Delaware: Funland, Part 2

Yesterday I talked about the kind of rides they had at Funland. Then I failed to finish the post. Rather than adding to it and coming up with a new topic today, I'm going to pretend it needs to be a two part article. So there.

What's left to talk about is the games. I'm talking both video games and the games where you can win prizes. Let's start with the prizes you can win.

On the boardwalk there are several classic games. There's the usual ring toss, ball toss, basketball shooting, and water spraying games. I never had any luck at ring toss. On the end is a horse racing game where you have to roll the ball to make your horse advance. I've played that a couple times and had no luck. Inside is a whack-a-mole game with about 12 stations. I'm not sure if I ever played that one. There's a frog bog game, but if I ever played it I've had no luck at it. (Actually, I think they got rid of that game recently.)

Other games include a duck pond where you win every time, and a catterpillar game that's probably similar. (Maybe I'm confusing two games here.) There's a ping pong game that I never played where you try to bounce balls into bowls.

The big game that we always played was a larger ball toss game next to the ticket booth. This game had a gold prize in the middle of the cups and a few red and blue cups. What's memorable about this game is that my mom won the gold prize a few years in a row. The first time she won she got a big lion. I would say it was about 2 feet high, three feet long. The second year, my dad and I saw my sister walking around with a goofy looking pink ostrich on her back. I forget what we've gotten after that. We've since given away those prizes since they just sat around in our trailer in a closet.

Not to far from the big ball toss game is an arcade. This arcade is the type where you can win tickets to trade in for prizes. The obligatory skeeball is located next to the bumper cars. I'm only average at that game. The one memorable thing is when, during the later 90s, Funland and other arcades added a cyclone ticket game. This is the game where a light revolves around the machine and you push a button to stop it to win the jackpot. During the later 90s when I was too old to go on rides my parents used to tell me that they'll give me money to play in the arcade if I would win the jackpot first. It takes several tries but it's not impossible to do.

There are several claw machines next to the whack-a-mole station. My dad always, always played these. He was pretty good, too. I think he was annoyed when they raised the price for some of the machines to fifty cents, though. My memory is fuzzy, so I'll only mention that he won a few Pepsi Polar Bear dolls. I'm not sure how much of these smaller prizes we kept. I may have to look through some bins.

I never had much luck myself and never had the patience for it. Usually when I started to lose, I felt I could have been wasting my money on a game instead of this darn claw machine.

There's a shooting gallery, which I was always a big fan of but I rarely played myself. In fact, I probably played the most times when someone left a game early. I can activate the easier targets, at least.

At some poin (probably the mid-ninties), a water shooting gallery was added to the second arcade. This was fun and easier than the shooting gallery, although it was a bit more childish so I probably only played it with younger cousins.

Speaking of the second arcade, we'll end this post by talking about that for a few paragraphs. When I was really young I used to mostly ignore this. The only games I remember being interested in was Super Mario Bros Vs. and some hack and slash game called Rastan. Otherwise I was more interested in the rides. Only when I became a teen and more self-conscious, I began focusing on the arcade. (Besides, there were other arcades in Rehoboth to go to.)

One of my best trips to that arcade was during a birthday where I had received ten dollars. After going mini-golfing at the roof of another arcade, I went to Funland and played The Simpsons arcade and beat it. My parents were making fun of how much I was pumping quarters into the machine. I had actually seen the ending to the game before at some other place but I was determined to see everything for myself, especially since I've played the game several times before and the best I could do was get to the dream level. I wish I could remember how much money I spent, and I actually spent too much because the game started repeating and my dad took over my final quarter or so.

They also had the Xmen arcade game which was similar the Simpsons game. Sadly I never got far in the game but I did get to hear Collosus's mighty yell.

There are a few pinball games set up, and I did get into one machine. This was around the time dot matrixes were new, so I enjoyed the Street Fighter pinball game because it gave you a mission. I could only defeat about five warriors.

I'll end this with a game machine that had a trackball that allowed you to play centipede and a bowling game. The memorble thing about this one was that someone had left about 90 some credits in the machine and I ended up buring about 30-40 of them.

That's it for Funland for now. I don't think I've been there in a few years. I'll have to watch the old home videos to see if I forgot any interesting anecdotes. Hopefully sometime this month I'll have more stories about our trips to Delaware including the glory years.