When I said I intend to visit soon, that turned into later today. I return with pictures.
It's a pretty nice place overall. Somewhat large and with a good balance of floor space with the amount of content to be seen inside.
Beatmania IIDX 22: Pendual. Seeing the newest game of the series in front of me, in a US arcade in 2014, and not in California, was and still is a bit unbelievable to me. I simply had no idea that I could have this experience today. The machine was incredibly loud (and I believe has been since adjusted to be a bit softer by now) but playing it was still enjoyable. Everything is new and crisp and clean. Now I need to get an eamuse card, and play more often so that I can play as well on an AC machine as I do at home.
Oh, and on the subject of IIDX:
Beatmania? There was one at the Brunswick Zone in Naperville back in like... 2008. By the time I finally went there, though, it was gone
Yeah, that was an actual one week only location test run and there wasn't any plans for BZ to keep the machine. I thought it did well enough, but I've read some reports saying otherwise and other reports about how the discussions between Betson and Konami weren't smooth enough to get IIDX back into the US in that manner. Hopefully now that it is here again and with eamuse hooked up, it will show a play frequency that both R1 and Konami deem to be sufficient to help the game series itself remain alive.
The IIDX machine shares a wall with the Pop'n and Gitadora stuff. The Miku games are further to the left. There's also that Elevator Returns game further down which I really should make a point of trying the next time I return, as it at least had the interesting gimmick of physical elevator shutter doors built into the cabinet.
Across from the Gitadora games is Guitar Hero Arcade. I was amused to see the machine there to begin with, and as I expected I didn't see a single person play it all day.
There were a lot of racing and bike games and they seemed to generally have a few players on each of them with fair frequency. More than a few of these games I had no idea about.
Against a wall furthest from the entrance were four of these huge deluxe photo booths. I think there was some sort of image editing interface on the machines, but I didn't take the time to investigate. Nobody was brave or interested enough to use these things.
In fact, more people played Flappy Tickets than used those photo booths. Thank you, Dong; your presence in gaming will resonate forever.
Here's one of those Mario Kart AC games that some people here are extremely fond of. I took a picture of it in hopes of you quoting it and posting in this thread. Does my ploy work? Let's find out.
There were some standard games to be found here as well. I forget what game it is on the machine without the marquee on top, the rest are Final Fight, Puzzle Fighter, Gradius, Garou MOTW, and Dodonpachi II (wat?). Behind me were a few Tekken cabs (TT2 I think). No CRT monitors, as to be expected, but I think it's better for these games to be here at all rather than whinge on the display.
Nice place, and at least for it being the opening weekend it seemed to have more people in it than could be seen wandering through the mall at any given point in the day. Let's hope it stays popular and alive.
