IT'S a Sunday afternoon, the first of the school holidays, and I am in a dodgem car spinning on the spot.
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Bright colours and lights flash by in a dizzying blur.
Over there, somewhere nearby, I can hear the constant crash and clatter of bowling pins. All around me are shrieks from a group of primary school-aged girls, who clutch sleek laminated plastic, like ATM cards that only dispense fun. The thud of a mallet comes down hard on some padding and then, a second or two later, the sound of a bell dings.
And then there are all the other sounds.
A discordant hum of guns firing, basketballs clanging off rims, cars being crashed, air hockey pucks pinging off walls, pinball flippers kicking balls back into the mix.
And yet, as I spin, those clangs and dings and shrieks feel a world away.
I'm not the only one executing a tight 360.
My mate Browny is about five metres away in a dodgem car of his own.
As I flash past the window I see a middle-aged woman, trying to wrangle her shopping and kids.
She peers in at us, two men, aged in their 30s, alone on the dodgem cars, spinning independently of each other.
But we're not self-conscious about being the only adult men here without kids.
We've come to test out the new Timezone at Westfield Kotara and relive our youth. And that means having a bloody spin on the dodgem cars. It also means I need to tell Browny he should keep spinning while I quickly advance on him and smash his car into a corner, moving in like a bumper bully and shunting him into submission.
Timezone and Playtime (which has since been subsumed by Timezone) were a staple of my weekends growing up.
We'd go to the movies in King Street, eat at Big Al's and hit up Playtime.
We'd play Time Crisis and Daytona and Cruis'n USA and try to win tickets and prizes on the skill testers. Walking into a Timezone for the first time in years, Browny and I were worried we might be severely out of touch.
Would everything be virtual reality?
Has Instagram got its own video game now? But here they were, all our old favourites as well as a mixture of new and innovative games. And, of course, the graphics and gameplay had improved incredibly.
We greedily devoured some Time Crisis, re-upping every time we died in a bid to kill that dastardly boss, a mustachioed man who occasionally appeared on screen, the word BOSS glowing above his head, and tapped a briefcase that our characters were clearly desperate for.
We had a game of Fantasy Soccer, where you control players with a joystick and kick an actual soccer ball in order to pass and shoot. We took a lap through London and Rio in Cruis'n Blast, the evolution of Cruis'n USA. We killed like 500 zombies while trying to escape from a prison in the United State's deep south in The Walking Dead arcade game.
And we hit jump shots on the basketball carnival game, knocked over skittles, tossed rings and balls and did our best to claim a novelty soft toy. But test driving the new Timezone meant trying as many of the games and all of the attractions. Our time on the bumper cars had been a huge success and we'd had a game of ten pin bowling. That left laser tag. Browny and I had thought it would just be us in the arena, a futuristic maze complete with pulsating techno music.
But there was a shadowy figure waiting on the sidelines while we watched the instructional video. He was coming in to play too. He said his name was Peter. We know him as Ghost Sniper. Not because that was the name assigned to him by the game, but because I wasn't able to shoot him once. I didn't even see him. We tried to gang up on him and he still killed us both. Game over, he stripped off his gun and glanced at the scores. He had destroyed us. He waited for his next unsuspecting victims.
Our experience proved Timezone has something for everyone; from the youth to those who, just for an afternoon, want to relive their youth.
The writer was a guest of Timezone.
