With Mommy and Morgan on the road somewhere in Texas, Mason and I decided to spend yesterday evening after work hanging out at Crossroads Mall. We walked the entire mall, going into any store that looked interesting to Mason.
We spent a little time at Le Mans, Crossroads Mall’s arcade. Man, has that place taken a sudden turn for the worse. The arcade has three different levels. The newest games have always been on the middle level, while classic games sit on the upper level and redemption games and kiddie rides take up the lower level. During our visit, the upper level was filled with broken games and completely roped off to the public, and most of the kiddie rides and games on the lower level were unplugged or non-functioning. Some of the skee-ball machines were lit up but had masking tape over the coin slots. Both of the kiddie rides we saw (Pink Panther and some other one) were unplugged. The middle section was still quite active — I saw The Fast and the Furious Racing (cars) next to The Fast and the Furious Racing (motorcycles), Time Crisis 2, 3 and 4, and other large monitor shooting games, but that’s not really the type of games I’m interested in playing. Hidden all the way in the back of the arcade were two Star Wars Trilogy games (one big screen, one CRT) surrounding a Star Wars Racer. I could not tell if this was the beginning of the end for Le Mans or if they were just in a state of flux at the moment, but either way didn’t look promising.
Mason and I visited Game Stop and looked at all the new games, and checked out all the new Halloween decorations at Spencer’s. From there we went downstairs to the food court, where Mason got his favorite meal (a corndog wacky-pack from McDonalds) and I had a six inch sub from Subway. With grub in our bellies Mason wrapped up his mall adventure by playing on the indoor playground. We stopped by Toys Were Us on the way home looking for one of those stupid Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Attack Crawlers, but no such luck. After that it was back to the house, where the two of us played a little Lego Star Wars II before bed time.
Man, I hate to see that happen to a good arcade. I used to go to Le Mans every now and then when I was living in Stillwater attending OSU. They always had good games for a mall arcade. I haven’t been there in probably 8 years though.