ATEI comes around again, and requires investigation (will Love and Berry make an appearance three years running?).
With a subtle shift towards prize machines, and Sega pushing their UFO Catcher hard yet promising their largest showing yet, curiosity abounds.
Arcade fun beckons.
£2000 a week? Sign me up!
Like playing Shenmue again.
Feed your UFO Catcher some Raving Rabbids.
Nifty table top curling.
What were they thinking here?
Drummania + Guitar Freaks V4 RockXRock edition (ahem) - Konami's flyer is at pains to point out they originated these kind of music games.
Really nice Eledees/Elebits themed ticket machine - catch the ping pong balls (real world Elebits) and suck em up a hoover. Good fun!
Pay money to play on a... PC in a box. Why!? The above stance is essential to get the most out of this, or at least thats how it seemed.
Touch screen game kiosk, pictured is the most interesting game. Not unlike Catch Touch Yoshi from what we saw.
Wacky Races. Kind of average, the one armed bandit pull was odd.
Sega
Can't see those drapes lasting long. Think of the dust!
Everything was very dark. and very slow. and very dull.
Sega have a lot to answer for.
This thing popped it's head out every minute - finger-trap legal compensation potential!
These things moved a bit. Like being on a movie set in the 50s, lets hope that was the aim.
UFO Stomp. Sega seemed very pleased to be distributing this Canadian monstrosity.
Sega girl not included.
Peculiar dual projection technology...
leads to a slightly blurry double vision display.
Battling it out for worst game of the show.
Drifty fun.
Always busy, always Tekken.
Busy again, we didn't get chance to try this one.
They missed a trick not having a telephone built into the control panel.
Ooh, spinny chair Lets Go Jungle! Very exciting!
It was great fun too, game of the show.
Laid back touch screen mini games. Not bad at all.
Part of Sega's prize machine onslaught.
I want an iFrog now!
Peculiar light bar jumping game. Seemed very loose, people were never quite sure when to jump.
UFO Catchers were out in force. The prize doors were sealed shut though - damn.
Generating less interest than Tekken 6, and no card readers either...
This was more fun than it should have been, ridiculous dino action and giant screen helped...
as well as the slightly pointless but fun touch screen navigation system. Jab at the screen for rocket launcher desperation!
Appalling light gun prize machine promoted (developed?) by Sega.
Woo-hoo! Three years running! Still only version 1 cards though.
The latest Pump it Up. I wish I was good at these things.
These seem to be cropping up everywhere now, here is hoping for Nintendogs series three.
Chinese Gashaaan clone, which was better than you'd expect.
Sega Race TV. Really woolly gameplay, the over-the-top Americana presentation was fun at least.
How to sell your arcade game Step 1. There is no Step 2.
Hey kids - the speed camera is your friend!
Sorry Blazing Angels, Nascar wins worst game of the show.
Reality bites.
I read the title as "ATEI Photo Beowulf"
I'm going crazy.
Cool pics and captions, I snorted when I read the Nascar one.
I'm a bit gutted that I didn't know about this though, I would have gone, but by the time I found out too late to book a day off.
I know not everyones a fan of Tekken...but any chance you saw anything with the customisations on the characters? From an earlier trailer it showed Bryan using a shotgun that was once a part of the character's objects for customisation.
Fuck knows how they gonna get all that to work across multiple characters and different objects, game is busted as it is. xD
I still love me Tekken though, theres not many games where I can sit back and rely on 3 combos for over 10 years to skank me some matches.
I guess that is why some people like it, and some people hate it
We didn't get chance to play, so I'm not sure about the customisations. The single Tekken 6 cabinet was always busy, with one dude who basically spent the entire day on that machine.
I am fairly indifferent to Tekken myself, I enjoyed 2 and 3, but with each iteration since I've lost interest. Tried Tekken 5 on the PS3, but soon went back to VF. With that game I learn something new each time I play.
It gets a hell of a lot of stick from people, especailly on message boards in recent years. Everyone shits on it when they have never played or actually can say why it's bad. It deffo has it's issues gameplay (Side step tracking...ffs!) and balance wise as to why it can be so INFURIATING at times, but at the same time thats what makes it Tekken, and strangley enough it's what makes it fun too. Pick it up, jump in from where you left off and learn a few more new things.
The funniest one is how everyone has jumped on the VF bandwagon and say how awesome that is, and for the exact same reason don't know what they are chatting about.
It's deffo moved on from Tekken 2 and 3, the amount of people I still see swear by Law and Eddie Gordo because of 2 or 3 moves (double cartwheel with law spam...lol) get punished when they play someone who knows how to counter and block stuff for advantage.
"OMG lol Tekken, Virtua Fighter, it's so deep man."
"Yeah, VF, it's like you are playing (..thinks...) Ludo!"
Anyway...errr, going off on one.
So...that Street Fighter 4 hey?
*rain cloud forms over Singho's head
*Singho *sighs*
Time Crisis 4 has been out a while now though Paper. It's out on PS3 too. Played it a few times, it's decent.
Tekken 5 - no matter how much thought is put in to it spamming and button mashing does just as well, which is enough to put me off. VF on the other hand, a win rarely feels cheap, and button mashing suffers. I guess you can't compare the two, they are that different, but Tekken doesn't do it for me any more.
Time Crisis 4... yeah seen it around, not played it yet.
Just to add a tiny bit of ATEI analysis, this show truely demonstrated the end of western civilisation as we know it, or knew it.
I didn't go last year due to guff commitments so I don't know how they pitched it, but if I were Sega, I'd be pushing After Burner Climax so hard I'd break peoples arms....
Wheel an F14 Tomcat into Earls court, line up a ton of cabs underneath, stick a load of dolly birds in jumpsuits if you have to and sell it. Sell the idea!
It seems Sega Europe Amusements etc etc are being extremly passive. basically dying a death through inept marketing and poor presentation.
The SegaRaceTV was kinda pitched alright, but it was still some cabs and dolly birds wibbling about, but the game is average.
As for the gambling floor, that was populated by noone, lines and lines of the same gamblers with no one trying them, no one interested.
I guess its education vs slob, and slob is easier.
TC4 for my money is the worst in series as elaborated on elsewhere. That said it can't prepare you for the absolute shitfest that is Silent Hill arcade. That game is just plain wrong. You can rack up pointless combos by shooting dead enemies ffs. Plus the tech is based on the old tech lightguns where the screen is flooded with white everytime you shoot. It's like some sort of nasty retro remake yuck.
That NASCAR game though is summin else. Second go on it I thought I'd select the maximum difficulty (most difficult car, manual tras and the hardest oval). I still came first by a country mile. Even in multiplayer it's broken and becomes a game of chance (who will have their boost activated just before the final straight). Graphics too are horrible and jerky. It's like Daytona USA never happened
Man, I forgot about NASCAR. The quality shone through with that game. The physical cab design was quite nice, just the game attached to it wasn't even first gen (whatever gen we are refering to). It was like a pre production design, proof of concept demo for a rip off of Daytona USA before anyone had seen a 3d racing game, or understood what an arcade game should be.
Sega kinda noticed that basing a NASCAR game around a continuous spiral of oval tracks would be pure tedium and only had one track, that wasn't even an oval! AND HAD A GIANT FRUIT MACHINE ON IT!! WITH SONIC!!
The visual design, the play mechanics the whole thing was absolutely shocking, I think the people who made NASCAR were happy to have the game in colour.
Well the complete absence of Too Spicy was enough for me to realise that this is the end game now. We're going into an era where Amusements = Novelty redemption machines and video slots, in this country at least.
I know Paper isn't down with the Spicy, but for my money it's the most original Sega title in a long long while and the fact that it wasn't even represented shows that the market basically stuffed two fingers up at it and moved on.
I think the only thing that can save it now is something akin to an SP version which has a 2 player co-op campaign a la Time Crisis >= 2, that would be enough to sell the mechanics to the massing morons.
So its like the arcade game producers are trying to reverse engineer games into a more accessible format.. the Freq-Amp-Hero route. But, ignoring the Freq-Amp and just giving us bilge. I think I am giving them too much credit.
What the heck was Silent Hill Arcade? WHAT?! It's not even like you can say it was a slow paced HOTD / Virtua Cop... it was just terrible on every level... the combos do nothing, the corpse shooting thing was broken... and presentation was tedious... I couldn't even bring myself to play it... the most fun was sticking my stubble / face to the wierd curtain around the cab... that was good.
Fixed, for clarity.