Between this and the several posts about Street Fighter IV I have to make (don't worry, one SF4 post will be about bad anime), we're going to be dipping into videogame mode for a while. I know most of you won't mind!
AOU is Japan's big arcade show. As the industry is not completely destroyed over there, manufacturers still have it in them to go out to a trade show and show off their wares. I'd love to go to AOU-- hell, I'd love to be able to play arcade games in Japan-- but in the meantime you and I are all going to have to settle for the footage this cool dude on Youtube snuck out of the place. I hope I don't blow your cover, bro! I'm going to skip the bigger games like KOFXII, because what's to say about that game at this stage that you don't already know? It's still very pretty! On the same note, the new Elevator Action has an amazing cabinet, but doesn't look to be too exciting in any other way.
This is undoubtedly my "Lead Story", as it were. Bishi Bashi is back. Any of you guys ever get to play Bishi Bashi? Imagine playing those bizarre Japanese game shows you see clips from on the internet with your friends and you're starting to understand. You have three big ol' Pop-O-Matic buttons (in the new game there's four), and like a prototype of Wario Ware, you're thrown into a minigame structured around some very strange task which is controlled, somehow, by these buttons. Or maybe I should just remind you that this entire video consists of four people competing to make the onscreen characters take a shit as many times as possible? There's a Bishi Bashi Special machine in Flushing, but it's broken. Very sad.
If you guys were worried about nobody being around to pick up the sleazy strip-mahjong mantle after Seta and Jaleco are out of the game, I guess don't be anymore, because Higurashi, of all the moe franchises, has jumped right in. The trailer implies that, in the spirit of Higurashi, the pretty girls will cut your belly open like a fucking Thanksgiving turkey if you lose and get into embarassing cosplay outfits if you win. Maybe those should both be special accessories on the cabinet. Here's the other video, where we mostly just look very closely at an face-down, ass-up figure of Rena. Otaku. Otaku, otaku.
I'm gonna talk about Daemon Bride (talked about a bit here) because there's so little on it and nobody talks about it anyway. It's ugly. I can't tell from this video whether or not the sprites are in a higher resolution than Arcana Heart, but they're certainly worse animated. Keep in mind that Arcana was already pretty cheaply animated, so this is really saying something. The developer seems to know that the sprites kinda blow, too, because we see a lot of really flashy, overdone CG effects that kinda block out the characters, because looking like this who'd want to see them? With this and Sengoku Basara X, there are two fighting games that specifically target Japanese fangirls: the first one was phoned-in and this one looks like it might be too. I wonder what this says about developer expectations! It's almost as though they already know they kinda have the wrong demographic for the genre, but they said "oh fuck it, let's slap something together and see what happens." Not much is gonna happen for chicks or for dudes with that attitude! (Daemon Bride would actually probably be fairly popular with the Hot-Topic-and-Kingdom-Hearts crowd at Chinatown Fair.)
By contrast, the new Power Instinct was around. Doesn't look gorgeous, but it does look solid. That's a lot more important.
Oh man. I think we should just segue into "cute things at AOU" here. This Hopping Road thing is adorable and you wouldn't catch me dead near it. I'm glad somebody lived the Blue Skies Manifesto so truly. So is Music Gungun, the musical gun game (Christ, why didn't I think of that) but that has Zuntata on it so you get mad hardcore gamer cred for playing it. Meanwhile, you might think that this is footage of cute gothloli cosplayers playing Death Smiles 2. Please don't be fooled. This is actually Death Smiles 2. Cave really did move into 3D. And they're just that good. In conclusion, ride a broom. America makes the Gyroxus chair, Japan makes the moe-moe witch-chan broom game. I'm not sure who was right.
Actually, if that's the same arcade game featuring an actual broom controller, then it's Korea that the Gyroxus chair is competing with. Japan had that one modern art piece/light gun for playing the world's worst lightgun game on the Sega Saturn (screw me if I remember what the fuck it's called).
Posted by: TORUMASUTA | February 23, 2009 at 04:03 PM