I’ve recently visited Tokyo for vacation and besides having many rythm games, I saw a type of arcade game I had never seen in the States before (the fact that there are no arcades anymore is besides the point). These new games combined the world of collectible cards with videogames. When I first saw it I couldn’t really tell what was happening – people were placing cards on a large table right in front of a monitor. There were only one or two buttons but lots of things were occurin on the screen. Here’s a quick look over a some guy’s shoulder:
Basically, you could buy card packs much like Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, or whatever it is the kids are playing these days. Some cards are rare, some are common. When you sit down to play the game, you place your cards on the board and move them around to do various activities depending on the game. I saw an ancient Japan military game (what the pictured guy is playing), a soccer game, and a space battle game. The best part is for the game manufacturers is that not only do you have to buy these cards to play, you also have to pay to sit down to play the arcade game as well! Nice way to double dip!
In some of the arcades there would be set meeting times for the players to come and trade cards they were interested in. That’s kind of a nice social aspect that these games bring to the table. In my book, interacting with others while playing a game is a lot more fun (and probably healthier) than always playing by yourself.
All in all, it was fairly interesting to see so many arcades given their status in the US. Perhaps if some of these unique style-of-play arcade games made it over here arcades could make some kind of comeback?