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Friday Slide Show: An Arcade in Stonestown
21 February 2025
A friend was early for her Apple Genius appointment to reset her iPad, which had locked her out after she forgot her password. So she showed me the new arcade and bowling alley at Stonestown Galleria.
It's the fourth Round1 arcade the Japanese company has opened in the Bay area. Among the attractions are bowling, air hockey, DDR*, karaoke, a full bar for adults and a huge collection of claw games.
Claw games are notorious for appearing to be mere hand-eye coordination tests but actually resort to the inevitable weak claw grip to drop your prize at the last moment. You can spend $50 trying to win a $5 prize.
Claw machine games are $2.25 (9 credits), $2.75 (11 credits) and $3.50 (14 credits) a play. Each credit is 25 cents with a $10 minimum on the playing card. You get bonus credits if you purchase higher increments.
The place is open from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. but after 10 p.m. it's 18 and older only and after midnight, 21 and older only.
Uh, no, we didn't play.
Our game of chance was to see if we could come home with any photographs of those bright blinking games lighting up that dark space.
We thought we'd cheat a bit by using our iPhone instead of trying to figure out what settings would work on a real camera.
It settled on f2.2 at 1/60 second and ISO 200 which, as you'll see, did just fine. Our Lightroom edits were restricted to the Upright tool to correct perspective and crop our rather furtive shots into something more considered.
Oh, the fix for the iPad, which you can do at home, we learned, is to plug it into your MacBook Pro and wipe it out, downloading iOS to restore it (which takes a while) and then reloading your apps from the App Store and logging into your email and.... She took it home to finish the job and even then, she said, it didn't go smoothly.
Sort of like that claw machine. You think you've nearly got it and it slips away from you.
