Robot Claw

Today in Akihabara (you can read more about our day’s events tomorrow, this post is all about video games), I sat down to play Death Smiles on the 5th floor of a Taito game arcade. Next to me was a Japanese man playing DoDonpachi Dai Fukkatsu, the best ‘bullet hell’ shooter ever made.

He was a savant. He may have been, and I swear I am not exaggerating here, the single best arcade gamer I have ever personally witnessed playing. His ability to dodge bullets was borderline supernatural. He did things I would not have believed a human could do had I not witnessed it. To understand: a ‘bullet hell’ shooting game is one in which the challenge is based not just around destroying the enemies, but also avoiding the seemingly unavoidable curtains of bullets they shoot your way. Not to go into too fine a detail, but success in the game results from practice, memorization, complete understanding of ‘hitboxes’ and awesome, just awesome amounts of skill. He demonstrated all these things in a way only a true master could.

The shot on the left is me playing, but you can see his hands and his game to my left. The rightmost shots were taken by KLS to try to show the sorts of obstacles he was seemingly easily overcoming. To watch him dodge pixel-by-pixel through these clusters of bullets was awe-inspiring, and I felt very lucky to have had the opportunity.

In the end he beat the game on a single credit. I’ll bet their are only a handful of people on this entire planet that could do that…

The arcades in Japan are going as strong as ever, but they are adapting with the times. Conventional, single-cabinet games are relatively uncommon, usually relegated to a half of a floor or so of the five to eight story mega-arcades that are common in areas such as Ueno or Akihabara. In a typical arcade of this size, each floor will usually hold a particular type of game:
– one floor will be entirely UFO catcher machines (aka ‘claw machines’). This is almost always the entry level of the arcade.
– one will be entirely ‘Print Club’ sticker-making booths
– one will be dedicated to ticket redemption machines, which themselves run the gamut from RPG-like quiz games to things like Gallileo I showed the other day.
– one floor will be large scale linked competitive games, like Star Horse or Football Manager. The biggest arcades will have 10 or more consoles linked to a gigantic screen for such games.
– one floor will be dedicated to magnetic card based games, such as the various MahJong games or SquareEnix’s latest game Lord Of Vermillion
– an entire floor will usually be dedicated to fighting games. Popular titles not include SF4, VF5, Tekken 6 and the various Gundam battle games. One arcade I was in today had no less than 12 linked Street Fighter 4 cabinets. Players can save their stats onto a magnetic card and reuse it every time they play (this is very common for many games here)
– one floor will contain old school cabinet games, including retro games (which most of these are these days). Very, very few games of this type continue to be made. The most recent one – Death Smiles 2 – has even been distributed free to arcades to get them to stock it. In the mega-arcades, retro games are increasingly rare and if they are present are almost always shooters (including bullet hell ones by Cave or any of the games from the Metal Slug series)
These arcades are astounding, and it’s very hard to describe to a video game fan just how amazing they are to visit without actually going to one. It’s particularly heart-wrenching for me because they simply don’t exist in America any more – not even tiny ones with a half-dozen games. So visiting arcades is one of several things about Japan I really enjoy, and I’ve been trying to do it as much as possible this trip.

The above sequence is designed to be viewed in order from left to right. As you do, imagine 2 seconds in real time passing between each image. That’s about how long my game of Gals Panic S2 lasted 🙂  (To the two of you wondering, this was an anime style Gals Panic, not a bad-digitized nudie game style)

< Half-Life

Western PC games do notoriously poorly in Japan, so Valve had an idea to release Half-Life 2 in arcades over here. The result is what you see above, and was more ‘interesting’ to play than ‘entertaining’. My feeling is it was a bit of a failure, especially since I’ve only seen it in one arcade so far. (This makes me wonder where these large dedicated cabinet machines go when the arcades no longer want them…)

The above is a redemption game that simulates the classic Japanese fair game of catching goldfish from a pool using a tiny net. The real thing is a diversion for children (the net is made of paper, so catching the fish is harder than it looks since the paper will break if you move it too quickly), but this version seemed more appreciated by the same types that are content to waste their lives on Pachinko!

< Gundam

The above is a shot of a Gundam ‘pod’ cabinet. When you get inside it closes, completely encapsulating you inside. Multiple wrap-around screens attempt to make it seem like you are actually piloting a Gundam robot. You then fight others in a 3D action game. The big arcades have up to a dozen of these cabinets as well as a large screen on which those not playing can watch the fights in real-time on a tactical map. The pods are linked all over Japan, so even if no-one is playing at the arcade you can see how they fights are going. Basically it’s a persistent, large scale massively multiplayer Gundam FPS that you play in these amazing pods at the arcade. In fact it is so impressive I’m somewhat pretending it doesn’t exist because it makes me sad such tech is Japan-only…

Random shots of random games. The leftmost shows the nice Street Fighter IV cabinet, which I don’t think made it’s way out of Japan.

The title of this entry (‘Waste Your Youth’) is a pun – arcades here are not the sole domain of the young. Quite the contrary actually. Children have their Wii’s and their DS’s – arcades here are for adults. The above three games are those typically played by middle-aged ‘salary men’ on their way home from work. The leftmost is a magnetic card based strategy game. You buy cards from a vending machine and create a deck to play with. The surface in front of the screen reads the cards in real time so you actually control the gameplay simply by moving the cards around. This tech was cutting edge when we were here in 2006 but many machines utilize it now. The middle shot is of a Football (soccer) game. Each player takes one of the chairs you can see, and has his own screen on which he controls the actions of his team. This is another game that uses cards that are purchased separately, and in many arcades I’ve seen every chair being used by older male players that are obviously enjoying managing their teams to presumed victory. The rightmost image is an even bigger redemption game than Galileo, and is another absurdly complex take on the old ‘knock tokens into a bin by throwing other tokens at them’ genre.

The Hummer game. Sega’s latest arcade racer, which I believe only came out a few weeks ago. BS would cry if he saw how detailed the graphics were 🙂

We have yet to visit Ikebukuro, which has a couple of mega-arcades itself. I also plan on spending more than a few more hours in the arcades in Ueno, so expect a few more arcade images before the end of this trip!