It had been years (around 20) since I had stepped foot inside a Chuck E. Cheese's. I remember I was out of high school and looking to kill some time before a movie started. I also remember being really unimpressed. The games were old, the place was run down and they were still ripping people off with tokens. Honestly who uses tokens these days? I wasn't very excited when my son started asking to have his next birthday there. Instead of blowing a couple hundred dollars on bad pizza and scary animatronics I made a deal with him, if he was good for his first week of pre-school we would go to to Chuck E. Cheese's. He was and we went.
The first thing I noticed when we got there was how clean and new everything seemed. It was bright and open, not at all what I was expecting. The emphasis has clearly been put on "boardwalk" style games that reward kids with tickets. There were a few traditional arcade games like The Fast and the Furious or Guitar Hero but I would say 90% of the games didn't have any sort of screen or monitor. They also had really basic games that catered to smaller kids, which was great. My son gets plenty of video game/screen time at home it was a relief that he spent most of his time there playing physical/boardwalk style games. Quite frankly, I get enough screen time at home. I was more than happy to play skee-ball for a couple hours.
Chuck E. Cheese's still uses the BS token system but this time it paid off for us. A friend of the family gave us a jar full of Tokens so we essentially played for free. Some of the games are a terrible value in that the game is over in 5 seconds and you're left with one ticket but if you were careful you could probably squeeze a half hour out of just a couple bucks. One of their big selling points is that every game costs one token. That seems like a better deal than it is since most of the time you're only getting 3 tokens for a dollar.
Logan's favorite game turned out to be this silly car ride where you get your picture taken with Chuck (as seen above). We left with 5 different pictures of him and Mr Cheese. Ironically he was deathly afraid of the real Chuck E. Cheese who came out every hour to high five everyone and lead all the kids in a song and dance routine.
On a scale of to 1 to Ms Pac-Man Chuck E Cheese's scored a solid B+. The Pizza was MUCH better than I expected but Pepsi at the soda fountain? Who does that?
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