'Round 1' rocks SoCal with bowling, food, pool, arcades and more

A new amusement facility has opened up at the Puente Hills Shopping mall in the LA area and thanks to AH contributor Phil Arrington (who setup the Arcade Heroes videocast at Amusement Expo earlier this year and also gave us a glimpse at an auction not too long ago) we have an in-depth look at this awesome new location. Called Round 1, this is the first amusement facilities that the company has setup in the United States, with most of their locations being found in Japan. The arcade might not be the primary focus of the facility which also sports a modern bowling alley, pool tables, darts, karaoke, ping pong and food but the game selection is nothing short of impressive. Some of the titles found at Round 1: Terminator Salvation Super Deluxe (the 100″ version); a four-player Tank! Tank! Tank!; a Deadstorm Pirates; two Sega Rally 3 motion deluxe machines; four Initial D5 units; four GTI Club units; four Wangan Maximum Tune 3DX+ units; linked Street Fighter IV; two Tekken 6 cabs; Samurai Shodown Sen; a GuitarFreaks and DrumMania XG; Pump It Up Pro 2; Raiden IV and more. I hadn’t heard of GTI Club making it to the States until now and the selection shows that they are aiming to bring together some of the best titles from around the world. I would not be surprised if they will have a Darius Burst AC there when that is available, but we’ll have to wait and see.The only thing Round 1 seems to missing are some pinball machines.

Phil took a bunch of pictures of the new location, hit the link below to start the tour.

Looking over Round1's arcade area

For starters, here’s Phil’s rundown of the location:

“In my view, its the Gameworks/Dave & Buster killer with the Arcade/Pin Pong/Bowling/Pool/Karaoke/Dart. The selection of games are good. Anyone saying arcades are dead, might be wrong after seeing the pictures of the amount of people that was in the place. This place is serious and they started off big. Really big. And, they are not too far from Arcade Infinity. If “AI” seriously going to relocate, I would not blame them since this arcade is right down the street from them and you’ll get a better deal with these guys in the long run since you can pay 7 dollars for the hour card. Unlimited play on all arcade games…..or any card slot that with green flashing colors. They have a card system which is pretty cool, games are not over priced and if you get a 25 dollar card it takes a while to get rid of all the credits on it. Unless you’re playing the crane games (which is crack for females since all of them were on it) Since there’s so many games and so much to do, my first day there, yesterday, I spent 9 hours there and it took me 6 hours to use my 25 dollar card..  And I still have not played everything in the place. In my view, places like this are the future. And this is not the first in So California (not counting GW and D&B), but it is the first one that’s close to the Los Angeles area. It is also known that, this place is nothing compared to the one located in Japan.”

Because we’re Arcade Heroes, let’s first going to take a look at the arcade area and get to the other stuff later in the post.

Raw Thrills’ Terminator Salvation Super Deluxe greets players as they enter the arcade area. This is the second location I know of that has this version. You can also see Namco’s Deadstorm Pirates in the background.

Namco’s Wangan Maximum Tune 3DX+, Konami’s GTI Club, GlobalVR’s NASCAR, Raw Thrills’ Nicktoons Nitro, Sega’s Harley Davidson King of the Road and Initial D5 can all be seen in this pic.

Sega Rally 3 Motion Deluxe, the ultimate way to play SR3

Namco’s Tank! Tank! Tank! for some four player havoc with Galactix, Terminator Salvation and Sega Rally 3 surrounding it.

Capcom’s Street Fighter IV

Namco’s Tekken 6:Bloodline Rebellion

Taito’s Panic Museum

They’ve got the light-gun games close together. Here we have the new 42″ Rambo, Big Buck Safari Deluxe and Panic Museum

Sega’s Initial D5. The cards are available too

Andamiro’s Pump It Up Pro 2 and Konami’s DDR Supernova 2 side-by-side.

They also have an extensive candy cab section

The redemptionified-version of Konami’s Pop N’ Music

More crane machines than you can shake a stick at

Plenty of darts too

Some Japanese-style photo booths

The pool table area

yum

I was going to post a pic of the bowling lanes but I cannot get Phils pics of that area to load in any of my browsers at the moment.

If you crave more then Phil has all these pics and more on his Photobucket account. Also you can find out more about the pricing structures and further details on different games at Round 1 on this post at the Bemanistyle.com forums. All-in-all Round 1 looks like a force to be reckoned with in the area in terms of an arcade alone – along with the rest of the amusement content they have it will be a desired location for a long time to come.