Starting tomorrow, Taiwan’s largest arcade show known as the GTI Asia Taipei Expo, gets it’s start and as always, we expect to see many pictures and perhaps a little bit of video of the many games from the event. One big name is coming to the show this year to give it a boost and that would be Namco Bandai’s Tekken Tag Tournament 2. The game’s producer, Katsuhiro Harada has already begun posting some pictures from the floor show as they set the game up, all of which you can see at his Tekken Twitpic feed.You get to see a glimpse of the internal hardware (the PS3-based System 369), the control panel and the setup, so far. I have a feeling that we’ll be seeing this game at many shows minus US ones as the only way it will make it here officially (as in, excluding special imports) is if they came up with a two-player-one-cabinet solution at a reasonable price.
Stay tuned for more pictures from GTI and not just of Tekken. This show always has some interesting games on display that aren’t often seen outside of Taiwan as well as some cringe-worthy knock-offs. Although from the looks of it so far, there are many more “official” products at this show, which is a good thing.
UPDATE: Speaking of that, here is a Facebook album by Music Game Fantasia showing some of the music games at the show including Konami’s 
Reflec Beat, IGS’s We Dancing Online, Hypaa’s Mozarc plus a Mozarc sequel of sorts called Beethoven with a new dual screen cabinet configuration and slightly different controls (pictured to the right) and Sega’s Project Diva Arcade. In regards to this new Beethoven (it has a different name but I can’t tell what it is from the angle there), I hope to see more of this soon – several music game fans at last year’s IAAPA show praised Mozarc for being a great game so I imagine that this will also garner some attention.
“the only way it will make it here is if they came up with a two-player-one-cabinet solution at a reasonable price” when tekken 6 was first released in the arcades they had it at namco station in manchesters trafford centre and in various arcades in london and they were all 2 player jostick game cabinets just like the one in this image that is able to have player v player. surely they can do the same for tekken tag 2. for some reason I have a feeling we’ll have more chance of seeing this game in the UK than in the US. the down side is that the game would only be in down south of england like everything cool is :/
A modified version of MOZARC by Mega Biotech is temporarily called “Beethoven”, they (Mega Biotech) made a bought deal from MOZARC’s founder Hypaa, but they still evaluate their hardware system (keyboard, multi-screen, etc.) for game succession issue.
Other photos outside of music games brought to you by ExpoFrontier can be found here. http://on.fb.me/iF8VDP
I think we need to put this to bed – the Namco cabinets for T6 in the UK were specially shipped in from Japan to prove a executive point. Originally they tried to sell them, then ended up operating themselves. They claimed that the high price made it prohibitive, but forget to tell their Japanese bosses that they also added such a hike on the price that no one would touch it (also the issue of not supporting the JP cabinets with on-line or cards had a part to play).
Any chance of international releases depend on the older distributors being excluded from the deal – as they have vested interests to sell at a certain price point and do not want to encourage this kind of price model. From the interest in the operation markets for the brawler I would not be surprised if a new plan arises that excludes amusement.
I bet they could easily customise the T6 cabinets and put tekken tag 2 installed with the cabinet artwork customised
Not really a Tekken person, but it’s good to see Namco continuing on with their arcade releases in snazzy new cabs like this! It bodes well for Soul Calibur V to have an arcade version… the only thing I disliked about IV was the fact I couldn’t play it on a cab, haha.