Hello fellow duders. I am sharing my quick impressions on the newly opened Round 1 Arcade franchise at Exton, PA along with a few games included at that location.

Round 1 Arcade - Exton Square Mall at Exton, PA

Round 1 Arcade continues its expansion and presence in the United States by slowly opening new franchise locations outside of California, where they have six locations around the SF/LA area. I had an enjoyable experience visiting their Bloomingdale, IL location during my trip to Chicago last year, so I was ecstatic where I heard they were opening a new location around the Philly area (albeit a long drive from the city). My quick impressions upon visiting the local location's opening weekend remain the same, although I do have some minor personal peeves on the arcade's layout of where they placed their games and a few malfunctioned or inoperable machines. Otherwise, Round 1 Arcade is a nice place to spend an hour or two playing around games and a nice gathering place with friends once in a while.

Rhythm Games Section

Dance Dance Revolution A(ce)

The newest Dance Dance Revolution game overall is not much different in terms of gameplay, gameplay interface, and arcade machine construction from its previous iterations, it is still the same DDR you have known since its inception. Visually, the arcade machine looks nicer in its all white and the A logo is pretty sharp looking. DDR Ace also has tons of song options, where you can select new songs from this version along with numbers of songs from previous versions. An amusing feature is that after a completion of a song, it tells you how many calories you have burned thus far.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy All-Stars Arcade

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy Arcade is a completely different beast from its 3DS and mobile counterparts. In the arcade version, there are four set of buttons, the two inner ones trigger the red and the green hold notes, while the two outer buttons are used for the directional notes. It was kind of hard to use all four buttons at once, especially during use of the hold notes moving up and down during the field music songs/sections trying to hold down one inner button while using the other movement button to move up and down, as well the frantic note patterns with simultaneous red and directional notes and all of the hectic note charts. I will give them props on having a melody song option under each main FF game count as just one song. Fun, but awkward.

Others

The location also had Hatsune Miku Project Tone Arcade (inoperable), Groove Coaster, Crossbeats Rev, Sound Voltex III, Beatmania IIDX 23, and a few others.

Light Gun/Cars/Action Section

Rhythm Heaven Arcade

Placed in the light gun/cars/action section, a rare arcade version of Rhythm Heaven. Unfortunately (like a number of arcades in Round 1), all of the instructions/menus are in Japanese. I only played the Karate mini-game and I guess I lost and my session was quickly over.

Castlevania Arcade

There was some Castlevania Arcade game where the controller was modeled as a whip. The arcade had two playable characters with different gameplay characteristics and the game played as a rails on light-gun shooter. I think the whip controller that I played on was not working right, as it did not register the whip motions as commanded. I could not confirm if I was using the controller right as again, the arcade was all in Japanese language.

Others

This section did not have a lot of interesting arcade games. A few standouts there are Initial D, Sonic and Mario 2016 Olympics, Time Crisis 5, and Gunslinger Stratos (inoperable), and whatever the table flip arcade game is called.

Fighting Game/Retro Section

Fighting Games

This Round 1 location does not have a lot of fighting games available, but it is an interesting limited crop of fighting games, every fighting game at least having one set of head-to-head cabinets. BlazBlue Central Fiction with NesciaxLive was seen there with two H2H sets, but was inoperable at the time. There was also two H2H sets of Tekken Tag 1 Unlimited and Super Street Fighter IV, along with a H2H set of TvC, MvC2, and Melty Blood AA. The location is expected to have vanilla Tekken 7 soon.

Retro Games

One block of arcade machines were programmed to retro games, which were Metal Slug 6, Columns, some Tetris game, and a DoDonPachi game.

Pictures

Select pictures of a few games at Round 1 Exton, PA. The last picture is my brother's winnings of four plush dolls from its crane games. The Splatoon plush doll is awesome.

Thanks for reading!