Today I spent a few hours at a local arcade in hirakata city. It's called DINO, and the games here are really cheap.

There's a section of rhythm games by Bemani in the corner, and they have a unique feature called e-AMUSEMENT PASS. For 400 yen you can buy a card that will save your progress in each of these games. This is useful, as there are unlockables for each game, including new songs, play modes, and new themes/skins/etc.



The games in this arcade are GuitarFreaks V6, DrumMania V6, and my favorite, jubeat ripples.
This arcade is really loud. They had a "Bemani sound separator" between the guitar freaks and jubeat machines, but the sound bleed is still terrible. The right jubeat Machine has really good volume, so I switched to that one once I figured that out.
Jubeat (pronounced YOU-Beat) is a rythym game where you tap colored blocks in time to the music. Cool thing is, the blocks are a 4 x 4 grid separation of one LCD screen, so you select your songs and do everything from there. I didn't get a photo of it, but I have a video of the screen in action.





The songs I like are honeypot by aika, Mr. Scat man, and kiss edge. Great songs! I went from Level D to level C4 in the achievements grading system they use, and I hope to be a B before too long.

GuitarFreaks only has three buttons, and it plays nothing like Guitar Hero. I don't care for it much.

DrumMania is fun, albeit complicated.

I look forward to more jubeat! Hopefully my fingers will callous up a little - they're tender from playing so many times today.

Comments (2)

On March 21, 2010 at 9:15 PM , Anonymous said...

That's cool how you can save your progress. I find that that's one of my driving motivations for playing games, being able to have more than just a score or ranking as a result of playing a game. I don't know if you'll get this reference, but it's like the appeal of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's multiplayer over Halo 3's multiplayer.

When you say the games are really cheap, what's that mean? Like... 100 yen a game? 50? 200? I've never really liked arcade game prices anywhere, except for on crane games, where the reward is a little more apparent.

 
On March 30, 2010 at 4:45 PM , Tyler said...

It's really nice to be able to save your progress.

The rhythm games were 100 yen, and the classic arcade games (Street Fighter, etc) were 50 yen. I don't like the crane games in Japan because they're impossible.