Travel Tip: Svinesund / Nordby Senteret – GAMEZONE : ARCADEN

Looking for cheap meat, alcohol, and tobacco? If you live in Norway, chances are you’ve made the trip across the border to Sweden, where prices are often far lower than the eye-watering ones we’re used to back home.

But let’s be honest: for gamers, these shopping trips have usually been a bit dull. Gone are the game shops we used to look forward to. Or so I thought… until now!

Out of nowhere, an actual arcade hall has popped up in the largest shopping centre along the border—Nordby Senteret. And yes, it’s the real deal—woohoo!

I’d heard whispers about it, but wasn’t sure if it was just a couple of random machines tucked away in a corner, like back in the day. Turns out, it’s a proper arcade space, located right on the ground floor near the centre of the mall.

It’s not massive—around 10 machines in total—but it’s a welcome blast from the past. While most of the machines are STAR WARS BATTLE POD units, two of them, in particular, gave me instant goosebumps.

Let’s take a closer look…

It was these two machines, both based upon the same cabinet, that were listed as DOME SCREEN Games, MachStorm and Star Wars Battle Pod by Namco. 

More info about these things is on their website…

Here you can see my good friend Tindis (nickname) playing Star Wars Battle Pod Dome Version. You can see more of him in the video later in this write-up.

The game plays fluidly on the huge screen and it is actually just driven by a projector+computer above the player so I’d first thought it would have been a crap experience but all in all, I liked it quite a bit (Tindis too).

There were also 2 of the more common Battle Pod machines in the arcade, not as special as the DOME version for sure, but still a nifty game to play, and yup, this is multiplayer enabled too.

The Arcade also got this huge PAC-MAN machine, which goes under the name “World’s Largest Pac-Man”, that said, I tried it and found the joysticks to be awful and way too loose for such a precise type of game.  Way cool to look at but really bad to play on (I made it to the 6th level before I just wanted to throw the whole thing out the window due to the loose sticks).

The game also had Galaga on it, didn’t bother to try it due to the quality of the sticks.

MAJOR LET DOWN.

Over to some cool stuff instead of that Pac-man coin eater crap.

Next up was one I have talked about on here before, Deadstorm Pirates Special Edition. 

A pretty solid game, and for some reason, the pictures I took at the Arcade are gone…

That said, want to know more about it, then check the link to my other article from a few years back (look above for the link).

The Arcade also had two of these SuperBikes 2 machines, not exactly a game I wanted to try, but if I had brought the kids here, then they would have loved to try it for sure.

And the final arcade machine in the Arcade was…

A game called ICE MAN, and regretfully, I did not try this one out, only had a quick look and had to go before I could try it. It looks like a Zombie shooter where you actually shoot water on the screen (WTF?), See the vid for more info.

Below is a quick look around the arcade.

In the vid, you get to see all the machines. Sorry for not making a longer and more detailed one.

Hope you enjoyed the tour and that you will go there one day, it was well worth it for me at least, thanks for your time.

Post updated in Summer 2023 with this video, notice the new cabinets, the arcade is alive!

Post updated in summer 2024 with the video above, notice the new cabinets, it keeps evolving!

Some updated pictures too…

You can expect a 2025 update too 🙂