Miki, a Japanese otaku in love with videogames, created this uber otaku diorama dedicated to our beloved game centers!

Pocket Lucho is the king of arcade modding: his mini arcade custom tabletops should be mass produced by Sega or Nintendo!! Via Danny Allen @ Giz

A new videogame museum just opened in Russia! Around 20 of the 37 different kinds of machines are displayed and playable. They operate with old Soviet 15 kopek coins, the hammer-and-sickle emblem of which itself conjures up a bygone time. Visitors can try their luck with games like «Sea Battle», where the player looks through a periscope and pretends to be a submarine commander, attempting to torpedo passing ships. In «Tankodrom» the player tries to knock out rocket launchers and jeeps with a small plastic tank. The museum also features Soviet pinball tables, ice-hockey games for two and four players, a target shooting game called «Sniper» and early video games with titles like «Gorodki» and «Skachki» («Horse race»).

Welcome to play, discover and enjoy!

 

 

Brian @ Kotaku posted about the Cave's revolutionary new revenue sharing marketing for upcoming Arcade PCBs. Basically CAVE will provide free games to game centers willing to share the revenues coming from the games. It's a really interesting approach and I'm really curious how JAMMA association fits in since this Japanese association, with its high license costs (yes you need to pay em to distribute ana arcade game in Japan), is partly responsible for the decline of the arcade market in Japan... I suppose that the license cost is based on a % of the PCB price so CAVE probably is trying to bypass the JAMMA license fees...  The first revenue sharing game wil be DEATHSMILES 2.  I'm also curios if this announcement is in some way connected by the suddenly choise of the cult game center in Shinjuku MIKADO to remove EVERY Cave game... hmm... but probably this is just a shooting gamer paranoia...

Next year there will be another (and probably more revolutionary) announcement that will influence a lot, and possibily revive, the Japanese arcade business but since I'm under NDA I can't reveal anything...
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I just wrote about ARCADE MANIA on the italian bestelling magazine XL and I'm really happy to read that the book (written by two of the best bloggers out there: Brian Ashcraft and Jean Snow) just got the second edition!
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WOW! Today Brian "Kotaku"  Asciukurafuto San appeared in Zoom In!! Super, one of my favourite shows on Japanese TV! He spoke about about Japanese arcades seen by foreigners perspective and of course about his great new book: Arcade Mania.
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Brain the Kotaku M@ster has just completed his new book dedicated to arcade gaming... it's a must buy for any kiban maniac out there...

(via HobbyMedia) Last week, the legendary Akiba game center HEY held the latest Street Fighters 4 location test. Photo were forbidden but I managed to take some pictures of moves lists. During the next location test Sagat and Vega will be playable

This year I had to go back to Europe for the Nuremberg Toy fair so I couldn't attend the AOU 2008 that has been held at the end of last week. Koji, from Akihabara Channel has posted a great reportage.

Here is a bunch of videos of the new Gundam VS Gundam arcade game  shooted today at the AOU 2008 arcade game show held in Makuhari Messe. Official screenshots gallery here.

The legendary doujin circle Studio Siesta has announced that they are going to release an Arcade version of their shooterTrouble Witches. There are other 2 doujin games ported right now to arcade (I can't reveld more info). This doujin arcade trend is not strange at all since behind many doujin circles there are programmers and designers who worked in the 2D Arcade business back in the days...

Click here to download a demo of Trouble Witches (125 MB).

Videogame Hacker drkIIRaziel got the Naomi bios running on the Dreamcast emulator nullDC: seems that Sega Naomi emulation is finally coming!

(NSFW) After Game Center CX what's better than a porno movie set in a Japanese Game Center with two lesbian malking love on arcade machines? We just found this porno masterpiece (starred by Sakurada Sakura) that has been released last year by HOT Entertainment. Actually this video company this year created the Hot Entertainment AV Visual Arts Accademy: the very first school to learn how to get a job (behind the camera) in the porno industry!



Sample images from "Geisen de Hard Lesbian" DVD on DMM.

According to Famitsu scan posted on 2ch Capcom is working on Fate Unlimited Codes: a new arcade game based on Fate bishoujo franchise.that will be released next year.

Update: Famitsu.com posted a demo video of Unlimited Codes.

Update (22/11): Screen shots and characters arctworks on Game Watch.

Sega Race TV is a fun old school racing game that runs on Lindbergh board. Right now the game is still in development but it seems already a pretty solid and fun racing game. It will be release early next year and I really hope this game will bring back back the Sega we loved in the 80s and 90s...

Update: a lots of videos from AM show has been posted on Youtube like Mamorukun ha noroware te shimatta! (GRev), Death Smiles (Cave) + Death Smiles Live, Tekken 6, Basara X, Quest of D: The battle Kingom, Chase HQ 2, Eternal Wheel, Pokemon Battrio, DragonBall  DataCardass game, etc...

Update: Arcade Renaissance.com posted some impressions from the game.
Update: Game Video posted a trailer of the game.


D1GP, from Taito,  is a arcade racing drifting simulator dedicated to the japanese D1 series.  The D1 Grand Prix was the vision of a Japanese car enthusiast and magazine publisher Daijiro Inada, founder of the Japanese auto tuning title, Option Magazine and the Tokyo Auto Salon (our friend, the japanese Idol, Amano Ai appeared as a Race Queen model in the august issue of Option Magazine).




CHASE HQ 2 is the next gen version of the legendary arcade game from the 80s...

Another new arcade game from Taito (owned by Square Enix since 2005) is Eternal Wheel (or "The wheel of Eternity"): a satellite card game developed by Square Enix. Satellite arcade games with touch sesitive panels are really popular in japanese game arcades (one example is Derby Owners Club) but the size and the cost of these machines limited the distribution to Japan (and sometimes Asian game centers). One of the most famous Satellite platform is Sega Chihiro. Eternal Wheel has been programmed on NESYS: a new PC-based Taito Type-X Arcade Board  which is a network-connected arcade machine that features a touch-sensitive panel. I think this release will stop the rumors about Square Enix working on a new hardware console that started spreading last year.
Akihiko Yoshida and  Amano Yoshitaka took care of illustrations and character design so the card will be really succesfull also among trading card fans.
Seems that Square Enix has been pretty busy with the release of  Crysis Core for PSP since Eternal Wheel has not even been listed on their homepage.

Today during the AM Show in Makuhari Taito showed the upgrade of the arcade version of HALF LIFE 2 (released in Japan last year in june). This upgrade will show up in a couple of days in Japanese Game Centers and features new weapons, new missions and new maps.

Oggi, presso la salagiochi NamcoLand di Shibuya (Tokyo) inizia il location test della versione arcade di Tekken 6.

Wired:   Fra la fine degli anni 70 e i primi anni novanta le industrie militari dell'allora Unione Sovietica (mentre l'occidente giocava con titoli come "Raid over Moscow" per c64) hanno prodotto circa 70 cabinati arcade che sono stati raccolti nel Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines aperto a maggio.

Arriva un nuovo satellite game nelle salegiochi giapponesi. Si tratta della versione arcade del gioco di carte Aquarian Age della Broccoli molto amato dagli appassionati giapponesi.
(grazie a Heisei Democracy)