Konichiwa from Japan!
Matt posted in Games on January 7th, 2007

I’m in Japan right now visiting, and I’ve been checking out some arcades when I’m not busy. So far, I’m a little disappointed with the arcade scene here. There really isn’t a big variety of games. I was hoping to find a bunch of really wacky and silly games, but I haven’t found any so far nor have I found my personal favorites Samba de Amigo and Para Para Paradise unfortunately. Pretty much every arcade has Time Crisis 4, Let’s go Jungle, Mario Kart GP, Taiko no Tatsujin, a driving game, some photo booths, a crap ton of crane games, card games and medal games. There are a few extra games here and there, but not much variety at all. Also, there are an overwhelming number of medal and crane games.

The card games are something that haven’t really penetrated America yet, although Sega is trying to bring Mushiking over. I tried playing it in the States, and I didn’t really like it. I read some articles about the card games, but I was really impressed with there scale. Here are some pictures of a huge Gundam game and another cool looking card game.

  

The games were expensive to play because they give you cards, and I imagine they were text heavy, so I didn’t try them.

I did play some of the medal games. These are like ticket games in the United States, but instead of giving you tickets, they give you medals (basically tokens). The medals could only be used to play more medal games (not even other games in the arcade), so it seems a bit odd. I tried my hand at pachinko. I was really excited before playing it, and I was a bit disappointed. The very first game I won big, and I got a ton of medals. Every other game, I didn’t win a single thing. I have no idea what I did right the first time and wrong the subsequent times. All the control you have is just a little knob that you can adjust the speed of the balls, and you try to bounce them into a little target. If you get the knob in the “right” place, which seems pretty easy, you can get about 10% in the target. The reason is only 10% is because there’s a lot of randomness because of all the pins. I seemed to get about the same percentage in when I won big, so I guess I just played a generous game. I tried to play other machines after that for some variety, and I lost everything.

I was really excited to try the Taiko medal game, but I think I was missing something. As you can see in the pictures, it plays just like those ticket games in the US with the rows of quarters or tokens that you try to knock down. Regardless of how many are hanging over the edge, they rarely fall down. The Taiko game looked much more interesting because it had a big screen with the position of your Taiko drum, and if you got it through the slots with pictures of dice, you would move that number of places on the map in a seemingly random direction. Depending on where you landed, it would occasionally drop some medals to help you knock down more medals, but that seemed like the only new feature that this massive machine offered. I imagine I was missing something due to my poor Japanese skills, but although it was an interesting diversion, I don’t think I’d play it again.

 

Something interesting is that the arcades are run by game publishers (I’ve been to a Taito, Sega and a Namco arcade), but they don’t really have much of a preference for their own titles. I was hoping to find a ton of Taiko drums at the Namco arcade, but instead of just one like the other arcades, they had two. I was also disappointed with the lack of music games. The arcade back in Ann Arbor has practically one of every Bemani title. Although, I don’t enjoy many of them, I was expecting to see some of the stranger ones that didn’t make it to the States. Instead, all I’ve seen is Taiko drums, and one arcade had a Drummania and a Beatmania. Luckily, I really like Taiko no Tatsujin.