Park Avenue Open Day – Familiar games as well as brand new ones

Shaggy June 6, 2008 2

For an industry that is supposedly dead, it happens to have a lot of official events where new product is being shown. Take for instance the Park Avenue Open Day, which took place a short time ago in the UK. In

addition to showing off some games that we know about already, there also were a number of new games there and thanks to our friend Kevin Williams of The Stinger Report, here is a run down of the event:

While the games were inside, one could enjoy the weather outside and network with other people in the

industry. Here is Electrocoin’s (a UK distributor) outside booth. (On all images, click on them to see the full size).

Inside is where it gets interesting however. First off is a new sci-fi themed table for the Virtual Pinball system by TAB Austria. I believe that one distributor in the US carries these and the nice thing about the system is the fact that you can install new table themes. Electrocoin also had Sega Rally 3 on hand (in the picture below it is being enjoyed by the guys at Taito) and it was revealed what the price tag would be for the motion deluxe version of the game (operators might need to brace for a shock): a mere £15,000 ($25,000). Not entirely surprising considering the quality of the game but it still can get to you when you see these high prices. We’ll have to see how much the standard edition goes for.

There’s a lot more to come so I am going to fit it in after the break, hit the link below for a look at a few other new games including a brand new Space Invaders game for arcades by Taito!

Continuing on at the Electrocoin booth was a ball-throwing game called Pang Pang Paradise. I have seen these before but I am not sure if this is brand new or not. It’s still a fun idea and it gives you something to play that they’ll probably never try at home.

Blazing Angels was also at the event, apparently the game is backlogged in the UK and is enjoying great success.

A couple of versions of Taito’s Chase HQ2 were at the booth, I don’t believe that these cabaret and deluxe versions are available in the US but should be relatively easy to find in Europe. I should be getting CHQ2 at my own arcade today.

And now for the big surprise of the event – Taito brought along a prototype for a new Space Invaders game currently called ‘Space Invaders: Beat The Attacker’ and as you can see, it combines Space Invaders with DDR! It is actually being angled as a redemption game but it will certainly garner some interest from older players as Sea Wolf did. There are some issues with the game still (we can’t see it in action here but it looks like the invaders are a bit too large- aren’t they supposed to walk back and forth?) so we will have to see how Taito addresses that and no word on pricing yet. I had wondered if Taito was going to be bringing the Invaders back to arcades in some form since they had re-branded their arcades in Japan with a heavy focus on SI.

That was it for Electrocoin so onto another UK distributor, United Distribution Company. They only had a

couple of games to show including the latest version of Pump It Up by Andamiro but in the picture you can see a covered item in a box that apparently is some new secret game from Andamiro but they did not reveal what it was (except to VIPs I suppose).

They also brought Hammer 2 to the UK, I saw this at ASI but this was the first time the game has appeared in Europe.

That’s it for now, thanks again to Kevin @ The Stinger Report for the coverage!

2 Comments »

  1. editor June 6, 2008 at 4:31 pm - Reply

    It was a great day and as always very enjoyable to cat up with the trade.

    The Invaders game was still a littl too early, and looked like thewhole screen aspect (illuminated LED’s) needed more work. Iwuld like to see smaller sprites, more buttons and a highscore chart.

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