Your glasses spike the screenlight at your face like a kid burning ants. HUD branded on your cheekbones.

Look at this coinslot flange, puckering up to take your hyakuen in an industrial-age kiss.

Time blasts by. This is a 21st-century, networked, 3D, arena-based robo combat dreamboat by Capcom, playing on a cathode ray tube in a yellowing hulk of a Sega Blast City cabinet from the 1990s.

I’m hearing bad things about the independents. Even Sega is shutting shops. Akiba 2-kan – iconic! – is gone. Photos of staff bowing outside in thanks for years of patronage from also-bowing, clapping crowds.

Teeth bared; talons out. But look at the posture of their right hands. Claws, but relaxed claws, ready to swoop at the attack buttons with quite a travel. Wouldn’t your response be quicker if you started nearer the buttons? It’s not that kind of reflexes. You play with rhythm, where the travel helps. Reflexes are to quickly change rhythm. If fighters were music games they’d be jazz duo jam sessions.

The 2D fighter: as a genre, perfect. Almost nothing pushes the edges of the concept: everything’s definitely a fighter or definitely not.

Good old rail shooters up for a one-coin-stand. Maybe these are for gaijin rolling off the escalator, spluttering into port from the alien seas of UFO catchers and Nesica Live.

Mortal Kombat was supposed to be a Jean-Claude Van Damme game. No JC in the end, so they went for guys in pointy hats and balaclavas pulling each other’s spines out. And lo, born was a multimedia franchise up there with Care Bears and My Little Pony.

Flying Power Disc (or, stupidly, Windjammers outside Japan) shows you a future of total sports perfection. This ultimate sport combines the pseudofunctional fetishwear of beach volleyball with the hardpolished maple of the NBA with the candyised plastic bodyarmour of the NFL with the circle going back and forth of Pong.

It tells you something about the purpose of Japanese arcades when you see multiple cabs on Tetris: you don’t always come here for the games.

There are rules about how you can modernise a candy cab.

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.

Anata No Warehouse in Kawasaki is themed to look like Kowloon’s walled city, the famous Hong Kong slum.

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.

Ask any gamer to name a mascot is a blue cardigan and they’ll say Sonic the Hedgehog.

The Versus City is a two-faced cab, smiling innocently at the player on each side.

Something I love about Tokyo is the prevalence of handmade signs. It’s totally normal even for high-end department stores to stand staff-constructed cardboard beside the till with laminated announcements and explanations. But this is just silly…

Sit in the dark and match threes on your own. Screen so bright you’re blinded to everything else.

For all the fanboy fussing on Sanwa and Seimitsu, can either earnestly be faulted?

Tokyo arcades had been waiting for me since my schooldays. They sent me loveletters tucked into 90s gaming mags and little video missives on Games Master. They promised to save themselves for me. Finally, years later, I got on the plane.

The Sega Blast City cabinets in my imaginary home arcade are forever young in the belle époque of 2D, CRT, stick-and-six gaming.

Everyone thinks their childhood games were gold. But only 90s kids were right.