Among various news to share with you today, a heads up that there will be an official Pump It Up Tournament this Saturday in London at the Las Vegas Arcade. The tournament is called the King of Styles V and the freestyle portion will be on a Fiesta EX machine, the Speed round on a Fiesta 2 unit where the kit just arrived in their hands. Andamiro will be furnishing prizes for the event. More details can be found on the official Facebook page for the event.
If you are in a festive mood, Namco is giving away some Pac-Man Christmas Tree ornaments through their Pac-Man Battle Royale Facebook page. If you want the details, here is the link.
For those curious about what is going on with that arcade network project, one that has some great promise behind it including a chance that he can find a way to capture the score data directly from the games, here is the latest video of his work. It’s too bad that all modern arcade games haven’t been designed with score sharing in mind but it comes down to the resistance behind some of the online features anyways. Of course this device will do more than just deal with the scores, as you can see here it’s to show some technical data that can be easily tracked in real-time from the games it is installed in. Done by ArcadeUK.
For those interested, news from Germany that they are cracking down on arcades for some reason. I’m not sure what it is exactly that they consider as a gambling game or not, if they consider all video arcade entertainment as gambling devices or certain types like ticket redemption games as such but either way it sounds like a real pain to operate there as arcades are restricted by federal law as to how machines one can have on the premises, that number being 12 for whatever reason. I know I couldn’t operate on just 12 machines as quantity is important with arcades so players have options to choose from. Not to mention that when it gets busy, the more machines mean the more customers you can handle. But that’s probably not the point of the law to ensure the economic success of these businesses, especially where the story is about how they are looking to make life suck even more for operators. InterGame has the details. (thanks to Kieran May for the tip)
To finish up, the very first Q*Bert arcade cabinet has been picked up by KLOV Forum Member koolmoecraig. It’s a prototype cabinet with different artwork and some very minor differences to the software but still a pretty cool find that had been in the possession of a former Gottlieb executive for these many years. There is no knocker in the game although perhaps it had just failed and needs to be replaced, which is an issue my much newer Blazing Angels game has constantly gone through. Perhaps the most incredible part of this story is that the guy got it for only $450. Here’s the thread about it.
Holy S$%t I want that Q-Bert
The “arcades” in Germany you mention are just gambling places with slot machine style games.
Closing them down is not a big loss since there are far too many of them.
It actually really some kind of cancer. A regular shop on a high street closes and a gambling establishment moves in. The shops to the left and right also close because of that gambling establishment. Soon there’s also a gambling establishment in those places….
Thanks for the clarification on that – the only other place I have seen gambling places mentioned as arcades too are in Florida. Not sure why that is.