I've been quite busy the past couple of weeks, so my attention has temporary shifted from having larger talking points. In that stead, I've used the little free time I've had to churn out arcade videos and live streams that take less effort.
There has been a lot of activity lately on the GemuBaka YouTube channel as I'm feverishly working through arcade footage I've had as far back as July, but one thing keeps sticking out to me: My top three videos from the last 48 hours is constantly dominated by arcade videos I recorded two-plus years ago.
The current legacy of my video channel is me arm wrestling an arcade cabinet and playing a light gun game with one hand. It boggles my mind that I have multiple videos with anywhere from 5-10 hours of production put into them, but these two videos that took the least effort possible have shot up my channel rankings out of nowhere.
Plastic Arms
My Arm Champs II video is even funnier to me because it was part of a live stream I did at an arcade. I was desperate for an update on my YouTube channel, and I just shoveled this section over to the channel. Despite that, it stands as the second-most-watched video on the channel, and the most-watched video I've personally produced myself.
To explain, the origins of my YouTube channel was to host videos for websites, and this included a number of game trailers - the true most-watched video on my channel is PM Studio's release trailer for DJ Max Fever in the United States.
The premise of Jaleco's Arm Champs II is simple – the player steps up to the pedestal-style cabinet and must keep their elbow on a pad while gripping the palm of a plastic hand stretching out of the machine. There is a gripped peg players can grab with their other hand for leverage and as expected, players attempt to muscle the machine’s hand all the way to the side for a referee’s decision. All the while, the machine is applying varying degrees of pressure in the other direction in an attempt to do the same to the player.
Perhaps what is most interesting about Arm Champs II is the title insinuates there was an original Arm Champs. Sites such as Lost Media Wiki declare this as a "lost game," and it's pretty tough to find information about this game online. It has been said the original entry was strong enough to the point it was hurting players, and it was subsequentially recalled from the market.
So, yeah, the opponents in Arm Champs II are a cakewalk for anyone with average strength. The strongest opponent is named Specks, and he looks like a marriage of Robocop and Master Chief. If you choose to start on this opponent, his armor changes color in the progressing rounds and he does gain a little bit more strength each time.
The real replay value in this game is its final bonus stage. Instead of resisting the player, the game at this point acts as a measuring device to calculate the amount of force the player is applying against the plastic arm. The resulting strength reading is the player's "score" that determines whether or not they make the high score table.
I later did a revised rematch video on the same machine a couple of years later, and this still net me a few thousand views. Apparently Arm Champs II is enough of a current-day curiosity that it gets recommended to YouTube users on the regular. I guess this is how you can repurpose a stream that maybe three people watched into something of more value to those interested in arcade games.
I once again streamed gameplay of Arm Champs II in August, and it's become a little bit of a meme at this point. It's been named the "Specks Challenge," and then I see if I can best my strength score at the end of the game. After August, my PB now stands at 139.2 ... whatever that means.
Gimmick Doors
Shifting over to Elevator Action Invasion, my videos based on this game apparently show I have no idea what people want from video gaming content. Then again, if I suddenly had to rely on my content to make money, I'd die of starvation within two weeks.
I can't say I'm a huge fan of the Dave & Busters locations, especially the ones closest to me, but it is by far the closest arcade that can potentially get the newest games. Unfortunately for me, this is largely in the redemption category. I'm not a hater, but these games just aren't for me ... and I'm especially salty my nearby location got rid of its Pump it Up machine.
The one genre where I typically get blessed at D&B locations is in light gun games - although I'm really starting to take a turn toward greatly enjoying arcade racing games. Our location just happened to get Elevator Action Invasion, and it's such a gimmick of a cabinet, I had to check it out.
Now, Taito has nothing to do with Elevator Action Invasion, I guess it just gave UNIS its blessings to legally allow its similarities to Elevator Action Death Parade. The cabinet’s biggest bullet point is with its elevator-style doors that open and close in-between scenes on the game’s vertical monitor. Outside of that, this is the most by-the-book machine gunner video game that could possibly exist.
Because you can just hold down a plastic trigger and endlessly spray fire onto the screen, I had the bright idea of playing the game one handed and placed my phone in the other hand to record the gameplay. At the end of this endeavor, I had roughly half an hour of footage for Elevator Action Invasion.
It seemed like a waste to not use it, so I stitched together a full raw gameplay video. In my head, I believed no one would be interested in sitting through a half hour of this game, so I made a "quick thoughts" video at four minutes in length in the hopes that anyone would bother checking it out. Time has dramatically proved me wrong, as the quick thoughts video scraped up a couple of hundred views, whereas the full playthrough now has more than 7,000 views. This was one of those cases where the video hovered at a low view count for a while, and then, out of nowhere, started spiking in views.
Now, I realize that YouTube throws videos into people's autoplay rotation, and a "view" doesn't necessarily mean anything. I find the "time watched" metric to be more valuable than the other stats that get thrown at the wall. Still, the no-effort video in which I taped together three video files has nearly 20 times the views of the video that is voiced over, edited and had a couple of brain cells powering its production. I just can't win in this game, I suppose.
As for Elevator Action Invasion itself, the standard action segments can be satisfying, but the game is severely held back by its repetitive nature, bad boss fights and its conclusion. Some of that goes into spoiler territory, so if you are curious, you can either check out the video or read over the information on GemuBaka.
So, there you have it: Two arcade game obscurities that over time ballooned into some of my most-viewed content on YouTube. They just happen to be two of the videos I would least expect to rack up thousands of views. YouTube viewers enjoy lazy content, I guess?? I don't know. I really wouldn't come to me for content creation advice.