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I’ve said it before, I’ll certainly keep banging the drum – one of the great aspects of the arcade industry is the ability to provide unique gaming experiences by the ability to completely change things up with something like a unique monitor that will simply never be mainstream in the home. Among recent developments in this regard Bandai Namco has Mach Storm, which is set to be released next month and now it looks like Konami is getting into the dome screen game with the upcoming Steel Chronicle Ganesh.
In regards to Steel Chronicle, we have mentioned that on the blog before – its a Japan-only mech/power-suit game that is challenging the likes of Sega’s Border Break. It also has a kind of Earth Defense Force angle of you running around and blasting giant mutant/alien bugs. Unfortunately the game has stuck just to Japan as Konami has abandoned support in the West, even of their tried-and-true brands like DDR. So this news won’t change that but it is an interesting note in the continued march of display technology evolutions/revolutions. The main hindrance to finding this tech in arcades is the fact that it tends to be very expensive; with Konami they have released 3D monitor games that cost almost $40k so I’m sure that SCN will also carry a premium price tag. It also has a touchscreen inside among a few other features as you can see in the flyer below. As such games like this will be limited to few locations that can not only afford the games but also have the traffic to make it worth it. But if you can find one, the experience is something beyond what you can find in any other sector of gaming and I would like to see the trend continue, especially if it means that eventually we get some lower prices.
So what are your thoughts on dome screens?
(Click on the image below to blow it up, sizewise)
awesome
After playing Mach Storm quite a bit (it’s currently at the D&B in Milpitas, CA) I feel the dome screen has potential but could easily be written off as another neat arcade feature that never really caught on. My initial thought is whether if this technology can be applied to most different genres of arcade games. What I mean by this is whether there can be other games like a driving game that uses a dome screen. In the past there have been several arcade games that used multiple screens to achieve a similar effect but most of them weren’t too successful. I’m unsure if this was due to cost but the ones I can think of (Atari TX-1, Sega F355 Challenge, Sega Airline Pilots) were mostly sims. In my opinion sims aren’t the best games for arcades due to steep learning curve and slower pace of most games.