With the flurry of news coming around with AOU, it’s hard to post about all of them on the current schedule I have (although Arcade Renaissance is doing an excellent job at that) but I am trying to post what seems to be useful. Here we have a report from Famitsu that I found via AM Net that discusses the innovations being brought to the arcade scene at this years AOU 2008. First it discusses Square Enix’s new arcade game Lord of Vermilion and it’s use of both specialized cards, among other controls. They say that the game “incorporates elements such as network-based RPG card games” which might mean MMORPG but it’s hard to say with the translation. Of course Sega has already tested a similar game in the US already (Sanguozhi War 3) and Konami also had a card-based game at AOU called HorseRiders so Square is not the only company looking at this concept. The article also discusses Konami’s Jubeat (which is supposed to be pronounced You-beat BTW) and how that works – from everything we have seen so far the cube thing is really a fancy marquee and not a monitor – the “monitor” is really built into each button and a small display above those.. And finally (for the video arcade part) they discuss Konami’s Action Cop (or Action Deka over there) and it’s motion-based controls. It’s a good article but keep in mind that the text is filtered through a translator so it’s not perfect.
