Border Break: play online – with school-skipping kids during the day or with family-shirking salarymen at night.
Easter eggshaped image from the loserdrop stairwell that squeezes you between the prize machines and a Chinese into a Fight Club-style fighting-game fight club.
In times gone by, when Sega made consoles, it felt like there was a clear path from arcade to home release. Back then, Gunslinger Stratos would have been ported to Saturn or Dreamcast and come with dedicated controllers.
Gentlemen reading this will know that sometimes there are splashguards and sometimes there aren't. In either case you just look straight ahead and mind nothing but your own business. But don't mind it too closely or you will raise questions.
The 2D fighter: as a genre, perfect. Almost nothing pushes the edges of the concept: everything’s definitely a fighter or definitely not.
How to be sure you’re in Tokyo
Oh, c'mon! They're practically jumping into the claw!
In your capacious Western home you probably have *two* display cases for prizes you have won in UFO catchers: one for the Japanese schoolgirl figurines and one for the model aircraft-carriers.
Code of Joker was a Trading Card Game from Sega – purveyor of some longstanding and well-loved TCGs. But what's that sign on the top? It says "free to play". Are they giving out free starter decks?! Yes!
Pokemon means pocket monsters. Tekken means iron fist. Therefore: Pokken means pocket fist. Named for the scooping of hundredyens – or the skulking home in the cold.
Get in the bustle. Tokyo street.
A controller dangling off the front of an arcade cabinet? What a flimflam! Like a Toys R Us demo booth with a coinslot.
Like something from Raymond Chandler, with that Deco font, or a cruise liner where puff-sleeved women skywrite with ivory cigarette holders as long as their silk gloves.
While retro arcade gaming is a niche interest in the West, it’s hard for it to establish a comeback when only nerds will seek it out.
Roads brushed to a shine and longstanding arcades showing only the necessary degradation.
What are all those card readers for on Japanese arcade cabinets? Here’s a quick guide.
Out of the office, pop your umbrella. Hide your eyes and shuffle with the crowds: synthetic-mix suits are both the camouflage and the background.
Wonderland Wars is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena that lives in Japanese arcades. Japanese gamers recognise and dig the MOBA but the Wikipedia list of MOBAs page is totally different in Japanese and English.
Figureheads was a Japan-only Squenix megafranchise that just never quite came to be. But while it lasted it was killer.
Tokyo has its ways of doing things, and as much as it will welcome The New, there is no automatic supersession of The Old. Certainly, the encroachment of the digital into daily life need not usurp the basic dignities of physical presence, such as cleanliness or well-mannered comportment.
There has long been a trend of reporting on Japan that selects and spins niche, non-news stories to contribute to a collaborative caricature of “Weird Japan”. One popular pastime is to point at sexual perversions – where many “perversions” are merely wayward of Western norms, presented absent acknowledgement or awareness of the imperfections in how we all cope with sex the world over.
