Few Nukes hit the Town

Japan is a Geek’s Paradise

October 8th, 2008

My Twiget Nuke Son’s continuing first impressions of Japan, enjoy

“So when we finally arrived in Akihabara, Japan. It was much much different than the small city of Yokosuka. Being a part of Tokyo, Akihabara isn’t exactly deserted. Masses of people were all over the sidewalks, and when the light changed colors a herd of people crossed the street in one direction or another. The buildings were plastered with anime characters and video game signs, and one tall building on a corner had in large letters “Welcome to Akihabara” on a huge sign at its top. There were buildings with just floors and floors of arcade games, from the simple “UFO Grabber” games where you try to grab prizes, to the more complex. The more complex being one floor with 10-12 large mock cockpits to Gundams that close sealing you inside immersing you into a brawl of 5v5 Gundam arena combat. The non-participants got to watch a large screen in the center of the room that showed the whole battle as it unfolded, you could see the people as little gundams going around and lying in wait, springing traps, ambushing, retreating, all in very sharp and vivid display. I glanced into one of the ‘cockpits’ and each person has a ~100 degree display in front of them showing the front view of their Gundam, they have all the controls and such you would expect from a crazy humanoid robot fighter. I want to go back and hop inside and try my luck, but I feel that the people who play on a regular basis are on a skill level far surpassing my own. And I don’t know if I want to pay for a team of 5 Japanese kids to continuously blow me up. The other style of complex arcade game play that I saw was based in cards. Like the kind of cards you would collect for Magic the Gathering or Pokemon or something. People would go to this game, it has a screen in front of you and a screen that’s horizontal that’s a touch interface. You then place these special cards on the touch interface and it reads the cards and all the stats from the cards and spawns your creatures up on the vertical screen in front of you. But that’s not all, you control these monsters by moving the cards on the large touch screen. You twist you card to the left or right, the creature pivots and turns. You slide of towards you, the creature responds in turn. I saw people control bands of 5 or so creatures, pushing and turning and maneuvering them in a fast paced combat that when I looked at the vertical screen reminded me of Gauntlet Legends but with better graphics and more particle effects. But they don’t limit this game type there. There are mock touch screen soccer fields that you place your favorite soccer player cards down to form your team and control your players. There were a lot of different ‘card’ games, and it amazed me that I had never even heard of this style of game. *out of the loop*“

Read Comments (0)