New Dragonball Z arcade game + Chinatown Fair Arcade in the NYT

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We’ve got two different stories to cover here with this Stinger newsfeed, first we’ll start off with a new game that was unveiled in Japan by Namco called Dragonball Zenkai Battle Royale. This is a System 357 title (an enhanced Playstation 3 arcade board; also used by Razing Storm, Tekken 6, Deadstorm Pirates) that I wouldn’t expect to get much play outside of Japan but it looks pretty nice as you can see from the screenshot above.  More arcade titles with graphics like that please! 4Gamer.net has more explicit details on this game along with some pictures of the cabinets. The game will begin public location tests next week on the 10th with a release coming in April 2011.

Then on a completely unrelated note, we’ve got an article to discuss from this last August covering the “Arcade Mecca of New York” Chinatown Fair which is located in New York City. I’m not sure how we missed this story when it first came along but sometimes these things manage to go under our radar.

The article gives a nice glimpse into what makes the Chinatown Fair such a hot spot on weekends but there is one thing I have to comment about in the article (surprise, surprise). It talks about the decline of arcades in the city as though it’s solely due to competition from online gaming on PCs and consoles but it fails to recognize completely the monumental task of compliance with city and state regulations regarding arcade businesses. To give you an idea of how tough those happen to be, when I first was conducting research for my own arcade I contacted a place in NYC that was  a LAN center and when I informed them what I was doing by mixing a LAN center and an arcade together they freaked out over the arcade label, wanting to avoid it at all costs in New York due to the much stricter rules they would have to play by if their business was put under the “arcade” category. This isn’t a problem that is bound just to NYC as we have covered in multiple stories before(recently in Beacon, NY with city policies putting an arcade out-of-business) but it’s something that should be noted in a story that covers any sort of business decline in a certain area.

But that aside, the article gives Chinatown a great profile, showing what brings many of the regular customers back for more. They also cover the tournament aspect of the arcade and the advantages that those can hold for people. The Chinatown Fair is one place that offers a Tekken 6 and Street Fighter IV set of cabinets, which are some good reasons as to why it’s a place that attracts fans of fighters. You can read all about it here @ The New York Times.