One last blog post before I head out to the East Coast. Don’t worry; this’ll be a short one. This isn’t an arcade, but it deserved a (very brief) post.
This is Animinneapolis 2017, a local anime convention. This photo probably makes it look tiny if you’ve only been to humongous anime conventions. The size of this game room will tell more experienced con-goers that this convention is enormous, considering it’s only the second biggest in town. A “small” convention would only have 10-15 consoles set up in the game room. This one has 30-40.
We have five or six anime conventions in the Twin Cities every year, but none have an excellent arcade-style game room. Usually, the only things we get besides consoles are the nomadic Pump It Up and DDR Extreme Machine (and Pop’n Music, on the rare occasion it isn’t broken). This year, someone besides the usual guy brought his machines. There’s still nothing to write about, but there were a few interesting ones. Let’s take a quick look.
The rhythm games are kept in the darkest damn corner of the room. As you can see, this is just a standard DDR Extreme machine, which we get every year. This one isn’t the usual machine that comes to cons, but someone else’s Extreme.
The biggest giveaway is this if you can make it out. It’s a long-standing tradition in arcades to put your coin on the machine to keep track of who’s next in line. DDR could quickly gather a coin line of 6 or 7 people in its heyday. Whoever owns this machine came up with mounting a coin holder on the front. That’s interesting, I guess.
At my home arcade, everyone was civil enough to keep track of who was next in line. Every once in a while, we’d get some douchebag from out of town cut in front of everyone and go, “but nobody’s coin was on the machine.” I guess arcades where they do the coin thing are full of people who would cut otherwise?
Not one, but THREE Pump It Up machines, because we don’t have enough. Pictured is a Fiesta 2, Prime, and a second Prime hidden behind the other one. Three was overkill since the middle Prime was generally open outside peak hours. Someone would stumble onto it every once in a while because it was empty. I wish they had kept the original plan of bringing a DDR Supernova 2 instead of the extra PIU Prime since the sole DDR machine almost always had a long line. The pump has a more extensive local fanbase, but the casual con-goer prefers DDR.
I very nearly sat this con out until I heard that this machine would be making an appearance. This is ParaPara Paradise, a short-lived game series based on the long-outdated dance of the same name. Nobody in America knew what the ParaPara was, but this machine was imported pretty frequently thanks to DDR’s popularity in the early 00s. Nowadays, most of these are in the hands of collectors who got them cheap. The only time you’ll ever find this in an actual arcade is if someone in town got tired of it taking up space in their basement and letting the arcade use it for free. According to the guy who brought the dance games to this con, PPP got thrown on the truck at the last minute. “I only tolerate this game because it’s easy to set up,” he says.
The game is played with five sensors that you swipe your hand over when told. That’s the entire game. Unfortunately, it can be a bit hard to figure out where the hell the middle sensors are during gameplay, so you’ll often miss because you swung your arm in the wrong place. On the bright side, it’s got an excellent Eurobeat soundtrack, including classics such as “Night of Fire,” “Velfarre 2000”, and several other songs that I wouldn’t expect anyone but me to recognize. Conventions are the only place I’ll ever see this game again, so I had to get a picture of it while I could. Mission successful.
Oh, I haven’t seen this one since Kansas City. If you remember, this is Dance Maniax/Dance Freaks, a game like ParaPara Paradise with less Eurobeat and a different sensor setup. This particular version came out around the same time as the DDR 5th mix, so the soundtrack has more than a bit of overlap. I love this game, but this machine was set in a mode that only allows you to play courses of 3 pre-set songs. Only 36 of the game’s 67 songs were available, and it got old fast. I’d have loved to play more of it otherwise.
Here was the real surprise of the con. On the first day, a Marvel vs. Capcom 2 machine was set up. On the second day, they swapped the hardware out for Fate/Unlimited Codes (arcade version). You’ll never find this game at an American arcade, and your luck will only be slightly better in Japan. It’s running on emulated hardware, but I can forgive it. It’s not like F/UC wasn’t made to be stuck in those generic white fighting game cabs Japan loves so much.
For those who don’t know what this is, it’s a fighting game based on the Fate/Stay Night visual novel. It was ported to the PS2 and PSP in Japan. By some miracle, the PSP version saw a localization and western release, which is probably the only version of it most people are familiar with. The arcade version is a bit bare-bones by comparison, featuring three and a half fewer characters. F/UC is so easy to pick up that it works much better as an arcade game, even with the smaller roster. People at the con picked up the mid-level mechanics after only a couple of games. Technical characters like Rin and Caster would get beaten down without much fighting, while many players couldn’t deal with Berserker. My biggest complaint was that the 4-button fighting system was awkward on a standard 6-button cab.
Anyway, that’s about it as far as arcade games go. They also had an official Project Dream Controller, so that’s something. This post is a lot shorter than I’m used to. There is another convention with an arcade I was planning on hitting next year, but this will probably be the first and last convention post otherwise.
See you on the East Coast.
