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Visiting The Outpost Arcade in Chandler, AZ

My friends and i visited the brand new Outpost Arcade on August 16th. It’s small, but cozy. No booze at the time of the recording, which was a shame because I could’ve gone for a beer if one had been available. I settled for an IBC Root Beer instead. Lots of great pinball games and video game cabinets too: Tempest, Star Wars, Tron, Marble Madness, Joust, Afterburner II, and a couple of games I’d never seen before!
https://www.theoutpostarcade.com/

From left to right, here are Star Wars, Tac/Scan, Robotron 2084, Joust, After Burner II, and Centipede. I’d never seen Tac/Scan before and it was a very cool vector graphic game by Sega! I also didn’t know that there was an Atari 2600 port of this game which uses the paddle controller. Neat!

Here I am, playing Tron. It’s one of my favorite movies, but I admit that the game is only so-so. As a kid, I really enjoyed the successor, Discs of Tron, far more. That said, this game cabinet is an exquisite work of art, with all the glowing detail which matches the movie, and the blacklights that create that fantastic glow. These two aspects really capture the ambience to the movie so well.

This really matches the Syd Mead/Moebius design work of the Tron movie so well.

Star Wars. Oh, heck yeah!

Somehow, the arcades when I was a kid only had Asteroids and not Asteroids Deluxe. The 3D look to Asteroids Deluxe is quite exquisite, with the background and the vector graphics projected onto it. Fantastic.

And of course, plenty of pinball goodness. I really liked the Doctor Who Daleks.

My friend Lou knows this Star Trek: TNG pinball game well. How appropriate, since he’s the biggest Trek fan I know.

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A visit to TiltStudio Arcade at Arizona Mills Mall in Tempe, AZ

So while I got to spend time with friends on my recent trip to Arizona, on the day which I visited Andy’s Hobby HQ and Book Off, we also went to AZ Mills Mall in Tempe. TiltStudio is there, and this is where I found the Pac-Man Capsule Factory I posted about earlier. Tilt is what used to be Gameworks which opened in the ’90s when I was in college, and I took videos of Gameworks back in 2010 in the early years of my YouTube channel. Here is the playlist for those videos. At the time, the guy who ran that arcade was focused on bringing in many arcade cabinets from Japan, including an incredibly awesome air hockey table I’ve yet to even come across in Japan even.

Tilt now focuses on a great selection of pinball games, thus the name.

This is cool! It’s a Beatles pinball game. My friend Kevin is a huge Beatles fan, and so is my wife.

An OT Star Wars pinball game! Righteous.

Ghostbusters pinball!

This is a JIBUNGOUS UFO catcher! Holy crap. I had to have my picture taken with it.

Tilt also has a nice collection of some great classic arcade games. The rest of these photos are a collection of pictures of those games.

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Hey, stop it now

Ulan asked me what picture I wanted her to draw, so I asked her to draw a picture of Yoda fleeing from seagulls. This is what she drew.

“One day I was walking and I found this big log. Then I rolled the log over and underneath was a tiny little stick. And I was like, ‘That log had a child!'”

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Memories of the Bag-A-Tel arcade in Valley West Mall (Glendale, AZ)

When I was a boy, the #1 game arcade I went to in Glendale, AZ was Bag-A-Tel in Valley West Mall. My #1 go-to game was, of course, Atari’s Star Wars sit-down cabinet. Released in 1983, this game came out the same year as Return of the Jedi, yet it involved the first Star Wars movie. I remember playing Atari’s Red Baron, a similar vector graphics shooter cabinet, before Star Was was released. The Return of the Jedi game by Atari came out in ’84, featuring an isometric view that I really could not get the hang of. Then in ’85 the first game was modified to play the Empire Strikes Back vector graphics game, which was not as good.

If Star Wars was occupied, my #2 choice was the Namco’s Pole Position II (released by Atari in the US) sit-down cabinet, which was located next to Star Wars. (This animated gif is actually of the first Pole Position game though.)

I have very fond memories of Bag-A-Tel. I loved that place. Whenever we’d catch a movie at the dollar theater, we’d be sure to stop by that arcade. Valley West Mall was eventually closed down, then later re-opened as Manistee Town Center. Eventually that mall went goodbye as well, and the mall was used for filming the movie Eight-Legged Freaks starring David Arquette and featuring a very young Scarlett Johannsson. The mall was demolished for that movie.

Here is a photo of the movie theater in Valley West Mall, courtesy of the CinemaTreasures nostalgia website.

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Han Solo sofubi figure kit by Kaiyodo

I was actually looking for Kaiyodo’s R2-D2 sofubi kit when I found this. These kits are 1:6 scale, making Artoo twice as big as Bandai’s 1:12 scale kit. Plus it’s hollow inside, making it perfect for lighting. I found Artoo for a decent price on YAJ, but the seller said that he couldn’t verify the contents. Then I noticed that Artoo’s main barrel body was not in the photograph. Good thing I noticed that before bidding! There was another one listed on YAJ, but it was actually a link to Yahoo Flea Market and the seller would only accept PayPay. PayPay is a form of digital money (somewhat like PayPal), but the only way to have a PayPay account is to have a smartphone. It’s bad enough that some places only provide coupons to smartphone users or the only way to make an appointment at the tax office is via Line on a smartphone, but between payments only attainable through a smartphone and the totalitarian push for “vaccine passports” on one’s phone, it’s easy for anyone with pattern recognition ability to see how we’re being herded towards the Mark of the Beast. It makes me sick.

Seeing that Artoo kit only available through PayPay was my motivation for getting a Mercari account, as I mentioned in my previous post. There I can find that kit listed and I can pay cash at a convenience store for Mercari purchases.

Anyhow, while I did not get an Artoo sofubi, I did see this figure of Han Solo, and it was only like 3,200 yen! The detail is exquisite. The previous owner had already cut off the excess vinyl and fit the arms onto the torso. Look at how well-sculpted it is! This is definitely Harrison Ford’s face.

His head looks big because I am up close with my camera. There is also a Princess Leia kit, but her head looks too big. I can’t tell if it is sculpted like that, or if it is just the way it was photographed (like how I inadvertently made Han’s face too big in my picture). Like Han, Leia is dressed in her white gown from A New Hope. Unfortunately, she isn’t holding her laser pistol in that kit. This Han kit includes his blaster molded in black resin. So cool.

Of course, I’ll paint this with V-Color paints. I think I’ll get the Artoo sofubi kit next month since I’ve got a bunch of crap to pay for and I’ve already paid too much on model kits this month.

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1:72 Y-Wing sofubi kit by Argo Nauts

On my nerd shopping expedition with my friend Lou at the end of April, I was at a Book Off Plus in Maebashi and took a look at this kit. I’ve seen it at that store for many years now, but they had reduced the price from something like 4000 yen down to 2400. I peeked inside the kit, thinking that it was a resin kit. It turns out that it’s a sofubi kit, with resin and metal parts. I couldn’t resist! I’ve already begun cutting the vinyl parts. I’ll put videos of this build on my YouTube and Odysee channels.

Argo Nauts was a sublabel of Aoshima’s in the early ’90s. They made sofubi kits of subjects from Robocop, Terminator, and Predator. They also made several Star Wars kits, and until Fine Molds got the license, these Argo Nauts kits were the best ones available. A few years ago, I built the Argo Nauts TIE Interceptor that was resin and metal. (Here’s a link to my photoset of this build on my Tumblr feed.) The detail on it is pretty fantastic, but despite it being 1:72 scale, it is a bit smaller than the Fine Molds TIE Interceptor (I built that one too). Argo Nauts’ X-Wing fighter kit is also a sofubi/resin/metal kit. That same Book Off Plus in Maebashi once had the Argo Nauts X-Wing Fighter, but that was sold a few years ago. They also made resin kits of the Millennium Falcon and the Star Destroyer. I have a 1:6 scale sofubi Stormtrooper by Argo Nauts, but the figure stands a bit too short, proportionally. It looks a bit like Luke Skywalker when he wore the Stormtrooper armor because he is short in stature and looked awkward wearing the armor. I think I will try to modify the knees with some PVC pipe or something to try to make it stand taller.

I had known of Argo Nauts for a while, but I did not know that it was an Aoshima brand until I worked for Aoshima in 2016. I had a conversation with an employee named Iizuka-san who had been with the company for a very long time and said that Aoshima had once made Star Wars kits. I was like, “No way,” and he told me that Argo Nauts was their sub-brand.

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My Star Wars Rebel fleet plamo diorama is nearly complete

I’ve been slowly working on this project for seven years. It started out with me just wanting to build and light up the Rebel Transport. This was back when I worked for Aoshima. I had wired it for lighting, took it to work to show a coworker, then placed it on the front seat of my car so as not to upset the bosshole because that grumpy dingbat bitched about everything. But the sun shone on it for many hours, causing the air inside the empty shell to overheat and warp the plastic. It was a lost cause, but fortunately my friend Steve (SMKR on YouTube) sent me a replacement!

These model ships came from the old MPC/AMT Rebel Hangar diorama from the early ’80s. There was the Hoth Battle and this hangar, and both came with lousy vacuform bases. I had the battle with the AT-ATs and Snowspeeders when I was a child. The Falcon isn’t too bad when looking at it from the top and bottom, but the sidewalls are crap. The back engine is completely featureless, as are the docking rings on the side. I added greeblies and pipes to the sides to spruce the kit up. The same for the X-Wings, where I added sewing pins to recreate the laser cannons properly. The Snowspeeders aren’t too bad, but the Y-Wings were sculpted without proper reference material and were obviously made going off of someone’s memory. Nothing is really in scale with others, although the X-Wings are in scale with the Falcon. I’ve been chronicling the process of this build on my Tumblr account and will update it again once I am finished. I envision this as a scene between the events of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back.