I was planning on taking it easy at home today but then I found out that 1) yorktown yuki is increasing its arcade game prices from 100y to 200y starting next month and 2) there's another arcade in saitama I've never heard of increasing its arcade game prices from 100y to 200y starting next month
I like yorktown yuki and its pile of great lightgun games kind of sitting unsupervised in a strip mall next to a curves, a supermarket, and a budget shoe store, but I know me and I love to spend more on train fare than I do at my destination
so let's go to Video Game Museum Robot
VGM Robot is an arcade that labels itself as being in Fukuya, Saitama, but is most easily accessible from my place via Kagohara Station. by that, naturally, I mean it's a 30 minute walk from the former, and a 40 minute walk from the latter, and there used to be a bus, and now there isn't, or maybe it just came so rarely that I gave up?
truly things are so much further apart in Saitama, in that kind of American sprawl kinda way. last time when I was at Minami-Kurihashi R1 I stated sidewalks do not exist in Saitama, and this trip did not do much to change my opinion
of course, that doesn't mean I don't still have fun walking 4 km past a variety of strip-mall type content, marveling at all the suburbs and slightly different chain restaurants and funnily named auto shops. it's a good time and on my way out I decided to walk to Fukuya Station instead of back to Kagohara, just for a visual change of pace, and ended up going by a nice little river in the suburbs as the sun set. good vibes
VGM Robot is a relatively compact arcade that feels kind of like if you took Mikado in Takadanobaba and unpacked it onto one floor - it's got a very deep selection of retro candy cabs, especially for shmup and fighting game fans, as well as a smattering of modern games (including all of Konami's online fare, as well as driving games and a Senjou no Kizuna II cab) to attract the usual clientele.
while not awe-inspiring - I'd say the retro gamer with less time on their hands would be sufficiently served by arcades on the Yamanote Line - it's still full of surprises and a quite unique joint. one thing I hadn't seen before is the point system VGM Robot has hooked up to their cabs, where you scan a QR code with your phone and earn 2 points for every coin drop into a quiz game you can barely parse but that has a cute doglike animal.
10 points earns you an umaibo, but I'm saving up, as in just a mere 99,000yen worth of gameplay more, I could score a Shirakami Fubuki prize figure
(maybe I'll get the stickers at 150 points if I go enough)
I am honestly not particularly a fighter nor a shmuper, but I still managed to make a few cool discoveries this day:
star trigon
star trigon is a namco game set in the drillerverse where you orbit planets at a fixed rate, and use a single-button control to send yourself flying off on a tangent, with your goal being to form triangles with your flight path, which are used to save aliens enclosed within them. it's so devoted to its single-button control that the joystick is completely unused, even in menus. this game has very little footage online from what I see, with most gameplay seemingly captured from the extremely early iPhone era 2008 port of the game.
winter heat
winter heat is a sega game in the olympic button masher genre, and plays largely as expected. notably, it throws you into your first event with no control explanation that I could find (the controls are: mash the buttons a lot). afterwards, it opens up, giving you a selection of events - I failed the ski jump four times over two credits, leading me to wonder if the game had a really sharp difficulty curve or if I simply did not understand the right angle at which to get air. cut me some slack! I've played nanaca crash!
gussun oyoyo
gussun oyoyo is an irem puzzle platformer where you are a mascot anime girl and guide an automatically walking baby to the exit of each single-screen stage, placing blocks tetris style to create a path. there's plenty of danger, from a slowly rising water level, to enemies with spikes on their head, to you being a clown and just squishing poor gussun with a block ("what happens if I do this"), and also, upon later research, lots of secret tech as well. you can shove gussun and enemies alike with the blocks, you can drop a block near gussun to make him panic and sprint, you can even make a falling block into a mini-taxi for gussun if you line it up properly. it seems like the kind of game to have a lot of depth or at least unexpected strategy, as well as a lot of panic. gussun oyoyo gets bonus points for having such a nothing title (gussun and oyoyo being the names of the two player characters), that when it came to english markets, the localizers shrugged and slapped the label "Risky Challenge" on it. this, despite having two more actual words than the original title, also means nothing
cleopatra's fortune
cleopatra's fortune (editor's note: cleopatra fortune, not cleopatra's fortune) is a fairly well-known (and by that I mean I remember one person on twitter who really liked it) falling blocks puzzle game from taito where treasure blocks can be eliminated by fully enclosing them with stone blocks, and all blocks can be removed by lining up a full row of them. lots of gravity is involved, and although it takes a while to kick in and it does feel a little more lenient to Just Survive compared to, say, tetris, it does get fairly frantic.
I learned I have a soft spot for how the difficulty select for every puzzle game of this era is basically "do you want to start at level 1, or start at level 20 with some free points".
see ya next time, robot!
