As AH contributor Kevin Williams pointed out in his recent crystal ball look into 2010, KidTainment will grow to play a larger role in the arcade industry and in Japan, several companies are already showing off products that will fill in that niche. Translated as “Generation Warudohobifea” (any of you who can translate Japanese feel free to correct that if need be), the show seems to be about products that cater to kids and video games were in full force there.
How prevalent a lot of these games will be outside of Japan remains to be seen but there are a few games we can take a look at here, most notably from Namco and Sega. First off, Namco is targeting Tank! Tank! Tank! towards kids, which makes sense – it really has appeal to everyone. Their Bandai side also showed off their card-based coin-op game DataCardDass (which involves some Power Ranger-like characters and seems to be aimed more at boys) and a Tamagotchi card game for girls, which also includes some sort of phone device as a main part of the panel.
Sega has a couple of card games in their line-up to compete, including War Gettenka History, which seems to be a card-based game with a little Dynasty Warriors-esque story behind it; a new game that has something to do with battling insects which also involves cards and a touch screen (the cabinet is similar to Sega Card Gen, it’s what is pictured above) and the title is translating as “If Mushikingubatoru insect guts!” – whatever that is really supposed to mean, I have no idea but I imagine that it probably sounds awesome to boys in Japan. Sega also was showing off a game for girls called Lil Puritsu Riyu Bipuruhime Chen!, which also uses a dual screen setup like the insect guts game but otherwise there aren’t many details on this one.
What are your thoughts on the growing surge (at least in Japan) towards KidTainment? I kind of already see redemption as KidTainment and we’re seeing a growing trend to use video games in the redemption sector; we also have games like Cooking Mama Arcade and Dino Duel available in various territories outside of Japan. How many more games will we see cater just to kids by the end of the year?
UPDATE: While poking around AM-Net.jp, I saw that Sega announced today plans for a Transformers based card-coin-op game which will be released this summer. Details can be found here and here.
2nd update: Thanks to Aaron Auzins for correcting a couple of things on the post.
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Is there a Web page for this event? The pic is too hard for me to make out some of those details, so if I had some text or a way to track down the full title of the Mushi game, I might be able to get.
But, first, let’s start with the name of the event … Again, if there is a site to pull this off of, let me know so I can see the actual characters being used, but Warudohobifea to me sounds like it is trying to say “World Hobby Fair.”
As for that picture, I can’t read the white text underneath the kanji (I’m not good with kanji at all), but the rest says Mushi Kingu Batoru Gatsu, or “Insect King Battle.” The Guts! seems like it could be a sort of tagline, like how Dragon Ball Z uses words such as Sparking! to indicate different versions of the games. Until I know what the first part says, though, I’m hesitant to give you a guess as to what the title is suppose to mean.
Just as an amendment here, I looked up some info on the event and its name is the Jidesai World Hobby Fair, meaning “Next-generation World Hobby Fair.” So there is your official, full title.