It's like Chuck E. Cheese, but without the giant rat merchandising.

First, we gorged ourselves on pizza... okay, I gorged myself on pizza, they had a moderate amount. Then, we headed to the game room. 100 tokens for $20, and we had a random one left over from last time. pseudo jr runs off immediately after I hand him a cup with 20 tokens and by the time I catch up with him he's already bored with the bulldozer game. akulaboy plays that for awhile, and I become convinced it's out of tickets. He jumps right over to the game next to it... which is also out of tickets.

I tried to stand in line to talk to the manager because it sucks for kids to plunk their quarters in and think they're not winning when they should be. But akulaboy was adamant; we needed to play games. We puttered around some more until I spotted the manager alone shifting quarters on a change machine. We approached him and I told him about the three games that were out (we had just hit up the "Twister" game, and it ran out while we were playing it), and he went and got some more tickets. When he reloaded the 'dozer game, I thanked him and headed off... but he stopped me and told me I could have the tickets it pumped out. I guess that's his policy, because he also gave us the tickets from the other two games while we were standing there waiting for those first tickets to output. I let akulaboy pump coins in while we waited, too, and he scored about 90 more tickets off of it (50 in one go)... we wound up cashing out right then before we continued playing, and we already had 400+ tickets.

I wanted to stress to akulaboy that this was a reward for being conscientious... but he's three. So, we just got a bunch of tickets.

We had a good time, and we're still saving our points for something cool. Maybe in August, we'll get something. We're almost up to 2000.

Comments
on Jul 30, 2006
We had a Mr. Gatti's here...but it was abruptly shut down about two years ago.

It did great business, so I have no idea what happened (local news couldn't get the head honchos to answer why it closed down). Wish it was still around.

Anywho, glad you had a great time with your family.
on Jul 30, 2006
Heh, here's my 15 minutes of fame- I knew the founder of Mr. Gatti's (Colonel Eure they called him) when I was a kid. That and getting Ken Curtis' autograph and meeting Larry McMurtey once are my only claims to fame...
on Jul 30, 2006
Haven't seen a Mr. Gatti's in a long time, but I really liked the last one I had been to

The other place I miss a lot is Shakey's pizza. They used to make great pizza too, far better than Pizza Hut and the other (few) choices we have around my area.
on Jul 30, 2006
altho noone woulda ever complained about the machines not payin out, i preferred mr gotti's ("come for the pizza, stick around for the heroin")