Arcade Fun time at Timezone!

Timezone is probably the most popular and the biggest chain of arcades in the Philippines. Operating over 170 branches nationwide and partly owned by Ayala Land Inc., Their branches are evenly spread out. Some are located at Ayala malls some on Robinson's malls and some on Sm Super malls. 

In this particular branch at Sm San Lazaro, Timezone arcade is integrated with Storyland for the rides but all of the arcade machines inside belong to Timezone. I also learned that this branch had been operating since 2005 around the same time SM San Lazaro opened.

I don't come here often but me and my friend passed by it and some of the games looked fun to play so we decided to try :) Some of the machines looked old and outdated though.

To play the games, you need to avail their powercard which you load with credits from the main counter, and swipe in each arcade game that will deduct the amount of credits according to the amount needed to play each machine. 

The powercard is issued for a minimum purchase of 100 pesos credit. Luckily, my friend already had one so we did not to spend so much money for the games. 

There are also prizes in the main counter which you can get by trading powertickets that you can win from selected arcade machines. Each prize has a price of a certain amount of power tickets needed. Most games only cost between 10 to 20 pesos

There are new games also like this temple run game that is fun to play.

There's also other games that offer more player cooperation like this dancing game Dance Dance Revolution :) Because of their age, some of the machines can malfunction sometimes and you need to find the staff to report the malfunction and they will refund the amount of credit you spent on the broken machine. This was an inconvenient ordeal for us because when we searched for the attendant he was nowhere to be found and we had to wait a few minutes before he returned again. It turns out there were only two timezone personnel on duty.

We decided to try this Deal or No Deal Game it looks fun and you can win up to 100 powertickets :) The game plays exactly like on TV.

After playing a bit, It finally came down to the last Deal or No deal question and i had to choose between the 54 tickets the banker offered or Risking between 8 or 100 powertickets that my case could hold. I stuck with my briefcase until the end and chose no deal :)

Thankfully, my choice was right and I won 100 Power Tickets! :)

There's also this machine that can store your powertickets electronically to your powercard for your convenience.

It was a satisfying experience for me, although it could have gone better if they would observe more proper maintenance on their machines and add a few more personnel to assist their paying customers better. Especially because some of their machines malfunction and customers would need assistance. They should also add new games and attractions every now and then to keep customers from getting bored with their current services available. 

After transferring the tickets to the power card, we  browsed their available prizes to see if there was anything we liked that we could exchange our tickets for but sadly, nothing impressed us and some of the prizes costs a lot of tickets. The good thing is that when we asked we were told that we could use the leftover credits and tickets we acquired in this branch on other branches.