I Suck at Video Games

As reported previously, I went to a book launch party for a book called Arcade Mania, which is subtitled “The Turbo-Charged World of Japan’s Game Centers.” I’ve finished this book, and then used what I learned inside to go look around the game centers of Tokyo. I’m going to follow the format of the book, and report on my experiences with these games as a gonzo-style review of sorts of the book. As the book is sorted by game type, I’ll be sorting by the exact same format. Inside, we’ll find details on:

1. Crane Games
2. Sticker-Picture Machines
3. Rhythm Games
4. Shooting Games
5. Fighting Games
6. Games of Chance
7. Dedicated Cabinets
8. Retro Games
9. Card-Based Games

Warning: there is a lot of gaming content within. I suggest reading it anyway, even if you’re not interested, because there is also a lot of Japan content within. Now join me as I game in Japan!

Crane Games:

The most popular crane game in Japan is called UFO Catcher. You pay 100-200 yen for a chance to get a prize. And some of the prizes are pretty spectacular. Plenty of character prizes — stuffed animals, figurines, card games, and just about anything you could think of. I had played crane games before, but these are unlike anything you might see in the U.S. There is more often than not only 1 or 2 prizes actually within reach, and they are balanced on a platform in such a way where you need to get it just perfectly. I wanted to try all of the things on this list, so off I went trying to get the Bandai edamame toy. It’s pretty popular here, and runs about 600 yen. If I could get it in less than 6 tries, I come out ahead!

So I tried a few times to grab the package and flip it off of the platform, but I just couldn’t get it right. The package needed to be just a little bit farther off the edge of the platform for me to get the right leverage. At this point, the Japanese girl running the crane games comes over to the machine, opens up the side, and moves two of them within reach. One coin, one edamame toy. Two coins, two edamame toys! Awesome!

Sticker-Picture Machines:

These machines tend to be separated from the pack. These are gigantic contraptions that have professional photo booths with some photoshopping elements, and then print out the pictures on collectible stickers. I wanted to try these, but the places I saw were women only. Men can only go in when accompanied by women. So I didn’t get to try them in the good places. I found a lousy place with a couple of machines, but they were really intimidating. One seemed to have a box you could put a stuffed animal in if you wanted to do sticker pictures of your teddy bear if you wanted to. These things are crazy. Before I go home, I will definitely do some sticker pictures.

Rhythm Games:

Seeing these games in the arcades sitting all lonely in the corner makes me think that these have passed their point of popularity here. There are the classics like Beatmania or DDR; unplayed. There are some more obscure titles like Guitar Freaks and the taiko one the name of which I don’t know; unplayed. It’s sad. These games are currently the biggest thing going in the U.S., and you’ve all played Guitar Hero or Singstar at my apartment. (If you haven’t, why not?) I didn’t play any of these games here. Am I shirking my responsibility?

Shooting Games:

Remember my post a few weeks back about shooting games? (You don’t? Read it again!) The games I’ve played have NOTHING on these titles. Well maybe Ikaruga does. These things are impossible. The section in the book on shooters (called “bullet hell”) is really really good, and explains the games even better than I could, especially since the shooter genre is about 100 times more advanced in Japan than it is in the U.S. It was pretty awesome to watch some of these guys play these games. The screen is about 80% bullets and they deftly fly through the gaps and kill the enemies. I had to try my luck at game whose name I don’t remember — it was pretty complicated sounding. I should have written it down, but darn it all, sometimes I just get caught up in the moment. Did I say moment? I think I lasted all of 20 seconds. Like I was a shooting game virgin or something!

Fighting Games:

The one game I was most looking forward to was Street Fighter IV. I think I mentioned this in an earlier post. I finally did find a stand-alone machine so I could fight against the CPU. I picked Chun Li and beat up on Zangief, getting a perfect on the second round. And then I did it again against Dhalsim. One problem, though: I cannot pull off the super. There are “instructions” on how to do this, but I simply cannot take the necessary joystick and button combinations as written and turn them into motions with my hands and fingers. So even though I have enough power saved up to the Ultra Super Mega Hard Hit Blast Combo, I just get my ass handed to me by Balrog (the one who’s called Vega in the U.S.) as I flail desperately to pull off the combo.

Games of Chance:

My aunt had a pachinko machine in her basement on Long Island. I would play that thing for hours and hours and hours and hours. I loved it. So I was really looking forward to trying pachinko here in Japan. But wow, is pachinko in Tokyo 2008 different from Pachinko on Shelter Rock Road in 1978!

Pachinko and slot parlors are all over the place. And they all advertise the newest games and their release dates. Most of the modern games have a video slot in the center that shows clips from anime. The most popular, seemingly, are the Neon Genesis Evangelion machines. These only have a few pegs and drops, and are taken up mainly by a video slot center showing clips from Eva. Simply looking at gives me a headache. I had to try it, anyway. I put some money in, nothing happened. I pushed some buttons and some balls fell out. Then a card spat out of the machine. Then some other numbers started flipping through and I spun the dial that shoots the ball. I did this a few times, and a few times I got the video slots to spin. I don’t think I hit any winning combinations because nothing else really happened. Then I pushed some more buttons and some more balls came out. And there were some more numbers, and lots of buttons in Japanese, and I pushed some more and some sound effects happened. In the end, I ran out of metal balls. Maybe I had won? The numbers, do they mean something? Was there something I was supposed to do with this card? I looked around at the Japanese men smoking their cigarettes with thousands of metal balls at their feet, and realized that gambling in Tokyo is completely out of my league.

Wait, did I say gambling? Gambling is illegal! Besides, you just trade these balls in for prizes, right? Here’s the cool part. I heard this, and then watched it happen. I followed this guy as he finished playing so I could see for myself. You trade the balls in for a voucher that shows your points. You then trade this in at the counter for some candy. Then you bring the candy to this nondescript counter on the corner, and trade it for money. It all just seems so shady. It’s awesome. Too bad I didn’t get to try this myself; of course, I may have done it wrong and ended up with a $100 box of pocky.

Dedicated Cabinets:

This refers to the type of game that you get inside of and it’s like you’re really there! Think old Pole Position or sit-down Star Wars back in the day. Or that game where you actually got to ride the motorcycle. Anyway, these have gotten a lot more fancy, and if you go to an arcade like Sega Gameworks or whatever they’re calling the one in the Metreon these days, you can see the best of what’s available in the U.S. These have nothing on the Gundam one that is popular here in Japan. For 500 yen, you get inside of a pod that has a screen that takes up your entire field of vision. Then you pilot a Gundam in a little first-person combat game. It’s amazing. I wish I were better at it, but even so, it is incredibly cool. The arcades have sign up sheets for the game so you can reserve a time. I didn’t know how to do this, so I had to wait until I found a small out-of-the-way arcade to try it. Jeepers, it was awesome.

Another type of dedicated cabinet is the light-gun game. I like a good light gun game, but I always die before I think I should. For example, the newest biggest shooting game around these parts is Rambo. Rambo is freakin’ cool. It mixes up scenes from Rambo 3 with video game action! (SPOILER ALERT) The Afghan army comes to save you! You have to shoot the bad guys but not the Afghan army people or you lose points, I think. It’s hard to figure out; all of the instructions are in Japanese. I had a lot of fun with this game, but I died really fast. And it’s 200 yen to play. Goodness. This game needs to come out in the U.S. And be cheaper.

Retro Games:

The suggested arcade for checking out retro games was Shibuya Kaikan, which is a goju arcade. Goju means “50,” because the games here are 50 yen. They are older games, but from walking around here, most of the games were ones I had never seen before. There were a crapload of obscure fighting games and a slightly smaller crapload of crazy-ass shooters. There was not a Super Puzzle Fighter cabinet, at least not that I could see. I had this dream of coming to Japan and kicking everyone’s ass at Puzzle Fighter, but I have yet to see it. Perhaps it will continue to be a dream. Maybe it’s just that any game that gets a following in the U.S. becomes immediately uncool in Japan. I really have no idea.

The retro gaming I’d like to focus on was the crazy shops in Akihabara that sell Nintendo Famicoms and thousands of carts for it. I was seriously considering whether I should buy one of these and some carts and bring them home. What a nerdy thing to do! The machines themselves are pretty cheap, but any game I’d heard of, and could therefore figure out how to play, was not in what I consider a reasonable price range. I wore my Mario shirt to Akihabara — the one with the pipe — and no one pointed at it or said anything. I’m very disappointed by this. Very.

Card-Based Games:

I am so glad that these games aren’t available like this in the U.S. I would be really into them. They combine card collecting and video games. Let me try to explain. Take Magic the Gathering. You buy a starter set and then booster packs to make the best possible hand you can. Now imagine if you had a special play area that was hooked up to giant video screens and the way you picked your cards and moved them around the screen controlled the action. That is what these card-based games are like.

The ones I spotted were some Gundam game (Gundam is huge here), a Square Enix (the Final Fantasy guys) title called Lord of Vermillion, a soccer title which takes up an enormous amount of space and seems to be remarkably popular, and finally, the one that would be the end of me, a baseball one. You buy packs of baseball cards to build the best team and then you make management decisions. The actual swinging of the bat, you don’t do. This is perfect! There was a baseball game a few years back that did this was cards and die-rolling, but this would be amazing! I don’t know if I can do these games justice — the cabinets are phenomenal. I’ll show you one below:

Well, that’s my review of the Japanese Game Centers. Thanks for making it to the end. As a special present for those who have, the first five people to email gordon@isuckatvideogames.com with the subject line “Edamame Me!” with your address if you’re not local (to Oakland, that is) will get an amazing Bandai edamame toy.