Subatomic Brainfreeze

In the year 199X, my Hokuto no Ken slot machine sure spit out a lot of fake money

It's a little dusty, and I'm going to need to replace some parts soon, but my prize possession can still spit out tokens with the best of them. I think it's a house record. I wonder what the yakuza exchange rate for 1901 tokens is? Bet it's an assload. I could totally buy a hotel on Boardwalk with this change!

Japanese slot machine jackpots aren't exactly the same as western slot jackpots: while Western slots simply give you the damned money, pachislos are legally required to only give out 15 tokens per spin, maximum. As such, instead of having a mighty 15-token jackpot, the machines worked around the law by putting the player in a bonus round where they recieve 15 tokens at almost every spin. On the Hokuto machine, Raoh and Kenshiro fight during the bonus round, and if Ken wins, you get to play another bonus round. This repeats until the machine decides you've had enough money. Here, you can see I got to play the bonus round.... fourteen times in a row. It takes forever. I must have been listening to Ai wo Torimodose (which only starts playing once you've made loads of money to begin with) for twenty minutes. Not that I've never done that before!

Window-shopping for pachinkos

It's not that I'm buying another silly gamble-machine so soon; it's the market. The way it works is this: you can't buy a pachinko machine when it comes out unless you have about two thousand dollars. That's what the parlors buy them for. Pachinkos may be fancy, but they don't actually cost anywhere near that much to make; it's just that they're massively profitable, so they price them how they want. It's the manufacturer's way of saying "hey, give us a little bit of those earnings, eh?" And the parlors do; they don't have a choice. Crane machine manufacturers do the same thing here, I believe.

Anyway, these things make their money, new machines come in, and parlor operators have more junk machines than they know what to do with. This is the part I'm not completely sure about: I've heard they get destroyed, dismantled for parts, all kinds of stuff. But some of them inevitably end up being sold in bulk, to dealers, for cheap, and the dealers let the collectors have at them. This is where my slot machines came from, and the home pachinko market pretty much works the same way. The turnaround time and the price depend on how popular the machine is, but they start to appear on the used market not long after release. From there, the price dips with time. The way I figure, whatever current machine I want, I can probably hopefully maybe get it around the end of next year.

I had been looking at the very nice Evangelion Second Impact machine. I'm not even a particularly huge Eva fan; the machine's just gorgeous. Lots of gimmicks and fun stuff. That link is a search for Second Impact machines on Yahoo Japan; they're around the $200 range. If only it was so easy to buy one; shipping from Japan for an item this huge is prohibitively expensive. I'd have to wait for an importer  (who buy in bulk, naturally) to start getting them. The late-'04 first model Eva pachinko is already going around on Ebay, and I figure that a lot of Second Impact machines are going to start popping up too, on account of this:

Yeah, the third Eva pachinko in three years. They made good business. It'll be out next month. The video is just a long, long "here is why this machine completely outclasses Second Impact", but you can get the gist of it if you fast forward to about four minutes in.

THREE.

HOWLING.

ROBOTS.

I'm also pretty sure it says something about new Gainax animation and a variety of exciting new game modes, that kinda thing, but that's not what I'm here for. I'm here for giant, howling robot heads. Second Impact only has one howling robot head. This one's got three, man. Three. Even the totally awesome Fever Captain Harlock machine (my other candidate) doesn't have as cool a gimmick. And its gimmick is the Arcadia.

So I start saving my pennies and waiting. Maybe by then there will be a pachinko machine about Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro, and I'll buy that.

ULTIMATE JUSTICE: GAMBLING TEAMUP

The successor to Hokuto Shinken and a giant flying turtle: finally, together at last.

So sometime during the summer I started getting into Japanese slot machines. It was all a natural process: I saw a PS2 port of the Fist of the North Star slot machine at the import shop I go to. I bought it out of curiosity, and it hit me that this machine actually existed in the real world. I went looking, and not only did the things exist, they were being imported to the US for reasonable prices. Madness! So I bought Fist of the North Star from cool dude Gaku, and I figured that would be it, you know? I only need one surprisingly affordable slot machine. The guys on the Pachitalk boards (heroic men who have converted entire living spaces into tiny Japanese casinos) hear that line all the time, and they laugh, they laugh, and they laugh.

First I wanted an Ultraman Club ST. Then I got sorta fickle. Gamera High Grade Vision was looking pretty sweet, but the Ultraman was a lil' bit cheaper. But you know, when you're buying a permanent fixture like this, you gotta really love it. So I went for Gamera.

Gamera spends most of his time sleeping, as you can see here. Sometimes he sees fish and lights from the sky and stuff like that. Sometimes he fights Guiron. Sometimes he fights less awesome but still pretty awesome monsters. Most of the time he gets his ass kicked. Eye-lasered or stabbed (complete with green arterial spray) by Guiron's head. Really rough stuff. Sometimes he wins, though, and that's when the machine pays out, or as the Japanese seem to like to put it, you GET. If we were playing with medals that we could trade for goods (which we then trade for money around the corner), like they do in Japan, we'd have it made. But we're not. We are satisfied with the ch-ch-ch-ch-ching when the tokens fall.

This is a lot of GET to GET. It's so much GET that the machine gave up: When the theme song played, and Gamera swam out into the sunset, it spit out all the credits it had, and the Game Over light lit up. Lower right corner, there, in that picture. In a parlor setting, this is the machine's way of telling you you won enough, and to go home already, for christ's sake. The Fist of the North Star machine does this by re-enacting the final scene of the fight between Ken and Raoh. It's totally awesome (spoilers, naturally). It's also so rare that I've never actually seen it on my own machine. When Gamera hit the jackpot it didn't do anything special, but I figured it might never happen again, so what the hell. I took pictures.

I'll take more pictures, probably; I need to spend a good long time playing the slots and taking pictures of rare occurrences, and technically, not matter how much I slack off, I have to say that I don't really have any time. You know, finals. Really.