Posts Tagged ‘ arcades ’

Hands On: Music GunGun! Arcade Game Smashes Up Rhythm, Shooting 03 March 2010 at 4:52 pm by billChoophiex

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TOKYO — Japanese arcades have long relied on shooting games and music games to draw in customers from the street. I suppose it was inevitable that the two would merge.

Alongside the latest Japanese arcade games on display at the AOU Expo on February 20, Taito unveiled a “music shooting” game that the company says is the beginning of a new genre. Like the multitudinous other music games that litter Japanese game centers, Music GunGun! lets one or two players choose a song and perform actions to the beat like any other music game. But the interface, instead of a guitar, is a gun.

myuganUnusually for a music game, Music GunGun! actually has a plot: You are trying to apprehend a flying creature who attacks you with “sound monsters.” Each level presents itself as a chase where your target is floating away from you and sending monsters towards you as you advance. As the monsters reach the front of the screen, circles appear to indicate where and when to shoot.

Ideally, your shots and the song will be in sync, though the din of the AOU exhibition hall made it hard to hear at times. You can see (and almost hear) the game in action in this YouTube video (skip to the 1:22 mark). You can also watch videos of the game being played on the Japanese home page.

In between these rhythmic sections are moments of free shooting where your target becomes vulnerable or the screen fills with monsters. These are the times when the player can let loose and just shoot everything as fast as possible. The gun sound effects do overwhelm the song during these breaks, but it’s a welcome change of pace from the carefully-timed music gameplay. There’s something very rewarding about getting permission to fire at will after being so strictly restrained.

musicgunguncontrollerWhile all the levels are essentially the same, the varied backgrounds and monsters keep things visually interesting. The characters and environments are all brightly colored and cute as a button. Even the firearms, plastic space-age rayguns with star decals, are adorable.

Music GunGun! boasts more than 80 different songs, most of which offered two or three difficulty levels each. I found it to be more challenging than typical music games because, as a video game player with a gun in my hand, I’m used to shooting first and asking questions later.

The guns also lack the physical feedback of an instrument-based game: Crafting a tune by pulling a trigger feels much different than strumming a fake guitar or beating a plastic drum.

The cuteness factor and the combined draw of two popular genres should make Music GunGun! a hit here in Japan, but will it turn up overseas? I wouldn’t count on it. Then again, I thought the same thing about Taiko Drum Master, which had even more cultural baggage. At least this game speaks the universal language of guns.

Bonus Fun Fact: Music GunGun! is part of the company’s lineup of easy-to-understand games, which is called “No Thought.”

Images courtesy Taito

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+ Report: Space Invaders Marching to the Silver Screen By Whonpourn 03 March 2010 at 3:43 pm and have No Comments

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First Asteroids. Then Missile Command. Now, Hollywood is making a movie out of Space Invaders.

The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that Warner Brothers is negotiating with Taito to grab the rights to the classic arcade game. If the deal goes through, Mark Gordon, Jason Blub and Guymon Casady will produce.

In 2009, Universal won the rights to produce a movie based on the Atari classic Asteroids. Last month, the Times reported that Atari was shopping around another hit shooter, Missile Command.

The notion of a Space Invaders movie might seem silly, but as I explained earlier, Hollywood needs pre-existing properties to help get their movies made. And arcade games, with their wafer-thin plots and archetypal conflicts, are the perfect venue for getting action, adventure and fantasy movies off the ground.

Space Invaders, designed by Tomohiro Nishikado for Taito, debuted in Japanese arcades in 1978. Later, Bally Midway brought the smash hit game to the United States. In what is considered to be the father of the shooter genre, players controlled a slow-moving laser cannon, fending off an oppressive alien invasion. In the decades since Invadermania swept the world, the game’s simplistic alien invaders — inspired by crabs, octopi and the invaders in H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”, have insinuated themselves into the mass consciousness, an iconic representation of videogames themselves.

Taito has managed to keep the Space Invaders flame alive with a series of remakes, reboots and anniversary editions. The best was Space Invaders Extreme (above), a clever remix of the game that used trippy background visuals by Jeff Minter. The oddity Space Invaders Get Even for the Wii is worth playing, if only for the chance to play as the aliens.

Videogame incursion into Hollywood could continue with Space Invaders [LA Times]

Image courtesy Microsoft

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+ Steve Wiebe to Chase Donkey Kong High Score at GDC By smirmZero 01 March 2010 at 4:32 pm and have No Comments

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Steve Wiebe (pictured) will shoot for the Donkey Kong high score next week at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.

Gamasutra reports that Wiebe will appear at the booth for Atlassian, a maker of bug-tracking software, where he will sign autographs and do his darndest to beat rival Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong high score.

Steve Wiebe is best known for his appearance in the documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. The documentary followed Wiebe, the underdog in a competition to nail the high score in notoriously difficult arcade game Donkey Kong. In the film Wiebe bested the charismatic Mitchell, but in 2007 Mitchell beat the record.

Just this month, Wiebe re-gained the title of best Donkey Kong Jr. player by posting a score of 1,190,400 points.

Wiebe made a similar attempt to recapture the Donkey Kong high score at E3 last year. Depsite reaching the game’s kill screen, Wiebe wasn’t able to beat Mitchell’s score.

Top: Still from King of Kong courtesy Picturehouse

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+ Light Cycles, Disc-Fu Juice Tron Legacy Trailer By Jametesia 27 February 2010 at 9:34 pm and have No Comments

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LOS ANGELES — Devoted Tron fans were granted an early look at the trailer for Tron Legacy Saturday.

Both Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski and original Tron helmer Steven Lisberger were on hand to introduce the two-minute trailer, screened in an Imax theater here as part of an ongoing viral promotion for the movie. Kosinski called his sequel the “first movie in which an actor plays against a younger version of himself,” alluding to Jeff Bridges reprising his role of Kevin Flynn alongside a digital re-creation of his younger self.

Lisberger, responding to a fan’s fear that Tron Legacy wouldn’t be the Tron sequel the faithful had been waiting for said: “We should all be really glad that it happened.”

“It’ll be great,” he reassured the crowd’s skeptics.

Tron Legacy, due in theaters Dec. 17, is the 3-D sequel to the pioneering 1982 film about a videogame programmer that finds himself trapped in a virtual world of his own creation. The original is best known for its computer-generated action sequences — a rarity at the time — and its bold neon look.

First impressions: Tron Legacy trailer

The Tron Legacy trailer opens with the traditional view of the studio’s logo — an image of Cinderella’s Castle from Disneyland — except altered tastefully with an effect resembling scan lines. As the preview unspools, we’re introduced to Garrett Hedlund riding his Ducati through city streets. It’s a not-so-subtle setup for his character’s proficiency on a light cycle.

Hedlund plays Sam Flynn, son of missing programmer Kevin Flynn. Bruce Boxleitner, revisiting his role as Alan Bradley, acts as the de facto narrator of the trailer. He’s cluing Sam in to his father’s whereabouts, suggesting that Flynn was onto something revolutionary before he dropped off the face of the earth.

We see Sam revisiting his dad’s old, shuttered videogame arcade — where dusty videogame cabinets, covered in tarps, loom like statues in an ancient tomb. Sam flips the breaker on and the machines come to life. He drops a token in the Tron machine (with the fictional Encom logo rather than the Bally Midway emblem found on real-world machines) but the coin drops right through the return. Turns out the machine hides a trap door — it opens, revealing Kevin Flynn’s secret lair and a computer monitor. Sam sits down at the computer and wipes a hand across the dusty screen.

The audience at this sneak screening, totally familiar with the lore of Tron, laughed knowingly when the trailer cut to the image of a fairly innocuous-looking device — similar to the scanner that zapped Kevin Flynn into a virtual world way back in 1982. Sam’s about to take a similar trip.

Here’s where the trailer gets really fun. The music, a new composition by Daft Punk, kicks in with retro electronics that do great honor to Wendy Carlos‘ original Tron score. We see flashes of Tron Legacy’s computer world.

The first look is a doozy: The menacing Recognizer vehicle hovers and glows an evil red as chain lightning explodes in the virtual sky. Much of the remainder of the trailer is disc-fu — characters racing, fighting and looking all kinds of badass on the game grid. If the trailer is any indication, Tron Legacy will feature more than a couple life-or-death Frisbee duels.

We catch more than a glimpse of Olivia Wilde stretched out on a Victorian love chair. The furniture rests atop a glowing white floor — an obvious nod to the final moments of 2001: A Space Odyssey. We see a band of orange-and-yellow glowing toughs — likely the resident bullies in the game grid. We also catch a tantalizing glimpse of Michael Sheen as Castor, an audacious (or so one would infer from his onscreen air guitar skills) nightclub owner in Tron Legacy’s virtual world.

The clip ends with the Tron money shot — a light-cycle race. One racer cuts another off. The losing orange bike explodes into liquid and sparks.

The Tron Legacy trailer will debut to the public next Friday when Disney’s latest 3-D movie, Alice in Wonderland, opens in U.S. theaters. For the dozens of Tron fans sitting in the theater Saturday with 3-D glasses over their eyes and Flynn Lives T-shirts across their chests, it’s going to be a long 10 months until the full movie arrives.

Image courtesy Buena Vista

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+ Hands On: Dead Storm Pirates, The Shooter that Might Make You Seasick By Denis.Walerton 25 February 2010 at 2:35 pm and have No Comments

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TOKYO — Blockbuster movies and videogames are often compared to amusement park “thrill rides.”

At the AOU Expo this past weekend, I saw a new arcade game that looks to bridge the gap between the two, offering players a ride to go along with their pretend violence.

Dead Storm Pirates, created by Namco Bandai, is a two-player shooter that raises and lowers the players’ seats inside the enclosed cabinet. The movement gives the action on screen a lot more weight: When our characters took their boat through the rapids or swung through the air from the ship’s mast, my friend and I were laughing out loud as the machine shook and bounced us around. Any videogame with an “emergency stop” button inside is doing something right.

The game is primarily an on-rails shooter with force-feedback light gun controllers, but there’s a steering wheel for select action sequences and Quick Time Events. At no point in the demonstration did we have to steer and shoot at the same time. There’s also only one wheel, so only one player can steer at a time. Forcing players to take turns is a little disappointing from a gameplay perspective, but from a teamwork standpoint it makes total sense: Your characters are literally in the same boat.

Teamwork is more than encouraged in Dead Storm Pirates. It’s essential. When players focus their crosshairs on a single target, they both receive a power and speed boost. This combination attack is crucial against larger foes such as giant enemy crabs. This creates some good-natured conflicts when multiple tough targets appear: A player’s instinct is to defend his own half of the screen, but splitting up will only leave both players in trouble.

It’s a challenging mechanic, one that had us tapping the Start button furiously to return to the action as we accidentally got each other killed again and again. Had we been playing in a real Japanese arcade, we would have easily run through 600 yen each (about six bucks) during our 15-minute demo. While that’s on the expensive side, the physical aspect of the game made the experience well worth it.

The good news is that Namco representatives told me that an English version of Dead Storm Pirates already exists, and that the company hopes to have machines in Japanese and American arcades “this spring.” I’d better start saving my 100-yen coins now.

Image courtesy Namco Bandai

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+ Report: Atari Pitches Missile Command Movie to Tinseltown By GwenTb25 25 February 2010 at 2:07 pm and have No Comments

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After Universal won a bidding war last year over the movie rights to Asteroids, Atari now hopes to launch a movie based on the classic arcade game Missile Command.

The Los Angeles Times reported Thursday that the venerable game company has been actively pitching studios on the Missile Command concept. There’s a good chance, says the Times, that the project will wind up at Fox through former Newscorp CEO Peter Chernin’s production company.

Missile Command, developed by Tempest creator Dave Theurer, first hit arcades in 1980. Players used a trackball to launch defensive weapons, protecting their cities from incoming missile attacks. As the Times points out, the game leveraged the Cold War anxieties of the 80’s. It was perhaps best known for its iconic and inevitable “The End” screen, a chilling scene of nuclear winter. Versions of the game were later released on platforms from Atari’s classic home consoles to recent retro updates for the iPhone and Xbox 360 (above).

The notion of movies based on retro games like Pong or Asteroids is usually reserved for punchlines. (On that note, Kohler is still available for scriptwriting duties.)

But it makes sense. Hollywood has become increasingly risk-averse when it comes to launching new properties, with good reason: Only two of the top 30 films in the last decade, Kung Fu Panda and Finding Nemo, were fresh concepts. The rest were sequels, adaptations or remakes.

So if you want to get a movie made and convince audiences to buy tickets made you’d better have something, anything, to tie it to. That’s why director Peter Berg was able to get his high-concept movie that pits naval warships against an alien invasion off the ground — because the picture is based on the board game Battleship.

Here’s where old-school videogames come in. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of retro properties up for grabs. They run the gamut when it comes to subject matter. Most importantly, compared to today’s games, classic games like Missile Command aren’t saddled with backstories. Retro games give movie makers the blank slate of an established old-school game as a launching point for a creative commercial endeavor.

Who wants to bet that we see an Adventure movie in the next ten years? Who will play the square?

Atari’s Missile Command, a potential Hollywood franchise [LA Times]

Image courtesy Atari

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+ Hands On: Ace Sniper, Never Coming to an Arcade Near You By innotoSmiluen 23 February 2010 at 12:59 pm and have No Comments

TOKYO — Of all the make-believe guns I fired last weekend, only one had real bullets in it. OK, maybe they were more like pellets. Either way, they could put an eye out.

Saturday was the AOU Amusement Expo 2010, Japan’s annual trade show of the All Nippon Amusement Machine Operators’ Union. Japan’s arcade game makers showed off several new titles, most of which involved expensive, elaborate setups that can’t be replicated in the home.

Ace Sniper is less of an video game and more of an enclosed shooting gallery with Airsoft guns. The unit is a long bunker with small windows, so passersby can get a glimpse of the gun rack and watch you shoot (see below). An extremely short tether and a door that locks keep anyone from taking or even pointing the gun outside.

This is important because the guns look extremely realistic and are closely modeled after actual weapons. I saw five choices on display, ranging from a handgun to a full-on assault rifle. Having never held an authentic machine gun before, I was taken aback by the weight, particularly in contrast to the flimsy plastic toy I was holding in Metal Gear Arcade an hour earlier. Even without bullets this thing could probably kill someone if swung hard enough. That explains why melee attacks in video games hurt so much.

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One session includes three rounds of escalating difficulty in the gallery; each round was timed and my ammo was limited. At first, the targets stood still and appeared in order, but soon they began sliding back and forth. Any target left standing for too long began to flash red before disappearing.

The final round was a single target at the rear of the machine. I had ten seconds and only three shots. I only needed one.

There was a burst of yellow, as if I had popped a balloon (I hope that color cannot be changed to red or the game would be far too macabre to enjoy). The game evaluated my score and rated me a “normal sniper,” the second of four possible levels. This was accompanied by an pitiful “awww” sound effect from an audience, suddenly making me feel inadequate as a potential sharpshooter.

Luckily, an ego boost was forthcoming when the attendant hooked up a paper target and I got to take aim one last time. Shooting pellets at an unmounted piece of paper is harder than it sounds because there’s very little visual indication when you strikes the target or not. Had the attendant not told me to “aim lower,” I might never have hit the bulls-eye. He let me take my target home as proof of my pellet-firing ability.

Even though the game’s distributor KNT Co. routinely deals in arcade machines overseas, I cannot imagine Ace Sniper appearing in the United States in my lifetime. Not only would anti-game crusaders and victims of shootings be up in arms, customers would be scarce as I was told that units will cost 3.5 million yen (approximately $39,000). Isn’t that more expensive than an actual AK-47?

Photos: Daniel Feit/Wired.com


+ Hands On: Hardware-Heavy Metal Gear Arcade Packs 3-D, Head Tracking By wowgold 22 February 2010 at 5:10 pm and have No Comments

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TOKYO — Konami is bringing Metal Gear to Japanese arcades this year. Here’s our hands-on report.

In the wake of the global success of James Cameron’s 3-D film Avatar, many gamemakers are adding 3-D visuals to their products. On Saturday, Konami gave the Japanese public a first look at Metal Gear Arcade at the annual Arcade Operators Union Expo. The game promises to bring networked shooting action to the country’s game centers with the added hook of 3-D graphics and head-tracking sensors.

Arcade games with online capabilities are not uncommon in Japan, whether it’s players fighting one another directly or simply comparing their high scores. Metal Gear Arcade’s unique hook is that it straps a motion controller to the player’s temple, allowing him to manipulate his perspective simply by turning his head. If you’ve ever seen Johnny Lee’s YouTube videos examining the potential of the Nintendo Wii motion control hardware, you can imagine what this looks like in person.

Beyond the fancy headgear, the controls are relatively straightforward. Players move their character with an analog thumbstick attached to a two-handed light gun controller. The on-screen cross-hairs are layered to reflect the three-dimensional depth.

However, the lightgun has six other buttons (not including the trigger), which can make things rather complicated. Of particular inconvenience is the “voice chat” button on top of the gun, entirely out of reach from players who want to keep their fingers on the trigger.

It is also unclear how voice chat will work, as there was no visible microphone on the demonstration units I saw. The motion sensor and 3-D glasses are already somewhat bulky, so adding more weight to the player’s face might not be an option.

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Metal Gear Arcade’s gameplay draws heavily on Metal Gear Online, the competitive third-person shooter that came bundled with Metal Gear Solid 4 in 2008. All three of the maps shown at the Expo were taken directly from Metal Gear Online, so experienced players will have a distinct advantage in the arcade version. Likewise, the weapon and item selection largely mirror that of the home game. Players choose their main weapon (from two sub-machine guns, an assault rifle and a shotgun) and one of three items at the start, and have the option to swap these out whenever they are killed.

The classic Metal Gear cardboard box is available, but the most useful item seems to be the stealth unit, which renders your character invisible for a period of time, though your weapon continues to dance across the screen as if held aloft by string.

A standard match lasts for four minutes with a maximum of eight players, four on each squad. This felt like a good fit for the maps I saw, for no player appeared too far away from the action, nor did I see players getting killed immediately upon re-entering the battlefield. The competitive balance is hard to judge in an exhibition setting, but the relatively slow speed of the game should offer players of all backgrounds a fighting chance. Without a sniper rifle in the game, there’s no danger of being taken out by unseen enemies camping in a tower.

High-definition home consoles with online features have yet to take off in Japan like they have in the United States, so Metal Gear Arcade could prove to be a vital step towards getting more people into the gaming habit. The 3-D goggles and motion controls, while encumbered with a multitude of buttons, should offer a lower barrier to entry than the notoriously obtuse video game controller. The shrinking Japanese gaming industry can certainly use all the help it can get.

I’ll have more game impressions from the AOU 2010 expo later this week.

Image courtesy of Konami

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+ Gamer Beats George Costanza’s Frogger Score By rubikasuss 05 January 2010 at 2:44 pm and have No Comments

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Pat Laffaye of Westport, Connecticut has beaten the high score for the arcade game Frogger — the real one, and also the fictional one set by George Costanza on a famous episode of Seinfeld, scorekeepers at Twin Galaxies announced on Monday.

The fictional record of 860,630 points was set on April 23, 1998 — that’s when the episode of Seinfeld titled “The Frogger” originally aired. Laffaye’s score of 896,980 is a new world record, at least until the next fictional character comes along and bests it (we’re watching you, Sheldon Cooper).

“Even though it was imagined by television writers, Pat has broken one of the most famous scores in pop culture,” said a Twin Galaxies representative in a statement. “Pat’s amazing score will now forever be attached to not only Twin Galaxies history, but pop culture trivia as well.”

Pat Laffaye also holds a record score for Paperboy. He and rival gamer Donald Hayes have been embroiled in a King of Kong-style duel for the top Frogger ranking for some time.

Image courtesy Twin Galaxies

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+ Region-Free ‘Bullet Hell’ Shooter on Xbox 360 Thursday By teppleava 25 November 2009 at 2:42 pm and have No Comments

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On Thursday, the gorgeous, lush and incredibly hard arcade shoot-em-up Mushihime-sama Futari will be released for the Xbox 360.

The bad news is that it’s only coming out in Japan. The good news is that the game is region-free.

And if you want to see more of these traditional shooters on our shores, take heed: Publisher Cave says this region-free re-release of its 2006 game is a test to see how many stateside gamers want to play games like this.

In an interview with Kotaku earlier this year, Cave general manager Akato Masada said that by making Mushihime-sama Futari region-free, Cave was “measuring the amount of overseas users.”

By total coincidence, I played both Mushihime-sama Futari and the original Mushihime-sama this weekend. My friend Jeremy, a denizen of the Shmups forum, just bought the full arcade kit for Mushihime-sama from a collector in Europe.

I played the game on his Egret arcade cabinet and found it difficult, compelling and quite lovely.

mushiMany Japanese arcade shooters share a similar aesthetic: all robots, transforming space ships and military aircraft. Mushihime-sama is totally organic: The enemies are bugs. Small ones teem on the ground. Huge boss bugs, like enormous dragonflies, bear down on you with wave after wave of bullets. Even the bullet patterns feel less mechanical and ordered, echoing the organic chaos of nature. Comparisons to the Hayao Miyazaki movie Nausicaä are more than fair.

I watched Jeremy beat the game with one credit — known as a 1CC, or “one credit clear,” in shmup parlance. He was playing on the “Maniac” setting, the second most difficult and the first to incorporate the complex chaining system for multiplying your score.

The flood of numbers that fills the screen when the player transforms on-screen bullets to points is really something to behold.

We took a drive to Arcade Infinity in Rowland Heights, California, to play Mushihime-sama Futari. Arcade Infinity is a lively game room filled with import arcade cabinets. On weekends, there’s usually a crowd of young gamers there playing Street Fighter IV.

Towards the back, sandwiched between sit-down Neo Geo cabinets, are a couple of serious shooters. I dumped more than a few tokens into Mushihime-sama Futari, trying to get my chops up. The sequel, at first glance at least, didn’t seem as colorful as the original. There seemed to be more earth tones than vibrant colors. And the insectoid invaders were joined by dragons that looked ripped from Asian folklore.

I learned from Jeremy that way to play these games isn’t to pump money in every time you die, but to restart the game, refining your technique until you can go for the 1CC.

I’m obviously not there yet. Jeremy’s getting close. His first run wound up being his best — he made it to the final boss on one credit, but couldn’t hold out against the rain of bullets it showered on him. There’s always next weekend.

Mushihime-sama Futari is available now at import shops like Play-Asia.

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