IAAPA Day 2: More Guitar Hero; CSI pinball; NX Absolute; Go Go Jockey; Battle Stations & more

Posted November 20, 2008 by Shaggy
Categories: American Alpha, Andamiro, Arcade Coverage, Arcade Gaming, Guitar Hero, IAAPA, Incredible Technologies, New games, Stern, Tecway Development
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

stinger11

Once again thanks to Kevin Williams of The Stinger Report for getting us this information. I will be talking with Kevin directly later tonight to get some extra details on all the things we are seeing here so that we will fill in the rest of the gaps. Either way, I think it’s clear that for an industry many love to call “dead” there is quite a bit of new content to go around, a little bit more than we’ve seen in previous years. As always, click on the thumbnails for a full view of the picture.

POST UPDATED - New info below

First off, a little extra detail on two games we’ve seen get a lot of attention: Guitar Hero and American Idol. In another surprise for Konami’s part, their name is also on American Idol and not just GH (there had been a rumor to that effect but it hadn’t been confirmed). According to the GH flyer, it will have over 50 songs, 11 playable characters in 8 venues and “Enduro-Ax Industrial Strength Controllers”.  UPDATE: Apparently the build at the show is only 60-70% complete - the final songlist is not complete and the cabinet will be changed for the final release. Here are what the flyers for the games will look like, just poster size. Also pictured is sort of a close up of the guitars, it sounds like GH has been a major hit at the show. Kevin even got Guitar Hero 3 tattooed onto his arm (fake or not Kevin? :P)

ahflyer ghflyer ghplayers konamibooth ghtattoo kevingh

Stern was showing CSI pinball at the show and they also had their Spiderman redemption game there, which we first saw at AMOA. My local distributor tells me that they are expecting to receive a couple of CSI machines within the next few days so I’ll get to check it out soon.

csipin spidermanredmp

Incredible Technologies wasn’t showing any product we hadn’t heard of before there but they had their full line-up of games running on their new pedestal cabinet that looked nice.

itgames gtlive09

We mentioned Andamiro’s NX Absolute yesterday and today we have pictures of it. There were two versions of it there, a standard and deluxe. Not much else on this one though.

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Next up, something from Tecway Developments. They are bringing Go Go Jockey to the US which is another game they showed off at the GTI Expo 2008 in Taiwan. This is a horse racing/riding game where you sit on a horse controller. I also believe that the next two pictures are from some redemption product in the Tecway area.

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This next game is IGS’s answer to Sea Wolf called Battle Stations. It has what looks to be a periscope kind of controller and at least in the picture below it seems like the graphics are pretty nice. The game is polished and even includes boss battles at the end of each level, it also uses a different torpedo system than Sea Wolf does. While IGS generally releases some product to the US through their company American Alpha, this was found at the Smart Industries booth.

battlestations

We also got two new shots of Trans-Force in action. It reminds me of Galaxian 3 by Namco with the multiplayer space shooter theme. It can house up to six players, each with their own contoller that moves gun turrets around on a space ship. On top of it having great graphics, the game also uses a motion base to enhance the experience further. This is being made by a Russian company who specializes in simulators.

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IAAPA: Power Boat, Textminator, Sea Wolf, Tank Adventure, more misc stuff

Posted November 19, 2008 by Shaggy
Categories: Arcade Games
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PLEASE NOTE: This post has been updated to include new information from the show floor

There’s more at IAAPA and first off here are some games from a company that used to be called iMotion but is now InJoy. While we had first posted a video for Power Boat quite a while ago, we hadn’t heard anything about it since and I had wondered whether the game was still coming to the US. InJoy answered that question today by showing off the latest build of the title at IAAPA, along with some brand new cabinets for their tank combat game, Panzer Elite Action. PEA has been available for some time in a different cabinet form but I guess they decided to give it a new, more appealing design. They have kept the motion for both games though, which is a good thing, it helped make Panzer Elite a more interesting game when I played it.

powerboat1 powerboat2 panzer1

Next up is Tecway Developments and their entries into the US market. They had demonstrated Tank Adventure some time ago in Asia and with them bringing it to the US it will compete directly with the Panzer Elite Action game mentioned above. Also from them is a new game called Ski Jet - from the pic below you can see it lets you choose a boat or plane to play and it’s a shooter in the same vein as Sea Wolf.

tankadv skijet

Speaking of Sea Wolf, Sea Wolf : The Next Missions was at the show with it’s new cabinet designs. With an upright cabinet and new gameplay it should be interesting to see how this is received as at ASI it was very popular.

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For the next game I am not sure who is creating this but LAI games has developed an interesting idea targeted towards the “text generation” and it’s called “Textminator”. The game turns the ‘art’ of texting on a cell phone into an arcade game but right now it’s still unclear as to what the gameplay entails at this moment. “Typing of the Dead” pops into my mind for it but I doubt this is about using text messages to fight the zombie hordes.

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Games that use motion capture (immersive reality) in some manner were abundant at the show. 1st is a pic of two people playing a pong game using their whole body (by a company called PlayMotion); 2nd is called Chatterbox (by Anmialive) where you sit in a green screen booth and chat with a virtual character; the 3rd I’m not sure what it’s called but it puts you in front of a green screen and simulates something close to the Playstation Eye Toy.

playmotion chatter motionpoint

There also was something called MagiQuest at the show which had a huge booth, Kevin snapped several shots of this one. Labelled the “World’s Largest Interactive Video Game”, one component we see here seems to be some sort of sensor grid that detects your arm movements above it the movement of a wand in your hand so you can throw spells. The control panel allows you to take different actions and the game plays like a more interactive version of those old CD games that were popular, like 7th Guest, etc. MagiQuest will also roll out a waterpark version of their idea next year using gloves instead of wands (pictured below)

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Finally, a very interesting picture that Kevin got was of something called Trans-Force, which even features the Transformers font. When looking online, I found a site about a company that makes 3D/4D amusement rides using the Trans-Force name so I assume this setup @ IAAPA is from them but it looks like the dome screen concept. There are flight joysticks inside but it’s not clear at the moment what kind of game[s] it plays. Check back later for more details on this and other games at IAAPA. UPDATE: More information found on this in this post.

dsc010441 transforce3 transforce41

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IAAPA: Brick People, Hummer, Harley Davidson, Razing Storm, Nirin, more

Posted November 19, 2008 by Shaggy
Categories: Arcade Games, Arcade Gaming, Namco, New games, Sega
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

stinger11

Next up from the IAAPA floor today, Sega and Namco. As always, click on the thumbnails for a full view, thanks to  Kevin Williams of The Stinger Report for sending us these pics. One big surprise from Sega is the game Brick People, which we first showed you a few weeks ago where it was testing in Japan. I didn’t expect to see this one brought over to the US so it’s a pleasant surprise. The object of the game is to get the brick people to the food by placing the bricks down in front of the screen, which they then climb up on. It does have enemies which try to block your path but I’m not sure how you get rid of them, it will be interesting to see this one in action.

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Next up, Hummer Extreme. Hummer has a motion base and uses a setup similar to Outrun2 Super Deluxe where two people can play with the game switching between the two as they navigate an obstacle course.

hummer4 hummer2 hummer3

Below: Sega Rally 3 and Harley Davidson. We had figured that HD would make it to the States when it was shown in Japan recently although there hadn’t been any official confirmation of that until now. As you can see below, there are two deluxe cabs of the game there, not sure if a standard cabinet was shown and they also changed the SR3 cabinet from AMOA (which they had told me would happen). It looks like the screens are bigger in this cab then they were at AMOA. Also several deluxe Rambo models were at the show.

sr3hd rambizzle

Finally for Sega today, R-Tuned Street Racing was there, no word yet on how it plays but it rounds out Sega’s diverse line-up of racing games overall.

rtuned

Now onto Namco. I had hoped that they would be showing some new product and they have. It’s now confirmed that both Razing Storm and Nirin will be available in the US. No word on how soon though, just sometime in 2009. We’ve covered a little bit about both games previously, Razing Storm is a sort of spiritual successor to Crisis Zone, Nirin is a street racing motorcycle game.

rstorm nirin rstorm2

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IAAPA: Guitar Hero, American Idol, Justice League, more

Posted November 19, 2008 by Shaggy
Categories: Arcade Games, Arcade Software, Arcade Video, New games
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

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OK, we have finally got some stuff from IAAPA thanks to Kevin Williams of The Stinger Report and it looks like it’s been a great show so far. Here are a bunch of pics for Guitar Hero and a few more from American Idol. We’re still waiting on finding out some extra details on the games but at least we have a better look now. Click to enlarge them:

konamirt gh1 gh2 gh3 gh4 ah1 ai1

UPDATE: Bemanistyle has more details on GH Arcade. They say it’s very similar to GHIII but the controllers are built to the standards of Konami’s Guitar Freaks (i.e. much better quality than the home version). They also have a pic of Andamiro’s Pump It Up NX Absolute!.

Seeing how Raw Thrills/Play Mechanix has held several online tournaments this year with Big Buck Hunter giving away many thousands of dollars, we can expect to see some really big GH competitions in arcades next year. With the Coin-Up system arcade operators can also hold their own tournaments, usually cash pot style so there will be plenty of tourneys to go around with GH.

While GlobalVR did not have Justice League at their booth, they did release a video of the game in action (which also shows the cabinet). They are not quite ready to release the game yet (thus meaning that this is not the final build) and are still holding onto details but at least we have a teaser video which shows a little bit of gameplay. The game uses cel-shaded gvrgraphics and is apparently two players (I had thought that it might be a 4 player game at one point). You can watch below by clicking on the link for GVR’s website. Otherwise at the GVR booth they had NFS: Carbon, NASCAR and Paradise Lost from what we have seen so far. We tried to upload the Justice League trailer but the codec isn’t supported by WordPress’s video player. Go figure.

[Click here to watch the Justice League Trailer]

Since we’re also on the subject of American Idol in this post, it appears that there are a couple of devices at the show which will compete with AI’s video recording feature. First is a game called Dancing Heads, where you can “Be a star, no talent required”. It looks like a photo booth that will take your picture and integrate it into some sort of music video and dispense a DVD of the video for you to use afterwards. The second game which does sort of the same thing (this appears to be the new trend in photo booth technology) lets you select a song and then it records you bopping to the beat where you then get a DVD showing you and your friends dancing around to the song. I can’t make out a specific name for this one although it has giant boxing gloves on top of it, if that counts for anything.

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BlazBlue now available for arcades in the US

Posted November 18, 2008 by Shaggy
Categories: Arcade Games, Arcade Gaming, Blazblue, New games, fighters
Tags: , , , , ,

bblue

While a certain company may feel that arcades are dead and so there is no use selling their fighter arcade title in the US, a different company known as Aksys has eschewed the logic of the aformentioned ‘certain company’ and released their fighter for arcades today known as BlazBlue. In case you are not familiar with it, BlazBlue is a high-definition 2.5D fighting game based upon the Guilty Gear series that had previously been available in Japan. AkSys has a website for the game available now and it should be shipping out to arcades who ordered it already.  I imagine that the price is the same as it was we first found out about it a few months ago (kit: $3500, full machine could vary between $5k-$7k depending on the model).

I think that it’s great to see another gauntlet thrown down for fighters in the US.  If Dark Presence can make it out before the end of the year, then that will mean that 3 fighting games (clarification: in an official manner) will have been made available to arcades this year alone - I wouldn’t be surprised to see more next year if the trend continues.

BTW- If you’re an operator interested in BlazBlue, I do not believe that they are going through distributors to sell the game but are doing it direct. I’m not sure how that will affect their sales overall but it will explain why you won’t see this game showing up on many distributor websites.

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Target Toss Pro: Bags heads to the Wii

Posted November 18, 2008 by Shaggy
Categories: Console Conversion, Console Gaming, New games, Target Toss Pro Bags, Wii
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I found this as a little bit of a surprise as Incredible Technologies hasn’t taken many games over from the coin-op market to the home market (they did do a GT game for cell phones last year) but I suppose that services like WiiWare are becoming irresitible to tossitdevelopers from every corner and Toss Pro is a game where it’s a no-brainer to see it work with the Wiimote. I still haven’t played the arcade version of the game yet (I saw it at AMOA but spent my time playing Power Putt Golf) but I wonder if this means that IT will begin to send more of their games over to the Wii.

In another IT related topic, I noticed that the youtube service being offered by Golden Tee LIVE 2009 is in full swing now. If you type in ‘arcade’ or ‘Golden Tee’ and hit most recently added there are videos of great shots all over the place. I would need to practice quite a bit to manage some of those.

[Via Kotaku] [Discuss on the Forum]

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IAAPA: Guitar Hero and American Idol seen, some details

Posted November 18, 2008 by Shaggy
Categories: Arcade Coverage, Guitar Hero, IAAPA, Konami, New games, Raw Thrills
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The information is starting to come out of IAAPA and first are the anticipated Guitar Hero and American Idol arcade games, we have been discussing for a little while now. This info comes to us via bemanistyle.com, which is allowing us to run with the info (thanks!)

gharc

First off, Guitar Hero. As was ‘rumored’ the cabinet has a 32″ monitor, a lot of LED lights and several speakers. It also has buttons for each player, Guitar Hero 3 related side art. The guitar controllers are specially made for this version of the game and at present the game cannot use your home controllers (although Raw Thrills would like to do that - perhaps in the future?). The cabinet also has a foot rest in case you get tired and it will use the Coin-Up tournament system, not unlike what is found with Big Buck Hunter/Safari Online. Also there are stickers for Raw Thrills, Activision and Konami on the cabinet so everything that was rumored the other day is completely true. Awesome. BTW- The game IS a two player game, they just hadn’t set the guitar up in the picture.

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Then there is American Idol which is pretty interesting (we revealed that American Idol was headed to arcades a little while ago). The game cabinet is more of a enclosed booth that will allow players to record their performance which can be put onto DVD or sent to them via e-mail. As it shows in the picture, the cabinet says “Star in a Music Video” and the cabinet has a touch screen on the outside.  There aren’t any other details on this yet but expect more soon!

[Pics and info via BemaniStyle.com] [Discuss on the Forum]

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Capcom: No SFIV Arcade for the US

Posted November 17, 2008 by Shaggy
Categories: Arcade Games, Capcom, Edge Magazine, New games, Street Fighter IV
Tags: , ,

soup_naziI figure it’s good to get this out of the way before the main page is flooded with IAAPA info.  Capcom has come around and made it official - SFIV will not come to arcades in the US. It’s not much of a surprise now since the console release is in Februrary and the only thing they’ve said up to this point is that it’s technically illegal for arcades in the US to have one imported. Their reasoning is that arcades have been dead since 2000 and so it’s not worth their time to sell games players want to the arcades that still are around (with a strategy of forcing arcades to buy two overpriced versions of the same game to play it properly which would have gone down well).  When asked about SFIV helping rejuvenate the scene, the communications director basically stated that the game isn’t that great to do that sort of job, as he apparently paid no attention to the fact that arcades who have (”illegally”) picked up the game have seen a resurgence of people coming in to play. I guess Mr. Kramer just doesn’t get it - arcades are only as strong as the games they have and game history shows that sometimes you only need one big game to get the ball rolling elsewhere - Street Fighter II itself is a great example of that, as are system sellers like GTA or Halo on consoles. Capcom is obviously not interested in doing anything to help out arcades but thankfully we have others who are willing to fill in the void. Of course if arcades saw a major resurgence (with some of the stuff we’ve got coming out of IAAPA) then I’m sure that Capcom would suddenly change their mind but if they did, I wonder how receptive some would be to them after they’ve teased SFIV arcade in the States without the real intention of bringing it over. As they say on the internets, Epic Fail Capcom. Epic Fail.

[Thanks to Phil for the tip] [Via Edge Online] [Discuss on the Forums]

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IAAPA news: Guitar Hero to be at the show (UPDATED)

Posted November 17, 2008 by Shaggy
Categories: Arcade Coverage, Arcade Gaming, Arcade Software, Guitar Hero, IAAPA, Konami, New games, Raw Thrills
Tags: , , , , ,

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Here is a very interesting rumor to start off with some IAAPA coverage: Guitar Hero will be at IAAPA and there will be a twist in who is involved in the game. According to the source at bemanistyle.com, the game has been developed by Raw Thrills but it will be published by Konami. Konami of course makes Guitar Freaks so if they are in fact involved with the new GH Arcade, that will not just be a big surprise, it also makes me wonder if the gameplay will mimick any certain aspects of Guitar Freaks. Here’s a little more according to bemanistyles anonymous source:

our source has stated the cabinet is going to feature 8-10 speakers, more than 500 LED lights and a 32″ monitor. The cabinet is also reportedly slated to take advantage of Internet connections to provide online cash tournaments sometime starting in 2009.

The online thing would deal with none other than the Play Mechanix/Raw Thrills Coin-Up network and offering cash prizes could easily draw many GH fans to any arcade with an online enabled cabinet to play.

Just keep in mind that it’s still a rumor  - I have contacted some sources about this to see if there is anything else to it but so far I have not heard anything back (which isn’t terribly surprising as it’s Sunday night) but we’ll keep you posted as soon as we find out more.

Tiny update: While I tried to get some confirmation on this, all I could find out is that Konami is going to be at the Betson booth, which is why they are not on the IAAPA map. Raw Thrills also shares the Betson booth so the union on Guitar Hero would be pretty easy to handle. That and our friend Editor in the comments below confirms it so now we just are waiting for the pics and video.

Another update: I have received confirmation that American Idol and Guitar Hero are there at IAAPA. That’s not much considering it’s starting tomorrow but at least it’s no rumor. We’ll have all the info we can get on it when it becomes available.

[Thanks to Bemanistyle] [Discuss on the Forum]

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Pre-IAAPA thoughts and guesses

Posted November 15, 2008 by Shaggy
Categories: Arcade Coverage, Arcade Games, IAAPA, New games
Tags: , , , , ,

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IAAPA is just a few days away and this is unfortunately one event I will not be able to go to. But we will habubble_thought_lve information pouring in straight from the floor as our friend Kevin Williams of The Stinger Report will be there and I also hope to be able to get some info from other sources there as well. So what can we possibly expect to see at the show? Here are my guesses/predictions for now - as always the arcade companies are being very tight lipped about everything as usual so the best we can do is guess.

Andamiro: We saw Hammer 2 at ASI and AMOA so that will likely be there; the latest Pump It Up! games should be there (Pump It Up Jump would be a mild surprise - it was tested but what happened after that?) and of course Arcana Heart 2. Could we see other Examu games coming over already, such as Demon Bride? I’m not sure but they did say that AH2 would not be the only game coming over for this new hardware.

Coastal Amusements: The new Sea Wolf will be there and we then should find out how it compares to the previous game and how much it costs. If another video product were going to be there we probably would have heard by now.

GlobalVR: We were hoping to have something in advance on Justice League but it looks as though they are waiting to show it there at IAAPA. Whether it will be a cabinet or just a video of the game in action I do not know, GVR has a decent booth there so expect to see NFS:Carbon and maybe NASCAR & Sky Bandits too.

Incredible Technologies: They have a smaller booth than they did at AMOA so I think that they used that event to really show off their new stuff (Power Putt Golf, Golden Tee LIVE 09, the new pedstal cab) and this is just going to be a downsized version of that with their newest stuff.

Konami: There is a bit of talk going on about Konami making a comeback in the US and I know that they are supposed to have a booth at IAAPA but I have looked around the Expo map and I cannot find them so they might be sharing with another vendor. I think it’s a given that we will see DDR:X and uBeat but there could be some other surprises too - maybe DrumMania & Guitar Freaks or even CastleVania? UPDATE: Konami is at the Betson booth, which also is shared by none other than Raw Thrills. Could this be confirmation the Guitar Hero rumor?

Namco: They have a fairly large booth so we can expect to see more than what they had at AMOA. While it’s hard to guess what they will be showing off here since Namco has been fairly silent this year in the US, it will be very telling to see what they offer here as it will likely be a glimpse into their plans for 2009. What would be great to see there: MaxiTune 3 DX, Razing Storm, Nirin.

Raw Thrills: Big Buck Hunter and Safari should be there, including the Deluxe version of Safari. The DLX version of the game was supposed to have been released last month but I haven’t heard anything since so perhaps we’ll get a fixed date for the game this time around. American Idol should be there since it was found on test recently but who knows what they will say about the Guitar Hero rumors. Of course if GH shows up then it will be a plesant surprise. Also expect to find Nicktoons Nitro and Tokyo Drift.

Sega: Sega has a larger booth for IAAPA than they had at ASI and AMOA combined so I am curious to know what we will see there. I’d put Sega Rally 3 and Rambo into the definite category, Clay Challenge, Primeval Hunt, Mini-Rider 2 and Hummer Extreme into very likely; R-Tuned, House of the Dead EX and any surprise announcements into the ‘maybe’ section.

Stern: While Stern has a small booth, I imagine that this willb e the first chance for the public to try out the new CSI pinball. Since that is the only pin that is coming out within the next month or so it will probably be the only new product there but the Spiderman redemption game and Batman and Indiana Jones could easily make it there as well.

Other stuff: What else could possibly be seen in the world of video coin-op? I do not know if ArcSys has any presence there, maybe through a distributor we could see BlazBlue - the game is scheduled for release on Tuesday. On games like Friction and Get Outta My Face! it’s hard to say but we will be trying to find out the latest on those titles as well. I doubt that Capcom will be showing off something like Street Fighter IV or Tatsunoko Vs Capcom since they have snubbed other big arcade events in the US and where they are gearing up for the console release of those games within the next few months I wouldn’t expect them to go pushing the arcade games they don’t plan on releasing here anyways.

I am not really sure what happened with the company known as iMotion - they weren’t at AMOA and I don’t see their booth on the IAAPA map now. Perhaps Power Boat has been lost in the US. There is one company based in Taiwan that does have a booth at IAAPA though, known as Tecway Developments and I am curious to see what they will be offering. We have covered them before when it was revealed that they made a new tank arcade game called Tank Adventure - that game is still on their website and it would be cool if they have decided to bring it to the States. Maybe they will bring Rythm High as well.

So there you have it, my best guesses. It’s nothing earth-shattering I know, but we will do everything we can to cover news as it happens.

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