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Hands-on: Music GunGun!
It's Ouendan meets Time Crisis.Wait, you need more than that? While not technically a new arcade game, this rhythm/light gun shooter was one of our favorite things from this year's Amusement Machine Show. (It was also conveniently located next to Elevator Action Death Parade.) Music GunGun! has you aiming at the screen with a colorful (but rather standard) plastic light gun. Instead of the usual shooter fare, your targets will be the most adorable, um, things ever. (They're not quite animals, fruits, nor vegetables.)The basics of the game will be familiar to anyone who's played Ouendan or Elite Beat Agents on the DS. Circular targets will appear on the screen, and players will have to hit the targets in sync with the beat of the song. As in most other music games, players are judged on how closely they match the beat, and successive hits will increase the combo meter.
Hands-on: Elevator Action Death Parade
There were a few new arcade games made playable at the Amusement Machine Show in Japan this weekend, but only one truly commanded our attention. No, we're not talking about Cho Chabudai Gaeshi, that crazy game where you hit a tea table. Instead, it was Elevator Action Death Parade that stole our hearts.Now, you might be thinking: "Elevator Action Death Parade? I'm already sold on that name alone!" But trust us, this Taito-developed arcade cabinet truly delivers on its namesake: elevator action and death parades. While the game may look like your an ordinary light gun game from afar, Elevator Action makes use of a unique cabinet that features closing elevator doors, up and down floor buttons and yes, even awkward moments of silence as you wait for the elevator to reach its next destination. Awesome!
Japan gets HL2 Survivor, we get videos of it
And here we thought Japanese gamers could care less about FPSs. Just because Halo releases don't result in new sales records over there, doesn't mean the FPS has no place in their hearts. Take, for example, this arcadization (?) of gaming's most celebrated first person shooter: Half-Life 2. Taito and Valve teamed up, buddy copy style, to adapt the PC classic to Taito's Type X arcade board (not much of a challenge, since it's a PC already, Windows and everything).What did take some extra work was adapting Half-Life's intimate, story driven affair from the long-form to the arcade form; that's even shorter than the episodic releases! They've created three game types: story mode (single player), mission mode (co-op), and battle mode (multiplayer).Don't expect to stumble upon one in America's limping arcade market though; they're still rocking broken House of the Dead machines from five years ago. Lucky for us, 1UP grabbed some videos of the game from the recent JAMMA show in Tokyo, which we've embedded after the break.
