Wrapping-Up The Week: Arcades At E3; Metallica LE Pinball; Big Buck World Championship 2013, Pirates of Monster Island + More

If you’ve been sloshing through the work week, it has finally come to an end to begin sloshing through the weekend. Here’s a review of some stories that have taken place this week that I didn’t have the time or really wanted to devote an entire shiny post to as well as a few things that popped up today. It actually grew into a larger post than originally planned, not that such is a bad thing.

First, anyone who pays attention to the gaming world knows that this week was the E3 Expo. With that there was plenty of gnashing mingled with rejoicing over which company “won”, which by most standards was Sony. Although I read a good point that Sony didn’t do anything magnificent really – they just did the presentation like it should be done normally. It just appeared to stand out more when compared to the drudgery of what Microsoft or Nintendo thought would be awesome.

Now this is a time where we pretty much expect to not really get news of upcoming arcade game releases as this industry likes to save that more for our own trade shows that pretty much no one outside of the industry actually pays attention to. But that didn’t stop a little bit of arcade goodness from happening at E3. Sam Ven of Namco America posted this picture to his Twitter feed showing some of the Namco Bandai booth. From the KLOV forums, some pics of the classic arcade area:

UPDATE: Double Helix had the new Killer Instinct for Xbox One running on a cab. It’s just a prop really, not unlike what Capcom does pretty much every chance they get nowadays.

Also in news to come out of E3 that will affect some arcade operators, it has been announced that Namco is bringing a collection of games called Pac-Man Museum to various console platforms later this year. Among the games announced: Pac-Man Battle Royale. That’s probably one of the most requested arcade ports to come along in a while so its not too surprising. No idea which version of the game will be on there, the same found in the original release or the prototype version Namco only tested. It would be neat if they release that prototype version just for arcades when this compilation comes around, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

In other news, Stern Pinball released a video today showing the features for their new Metallica Pinball LE model. The game’s designer John Borg walks you through what makes this model different, which is helpful for those who are trying to decide on whether it will be worth the extra cash vs. a Pro model. The audio on this isn’t perfect, you’ll definitely want to watch in HD if your computer can handle it for the higher quality audio as there is a bit of echo that makes some of what he says hard to understand. Overall the game looks great, I’m sure it will be on Stern’s production line for quite a while.

Also this afternoon, Play Mechanix released a nice, professionally made video about the Big Buck Hunter World Championships 2012. Why 2012? As a run-up to the 2013 Championships of course. Just like other championships in the past, players will be able to compete on a local machine to qualify for the big event later in the year. It will be held in Chicago this time as opposed to New York. I suppose you could think of this as a ‘get hype’ video for interested competitors.

Sega sent out a press release today with a ton of pictures to hype up their brand new videmption game, Pirates of Monster Island. This is not one that will have an amusement only option in mind but those familiar with Dream Raiders may notice a few winks at that game.

I almost forgot this, but Jordan Fredrick shared news about a new Cut The Rope videmption game being tested out at a Dave & Buster’s in Kansas City. ICE had tried a prize redemption version of this but the problem was that the machine had nothing to do with the actual Cut The Rope game. This video version will solve that particular problem.

It’s been a while since we’ve discussed Sega’s arcade football/soccer game series WCCF but that’s because it gets no love out West anymore. For anyone interested, here’s a new trailer showing off the latest version

It’s also been a while since we’ve ran any stories about arcade clothing – Taito is excited enough about their upcoming Groove Coaster releases that they are selling this black-lit T-Shirt which apparently can interface with a device to have the lighting coincide with the beats.

As mentioned on Facebook, I am still working on the Midway Arcade Prototypes Part 2 post, there have been a few delays but overall those delays mean that it will contain much more information about these games. My thanks those who are taking time out of their busy schedules to provide the info, a lot of it will be coming straight from those who were working on these games back in the day. Also stay tuned for a post about InJoy Motions Allied Tank Attack. It’s one new arcade game that is going to be turning some heads when it comes out later this year.