In Akihabara, the arcades don’t have to be polite. On the contrary, it would be the zakkaya or Ginza stationer who would have to apologise to passersby.

Gitadora: Guitar Hero and DrumMania. True companions – the point of each other. (Since 1999, so Rock Band didn’t invent the rock band.)

I guess the piano equivalent of Mario Kart controller twisting would be wiggling vibrato on the keys or conducting the strings while your hands are in the air. Chunithm lets you do that.

90s gamers know the magic. Quartercentury later and the blueandwhite trigger word still plays that voice. MKUltra shit. By now, you’re hearing Green Hill Zone, as we all will in the pre-death seconds.

This Christmas the 6th CD goes on sale!

Style never goes out of fashion. Lack of style never comes into fashion, so likewise can never go out, I suppose.

Yeah, I wear moccasins and a check shirt. Glasses. A look that says don’t bother looking. Spend life head-down, blanking some black hole on my heels.

Kind of like a glass keyboard but all with lights? Yeah? All blooming in clean glass. Music flies down the screen at your fingers and a kind of magical aura detects all this finger jazz you’re doing. It’s like air guitar but without even an imaginary guitar.

A horrorfilm pair, eerily pat-a-caking in synchrony at the gaping lit-up lips of the maimai machines.

Akihabara is the pristine gamer paradise daydreamt of over Mean Machines in the Mega Drive days.

DANCERUSH STARDOM is Konami’s celebration of / cash-in on its dance game history.

Tokyo: What have arcades been doing since they left your country?

This is a seven-storey-tall billboard showing the teenage-girl-cum-aircraft-carrier stars of an arcade trading card game.