ASI 2008 News Recap

Just to help you in case you missed/overlooked anything, here is a recap of some of the news to come out of ASI this past week, either at the show or because of the show:

Betson/Raw Thrills’ releases The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift Kit – We first heard about this in the comments section on one of our recent posts and it was confirmed at ASI with several cabinets converted to Tokyo Drift. The kit can go into Crusin’ USA, Crusin’ World and SF Rush 2049 and will cost between $2200 and $2600. It includes the game board, artwork and I believe the steering wheel. Done right the cabinets look great, even brand new if the monitor is in good condition and the cabinet itself is cleaned up.

Big Buck Hunter Pro reaches 10,000 units made – 10,000 is the golden number of sales in the coin-op industry and BBHPro is the latest game to break that mark. Along with this we are also seeing the release of BBHPro Tournament Edition with several cool online features that includes Hunting Parties – the game will alert others in your hunting party about the progress of others so if one of your friends beats your score, it will send you an e-mail or text alerting you that you’ve been beat. Great idea and we should learn more soon.

Big Buck Safari released – it is official now and it costs less than $5000 with more features than BBHPro has (minus the new online version). The Deluxe version is still being worked on but was at the ASI show and I was told that an online version of BBS will eventually make it’s way to arcades.

GlobalVR to release Need For Speed: Carbon in arcades – we don’t have any details on this yet but it is clear that GVR is targeting the technical arcade racer angle.

iMOtion to release Power Boat – a little know developer in the arcade scene is pumping up their selection with a new motion-based boat racing game called Power Boat. We hope to get more information on this one soon but I did see a video of it in action and it looks good.

TouchTunes and Merit to release portable touchscreen tablet devices – bartop touch screen games are about to move into the portable territory with new devices by both TouchTunes and Merit. I saw the TouchTunes model which included a D-Pad and two buttons (which weren’t functioning on the prototype model but should be later on) and it even has a credit card reader built-in to the unit.

Namco to use Wii hardware in future arcade games and the possibility of Pac-Man CE in arcades – In my interview with Namco I discovered that they are considering using the Wii hardware to power future arcade games as a means of lowering development costs. This does not mean that they’ll use Wiimotes and most likely they will modify the hardware to make it more powerful than the home edition (a common practice by Namco). Also we could see Pac-Man CE make it to arcades at on point in time but there are no details on this other than the idea is on the table.

Andamiro releases Oh! Hammer 2 game – Andamiro has released an interesting coin-op game that uses soft mallets and an interactive screen with several mini-games built-in to the unit including a few head-2-head games for two players. There are 8 single player stages, 2 co-op stages and 6 versus stages. [Oh!Hammer 2 site] (Thanks to Kevin Williams for a correction on the title)

Self-redemption cabinets now available – Smart Industries has made some new cabinets that can house redemption prizes and count the tickets for customers and let them choose what they want, thus allowing for certain venues to have a redemption setup without the big desk and manpower needed to watch over it.

If I forgot to add anything, I’ll be sure to update this post.

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