Best and WORST B'day Party

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had Hannah's birthday party at a fun sounding place called Thunderworld USA Family Fun Center.

First the good.

There was a great mezzanine area for birthday parties wherein parents could congregate and have immediate view of almost the entire area children would be running around in.

They have beer and mixed drinks.

They have skee ball, a DDR knock-off, a number of decent arcade games, a 'Deal or No Deal' machine, pool, and bowling inside the place as well as batting cages and go-karts outside.

The pizza was waaaaay better than what you get at Chucky Cheeze's and the girl that helped us with our party (an underling apparently far down the managerial ladder) was helpful and unobtrusive.

Now for the bad.

We ended up really needing to have gone to a few review sites before booking this place. There weren't many out there but if you're persistent you can find people not stymied by rage at their experience or tolerant of the subpar.

Yahoo! Travel had 6 reviews but is typical of our time there.

Insider Pages has only 2 reviews but the first one was what we'd had.

The party was expensive. Like Chucky Cheeze's without the stupid dancing rat.

Beer is $3 a cup and they don't open the bar for pool and mixed drinks until 5pm, even on Saturday.

Their prizes are even more insanely priced than Chucky Cheeze's and cheaper looking (how that's possible I don't know).

The bowling alley itself was large but the lanes were like looking at the ocean in freeze frame. That would normally not stop us from enjoying ourselves and had no real effect... except hilarity when Jose bowled a gutter ball that turned into a spare pickup in the next lane over for a young girl who'd bowled a split. An overriding factor for our dissatisfaction were the reoccurring glitches in their lane computers.

1) It took 15min for an underling to turn on our ball return after we'd told them it wasn't on.

2) Randomly throughout the game, the pins would be cleared. Usually when this happens you just miss out on the rest of the frame. Not at this place. Here, it still registered in the system what you bowled but unless your next throw was a strike (so it'd register a spare) it wouldn't count your first throw and allow you a third to finish off that turn.

Sound confusing? Try doing it.

Then there were a couple of other one-time glitches including the one frame Jose had to bowl 7 balls before it finally went to the next person.

Plus you had to pay up front for games and shoes. No prob. Disturbing to those who haven't had to do so, but it didn't bother me. The problem there came when Willie (who'd paid for 2 games in advance) tried to get a refund on the second game. At no time was payment on the first game in question. There was a sign that said: No cash refund. Cool. He paid with a card.

The manager staunchly refused to refund him.

Willie took issue at the sheer incompetence of the management and their seeming inability to understand that every second they argued with him lost them points in the eyes of all the parents whom would have otherwise booked events there as well. It wasn't a cash refund he was asking for. Just a credit back to his card.

When she finally capitulated after threat of contestation of the entire monetary transaction she then effectively told him to get the hell out.

After that hassle I'd give the experience in its entirety a 2.5 out of 5.

You have been warned. Proceed with caution.