met up with a friend to go to the classic arcade World Game Circus today. I was worried it wouldn't be an engaging enough activity to last from 13:30 until dinnertime, and, uh, anyway I went home at like 21:00 that day
WGC is a funny arcade in Tachikawa because it grows by a building every time I visit, with its total now standing at three buildings within the same block, all of which are exceedingly easy to walk by even when you are explicitly looking for them. the three buildings are roughly:
- WGC proper, with modern games, shmup candycabs, fighters, dance games (including stepmaniax) and a few older bemani games
- WGC append, where all the korean music games lives (sabin sound star, ez2dj, a sit-down cab version of pump?, also keyboardmania)
- club EXA, which has offline versions of non-bemani music games, including technika 3, crackin dj, synchronica, and crossbeats, as well as a few assorted other cabs
the latter is by far my favorite - the WGC main building is fairly crowded and noisy, but the other two are quiet, self-service joints where you flip the cabs on at your own leisure and no one really shows up unless they wanna play FGO AC or have a rousing round of Nippon Marathon. so it's all the fun of accidentally playing Technika for an entire afternoon (just like the college days) but without the huge lines and inability to hear anyone
Technika is, of course, finicky as ever, with short time limits, weird touch sensing, and a bunch of random licensed English songs that I'm not really sure if the artists are aware are in this game or not. do I remember how The Last Dance goes even though I have near-zero affection for the song and have not thought about it for nearly a decade? Yes. Technika is my youth.
I spent most of my time daring Randomizer to hit me, and instead mostly got fed with sets that averaged level 5 or 6. I definitely want to dig into Randomizer and understand just whether it is truly random or not. randomizer highlights:
- skipping clear blue sky mx when it was offered to me, only for the game to bring it back for the randomizer boss
- watching friend clang out of son of sun hd, then getting it in randomizer myself, dying, and having the game offer me bamboo on bamboo hd the credit after. did I decide to step on the rake? yes. did it hurt? very
this section of the post is dedicated to all the time I spent looking at Technika BGAs yesterday and being nostalgic for the exact sort of cheaply-animated early 2010s DeviantArt vibe that Korean music games have. looking at you, Creator
had gyukatsu for dinner (Gyukatsu Motomura, which I mix up with the more entertainingly-named Gyukatsu Katsugyu). there were two meals on the menu - the teishoku and the seasonal teishoku, and the latter was sold out, so uh, welcome to Gyukatsu Motomura, would you like The Meal
it is funny to note that the Japanese half of the menu lists the teishoku as X yen with three 100y optional side dishes, and the English half of the menu just lists teishoku+sides as X+300y (with no solo option). get that upsell money
I paid approximately zero attention to synchronica while it was in service, but I played a credit of it yesterday and I gotta say, being a namco game comes with some real good musical perks (having like seven ridge racer tracks, including ones from R4 and the PSP game, having like 20 imas songs, cool originals from inotak and ajurika and all your favorites). might be based after all
I also fed a credit into FGO AC after translating it for a friend (though it turned out the game brought over as much of the mobage loop as possible, from what I can tell, so it's very similar in that kind of sludgey mobage way). the fact that the game gives you 600 full seconds of menu time between quests before counting down GP is a testament to how much this game is a "sit around and charge your phone" game.
as it turns out, FGO AC, from what I know, needs you to actually place the physical cards in the machine to summon servants, as opposed to, say, ongeki, where the cards are a fun trinket but the data is tied to your account, which means that I have a lot of No Servants, but also there is currently an event running until like Feburary where you can just infinitely build a trial party with pretty much any maxed servant, which presents an excellent value if you don't want mobage loop, but you DO want to look at Astolfo 3D for 100 yen.
ok now to lie around at home and do nothing for a day