As promised, I hit the streets of Tokyo to find a video arcade that had the new Street Fighter 4. The obvious choice of starting place was Akihabara, or Electric Town as it is also known, a mecca of otaku culture bristling with pachinko parlours (パチンコ店 / パチンコ屋) and video arcades (ゲームセンター) as well as, of course, the myriad consumer electronics stores.
I first arrived at Taito Station, the most likely place to find the newly released machines.
This place has 6 floors of gaming with a different type of machine on each. On the ground floor (known as the 1st floor in Japan) they had the UFO catchers, and on the floor above they had the photo sticker machines (プリクラ / プリント倶楽部), and above that the dance and music games, and so on.
On the ground floor though, they also had a floor guide at the foot of the escalator.
So it wasn’t difficult to find (thankfully I knew the location of this flagship game centre because I had been here before). I made my way through the building via two escalators and an elevator from the 3rd floor to reach the 5th, which is easily my favourite floor because it has all the beat-em-ups.
So here they were. A bank of 8 newly released SFIV cabinets.
It wasn’t busy because it was in business hours, but there were a few guys in suits on the far side and a couple of guys on my side. The Japanese cabinets only accommodate 1 player per machine, but if a player starts a game on the machine opposite yours, you have to fight against each other in 2 player versus mode! This is a great idea as you can have way more 2 player battles, and against complete strangers. I gave someone the Ken treatment and I could see him out of the corner of my eye afterwards, peering around the machines to get a look at who beat him. This adds a new kind of dynamic to the whole idea of arcade games, and I like it! 2 player bouts are always more enjoyable than fighting the CPU.
The characters were cleared easily, but the end of game boss, Seth, ate a couple of credits. I gave up after that and went home. I wasn’t about to waste any more money, so I made my way back downstairs to the front of the arcade.
Outside, I found this interesting machine facing out onto the street.
This is Taito’s Space Invaders 30th anniversary novelty called ‘The Happy Button’. The idea comes from the playing style adopted by most players of space invaders, one of the few games to feature backing music consisting of only 3 notes, which is to pound the fire button constantly in the hope of hitting an invader. All you have to do is press start and you get the countdown 3,2,1 before you have 10 seconds to hit the button as often as possible. I gave it my best Track n’ Field vibro-arm and got a pretty poor 81 presses. Such a simple idea, but it’s hearing the legendary missile sound FX again that makes it all worth while. After two worse attempts, I cycled home.