While the public didn’t hear much news or fanfare about the AAMA Gala that was held last week, there was news to be made from the event. First our close associates The Stinger Report(Aug 3rd) stated that GlobalVR made some waves (as was expected) by showing off both EA NASCAR Racing and America’s Army. Stinger reports that America’s Army features a green sticker rating – indicating that it is suitable for all ages and the game plays much like Police Trainer, but with a military theme. The green label is practically the ‘E’ rating that game consoles have and this combined with a very nice price tag ($4000) AA is bound to show up in a number of arcades as well as street locations. EA NASCAR was available as expected but GlobalVR announced at the event that the game would be available immediately, which came as a shock to their competition. With another affordable price tag it appears that GVR is becoming a force to be reckoned with in the arcade industry. Unfortunately we did not hear anything about what their future plans may be for the end of the year. We know that they are working on an arcade version of Blazing Angels but little else. I guess time will tell.
GVR wasn’t the only distributor at the event of course and the competition was there to show off their offerings. Betson/Raw Thrills showed off an upright version of The Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift that they hope is attractive to street locations. Of course with all the racing games that are beginning to hit the market, it looks like Raw Thrills will need to come up with something that has a little more punch to it (if it was something other than a racer, that would be nice to see actually – I think arcades will be OK for the time being). Hit the post break for a few more pictures and information.
To understand what I mean, Sega also showed off it’s Initial D racer, as you can see in
the picture here, Namco showed off Maximum Tune 3 and Taito’s Chase HQ 2 were present. Probably the most surprising thing to come out of Sega of course was their announcement of VF5 coming to USA arcades (now where on earth is 2Spicy?) as we reported a few days ago. Strangely the event did not see Namco’s new motorcycle racer MotoGP2 –
perhaps they found out before hand that there were going to be a lot of racers at the event and didn’t want to overdo things. Either way I think it’s healthy to see all of this competition at the moment and hopefully this will mean that in the near future we will see some very interesting games for the arcade market – lets just hope that they aren’t all racing games.
[Thanks to the Stinger Report for filling in much of the info on what occurred at the event and the AAMA website for the pics] [Discuss on the Forum]
