DISCLAIMER: These early Las Vegas entries were the first blog posts I ever did. They’re VERY antiquated compared to the rest of the blog.
I’m going to preface this by saying I spent day 5 playing Initial D. I didn’t bother taking any pictures, so this is the last real day.
I saved the best arcade for last. Somewhere in the middle of Las Vegas’ Chinatown is a place I forgot to take an outside photo of. You can play as much as you want for eight bucks an hour, 18 for a day. They may sound expensive until you consider how much it usually costs to play DDR for five hours.
It’s a small, cozy place with just enough machines to entertain you. The front half of the building is consoles, while the arcade machines are kept in the back.
It’s home to quite a few rare arcade games. For example, this is Dance Evolution. It was intended to be a successor to DDR, but it didn’t go over all that well. Very few of these machines exist in America because of how costly they are to import. At one point, I believed that this was the only one, but there are a couple of others floating around.
The game itself runs on Kinect technology. It’s pretty similar to games like Just Dance. Most people probably know it better by its American Xbox 360 title, Dance Masters.
While Konami is the king of arcade rhythm games, Sega has been trying to move in on their territory in recent years. This is MaiMai, which I know nothing about because it was broken.
I should mention that I recently fixed up most of my older blog posts. A lot of these machines, like this one, were rare when I was in Vegas, but have since started popping up at Round1 or Dave & Busters.
BishiBashi is a series of arcade games by Konami that play something like a cross between Wario Ware and Mario Party or Pokemon Stadium minigames. You’re thrown into a strange scenario with a set of basic instructions. Most of the mini-games are reflex-based variations of “hit the colors in this order,” but the context varies enough that the games don’t feel same-ish. BishiBashi is full of weird Japanese humor, like a minigame with a line of toilets where you use the red and blue buttons to open/close the lid, then the green button to tell the person to sit on them.
Since this title was created by a big chunk of the same guys behind Konami’s rhythm games, it’s loaded with inside jokes and references. Among the playable characters are several familiar to any fan of Bemani, including a living Jubeat Arcade machine. Most of the game’s soundtrack will sound familiar to anyone who’s played Dance Dance Revolution or BeatMania. Jet World plays during a wild west shootout, Calico Cat Rock during a game where you bother cats, and Candy(star) in a game where you have to fill a candy jar without overflowing. While I know little about Beatmania, I also recognized a minigame where a bunch of fat live-action photographers had to take pictures of the IIDX Tricoro girls.
I really liked this game. It makes me want to build a home controller for it.
Jubeat is a recent Bemani game where you hit the panels as they light up. The game’s screen is behind the transparent buttons, making this feel like an odd cross between BeatMania and a touch screen game. The guy who owns this place thought he had the only Jubeat machine in the country. He was somewhat disappointed to find out that it wasn’t.
I wasn’t a big fan of this one.
BlazBlue arcade. Again, I’m not versed in fighting games, so I can’t say much about this. I’m sure someone will be excited to see it here.
I mentioned earlier that I went back and cleaned up my older blog posts, getting rid of the more embarrassing comments, inaccuracies, and whatever grammar errors I could find. Then I got to this paragraph. Instead of trying to fix this mess, I decided to just slap a disclaimer and apology on it. Please forgive me.
This is it—my holy grail of arcade games. I’ve searched for this game for well over a decade. I didn’t start playing until 5th mix was out, so all of these had long since been upgraded. I’ve found a handful of 3rd Mix machines over the years, but never 4th mix Plus. This machine has EVERY song from the first three mixes, as well as a large number of new songs AND the Korean 3rd mix exclusives. This game has the second biggest songlist of the original series games (150), right behind Extreme (240). After 5th mix, nearly all of the licensed songs were dropped, so over 100 of these songs are things you can’t hear in Extreme (you can, however, play all of the new 4th mix songs in 5th, but 5th dropped most of the songs older than that. 4th was the last “complete” mix). It even has Petit Love, a song which ran into licensing issues and was never seen again, not even in the home port.
I’ve spent so long looking for this game. I admit it’s half-cheating because they switched the mix for me, but I’m content. My only condition was that the game had to be on a public machine. Every lead I’ve found for one of these in the last several years has turned up dead (meanwhile, every 3rd mix machine was still around for some reason). Getting to play this alone was worth the trip.
But enough about 4th Mix Plus, greatest of all DDR mixes, they also had an X3 machine. That means it’s back to work. I still need to pass a 15 before going home.
Here’s Kimono Princess, one of the easier boss songs. I thought I’d be able to pass this one, at least, but it wasn’t meant to be either.
At this point, I was beginning to lose hope. My endurance was returning, but my reflexes were too out of practice for something like this. Trying to learn a new song was beginning to look like it wasn’t happening. I’m not all that familiar with the later games’ songlists, so I decided to browse through them in hopes that there was a 15 I could clear.
Then I found this. It was a boss song that could be played without reflexes. All it needed was sheer, unadulterated willpower to pass the monstrous stream of 95 notes in a row.
Those long strings of notes are called “drills.” While they look easy, the arrows come so heavily that slowing down for even a moment will destroy your health meter. It probably isn’t that difficult if you hold the bar while playing, but where’s the fun in that?
It was a struggle against exhaustion, but I did it. I could have bumped that up to at least a B with a few more practice runs, but my legs weren’t having it. I decided to take this as a victory and head home.
Of course, I wasn’t going to forget to grab some of these at least once before my trip ended.
