More fiddling around with arcade PCBs to see how well they play nice with my new monitor, this time Namco's Seishun Quiz: Colorful High School. (Don't mind the washed out color balancing in most of these shots. Some manual RGB level tuning is always to be expected with these things, especially when switching displays and this game in particular tends to be pretty fussy to get completely right.)
Twitter followers might recognize this one, but for the uninitiated, it's a quiz game with light dating sim flourishes. (Believe it or not, it's not the only arcade game of its kind when it comes to that exact genre hybrid.) Running on the PS1-derived System 10 board, it's a cute, charming little game with impressively beautiful animations for such large sprites. I have a soft spot for it in general as my first PCB I bought after diving into them in earnest (I'd picked up a handful of games basically as souvenirs over the years, but without the faintest idea if/how I'd ever play them) and it encapsulates my general approach to which arcade games I track down and buy. Aside from a few like Tetris: The Grand Master that I have a strong enough sentimental attachment to want to go out and own the real thing, in general, I'm mostly interested in games that either can't be viably emulated in MAME or, at the very least, have some sort of historical value relative to what I enjoy researching. Arcade PCBs don't have to be all that expensive to collect as long as you keep your ambitions in check, but they are generally pricier than your average console game and that coupled with their far lower manufacturing runs means that even with all the money and time in the world, you'll likely never have everything you want and as someone with neither, those criteria are how I choose to get bang for my own buck.
In this case, it's a little of column A and column B in terms of what draws me to this game in particular. Seishun Quiz can't be emulated in MAME, but of greater interest to me is both the dating sim angle (surprise) and its place in Namco history as their first collaboration with artist Toshiyuki Kubooka, who western players would best know at the time for his character designs in the Lunar series. He then went on to become much more famous for his involvement with the original Idolmaster game. Very longtime Idolmaster fans (we're talking people who played it when it was an arcade game) therefore tend to regard this game as being a quasi-direct predecessor of sorts despite the vast differences in actual gameplay, a connection that's gone all but missed overseas, most likely due in large part to the game's sheer inaccessibility both logistically and also linguistically. Nevertheless, it's clear that you don't get Idolmaster without the evidently successful collaboration that emerged from this game and it was the prospect of exploring it that compelled me to track it down and have it for myself. Even if I still suck at the actual quiz portion on the easiest difficulty, I can't help but hook it up to my supergun and turn it on for another quick jaunt every couple of months, so inexhaustible is its charm to me.
In that sense, it always feels like a minor privilege that I get to indulge in these arcade boards to even the modest degree that I do. This is Japanese game history at some of its most fleetingly tangible and as someone who was born both too far away and generally a little too late to have quite enjoyed a lot of these games on their home turf and in their prime, every PCB I manage to buy feels like I'm clawing back that distance just a little bit. Given their relatively muted impact within the greater picture of the local industry, the actual insight to be derived from these sorts of games I like to buy tend to be limited, less revelatory so much as simply filling in some blanks I may or may not have known were there before. But that doesn't make them any less rewarding to collect and get up and running and with any luck, now that I'm in Japan and don't have to rely purely on auctions and online stores for such niche collecting, I'll be able to eventually introduce you to some of the games I really have my eye on. Definitely much more of a journey than a destination sort of hobby, but I couldn't think of a funner one to go on and I hope you all enjoy going on it with me. 😌