New arcade releases this week: Nirin and Dance Dance Revolution X

My local distributor tells me that two new games are now shipping out to various distributors and thus will be showing up at different locations around the country within the next few weeks.

First off, Nirin by Namco. I got a chance to play this at ASI and it was cool – the graphics are really good and the cabinet is very attractive. It’s a little bit more technical than a motorcycle racer like Super Bikes. As a small operator I really don’t care for the price which is around $10k per unit (it varies by distributor) but at least it’s arcade exclusive and even if it was released to console they can never compete with the feel of the game with it’s controller. We will also have to wait and see now what Namco will do for arcades throughout the rest of the year, so far Razing Storm and Nirin are the only two titles that we know about for sure that Namco is bringing to the US for the moment, hopefully they will give us more than two games this year.

Here’s a video that Namco Bandai has posted of the game in case you have missed it and here’s a page announcing the release of the game:

Next up, the latest game in the long line of the DDR series which is also celebrating 10 years of DDR gaming, Konami’s DDR:X is also now available. They’ve added an SD card feature so players can create their own dance steps and upload them to the game, shock arrows and a huge list of songs. At ASI I was told DDRX would sell for a little less than $10k (as always, distributor prices vary) which is a nice change from having DDR games come around for $13k-$14k.

UPDATE: I fixed the video, sorry about that. Also Betson let Bemanistyle know that DDR:X will begin shipping in June – for some reason my local distributor had said that DDRX was shipping already and they usually are accurate about that so I apologize for the confusion. either way Nirin is defenitely shipping out to distributors and next week H2Overdrive will be shipping according to my information (which I am checking up on with Raw Thrills).

One more update: It looks like my distributor wasn’t the only one who thought that this was shipping this week, BMI Gaming also has listed the game as “Now Shipping”