I wrote an article on the very awesome Timewarp arcade in Bridgwater, Somerset last year (http://www.gamesfreezer.eu/2017/10/britts-bridwater-bender-at-time-warp.html), I originally visited as part of a friend’s stag weekend and completely fell in love with the place and its retro gaming charms.
Even as we travelled back to Cardiff from that trip, we all decided that we wanted to go back as soon as possible.
Finally, after a busy winter, we had all managed to find gaps in our schedules make time to head back and once again, it was a great experience.
I won’t go into too much depth as I have already covered the machines available to play in my last article (although there were a few new ones there this time, Splatterhouse among them, good) but of note was how the attached games store (Insane Games, owned by the same person who runs the arcade) was moving premises across the bridge to a more central location and so the stock on offer was quite limited as this was to be the last weekend in their current premises (We will clearly be heading back once they’ve set up the new store to find more gold) and once again I was shocked by how fairly everything was priced, definitely one of the best gaming stores I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting.
The low prices were assisted further by the fact that there was a 15% discount if you paid in cash.
I ended up grabbing :
Super Monaco GP, Dino Dini’s Soccer & Sonic & Knuckles (our copy has stopped working for some reason) on the Mega Drive.
Crime Killer (complete with Music EP), Timeshock pinball and Tunnel B1 on the PS1
MACH & Prostroke Golf on the PSP
Steelbooks of Dead Rising 2 and Resident Evil 6 on PS3 (I do love a steel-book)
All for around £30.
After this, I nipped to the Fountain Inn for a celebratory Guinness and it was as I was sipping away and fondling my goody bag (oo-er) that I had a simple picture message from Faye (who had wandered through the town to continue shopping) that made me down my pint and dash out to find her.
She had stumbled across a place called ‘Entertainment Zone’ which was a really old-school bric-a-brac store that seemed to sell anything and everything. There was an amazing woodgrain TV that we would have loved to have (I miss my light-gun gaming sessions) but it was just too impractical to carry back on the train and also, our flat is FULL (we really need a house to properly display all of our gold).
My friend and fellow gamer Vinnie picked up two very vintage cool She-Ra jigsaw puzzles and Faye spotted a pretty pristine boxed Amstrad GX4000, after a spot of haggling we managed to get the Amstrad GX4000 (complete with Burnin’ Rubber) a Sega Pro-Master tips book, another Mega Drive game (Andree Agassi Tennis) and a limited edition anniversary edition of Gran Turismo 6 for £55, an absolute steal as far as we were concerned. Gran Turismo 6…I’ll get back to this later.
It was after we had picked up all of this solid bronze that we headed back to the arcade to finish off our day when the highlight of the trip happened. I met ‘Dance Matt’.
At the back of Timewarp arcade there’s a machine called ‘Dancing Stage Supernova’, it’s one in the long line of dancing arcade machines that you see dotted around the place and they don’t usually interest me but when I saw Matt ‘Dance Matt’ Ackroyd working his magic, I knew that I had to talk to him, he was fast. He kindly gave me permission to film him dancing his way through some tracks on the machine which I’ll embed below for your viewing pleasure.
It’s rare to actually be in an arcade and see someone who is so good at a particular game but Matt apparently comes into the arcade once a week, complete with a change of clothes, towel and bottle of water and spends most of the afternoon smashing through songs on Dancing Stage Supernova (fair play, there’s over three hundred on there).
As you will see if you watch the videos, he knows his stuff! I was surprised when he said that he was nowhere near world-class as he was literally getting perfect scores on the tracks we watched him play. It turns out that there are some songs on there with the difficulty level ramped up so high that it’s actually off the graph that the game uses to illustrate how tough some dances can be and the world tournaments the high scores tend to be held by mainly Japanese players, although American winners have been creeping up in numbers through recent years, Matt informs me. He is a lovely guy and is pretty much a weekend fixture at the arcade, it’s genuinely entertaining to see someone play a machine with such skill and dedication. Hopefully, I’ll bump into him next time we head to Bridgwater, perhaps get an exclusive Games Freezer interview on the go, who knows.
In summary Dance matt, Timewarp arcade and Insane Games are all awesome and you should go.
Ahhhhhhhhhh Gran Turismo 6… when I got up on Sunday, I began to install it on my PS3 and after the twenty-two updates, totalling more than 8gb had installed (it took around five hours) I loaded up the game….only for it to install more updates for a further four hours. Amazing! I still haven’t played it!
Right, I’m off to dedicate my life to beating Dance Matt’s high-scores by hand-stand dancing.
Article By Britt
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