Playing Pinball at an "Abandoned" Mall

 Portland, OR

The Lloyd Center didn't look hopping from the outside.

Visiting A New Pinball "Museum"

Today Donna and I drove over to Lloyd Center, a near abandon mall, to visit Star Tropics, a brand new Pinball "Museum".  Star Tropics opened March 1st and is only open during mall hours (9-7).  It's just pinball, there is no bar.  It's pretty minimal but the owner is working on filling it out with cool machines and cool stuff.  He told us a bit about his plans while we were there.  It's $8 for an all day visit and I was happy to pay them a visit to help out.  

The "museum" is set up to look kind of "Street" and gritty.

He has CRTs set up and he is hoping to have them all showing 90s shows.  Right now he is showing a lot of anime, which is cool.

I spent some time on Capcom's Breakshot, a cool pinball with a cool "Trick Shot" mechanic.

I also played Roy Clark The Entertainer, another Cocktail Table Pinball machine very much like Star Shooter, which I wrote about here. Apparently 2 different companies made these.  They seem so similar.

Since it is a museum, he has a 1979 "Tilt" movie poster staring Brooke Shields.  Maybe I can find this streaming online and see how bad it is.  Oh yea it's here.

After playing for a bit I needed to use the bathroom and check out just how abandoned this mall is. The only restrooms where in the food court so I headed upstairs.

The bottom floor had very little going on.

The food court also had very little going on.  There were 3 fronts open out of about 11 or so.

There was a single ice skater taking advantage of the empty rink.

This guy gets it.  Where is the food?

It looked like all of the action here was contained in about 4 storefronts all next to each other.  There was this interesting Lego store where you could buy, sell, and trade individual bricks, an Anime Store, another store that was sort of Anime and Games, and the pinball museum.  It seems like they could turn this mall into an Anti Mall if it didn't have so many store fronts.  If it had 10 or so I think they could fill it with cool stores that generate business for each other.

I had my best game ever on Foo Fighters, which was great.

That's it for today.  If you missed, Our Last Week in Portland, check it out.