.
Overall Robot City was a lot of fun and a great value. For me, it’s more of a location for Video Game fans. Pinball Aficionados who are very particular about how games play may have an issue with some of the older pins. My son and I had a great time. The other awesome arcade in the Binghamton area is Moonwalker Arcade. Unfortunately, it doesn’t open until 3 PM on Fridays and we were in the area before that. I’ll try to hit it up next trip. I hear good things about it.
Stay tuned, we already visited stop 4 on the arcade tour later in the day. Write up coming soon...
Comments