Rerave Arcade “Unboxing”

In lieu of my sort-of tradition in “unboxing” new/newer arcade games (Example 1; Example 2; Example 3) ,  a new arcade game has found its way to my arcade this past Wednesday and here’s some pictures of getting it into place. The game has been spoken of on AH before, a rhythm game called ReRave. It was released at the beginning of 2012, developed by Step Evolution, manufactured by Coast-To-Coast Entertainment. For the particular cabinet I received, its seen some travel already – it was a unit that was used for the Rerave location test held in Japan.

I didn’t catch a picture of it wrapped on the palette as the delivery guys were needing to move on but they did stick around to help get it off that palette which I was grateful for. I’ve seen the game at trade shows before but for whatever reason it is a lot larger than I recall. I’ll blame it on the trade show haze. As such, it will not fit through a standard doorway so we needed to get a larger loading door open to get it into the mall. It got through the arcade entry just fine and after removing the bubble wrap and getting it off the palette, the fun part was about to begin:

Included in the palette wrap was a huge and heavy box with the monitor:

And another box that was taped to the front of the cabinet which held some of the bolts, instructions and a black device with LEDs and various inputs and controls.

This threw me off as I had never seen it attached to any cabinet but after I found the manual online it turned out that this goes inside of the unit and its what is responsible for the multi-colored lighting that is synced to the music that the game plays.

That piece goes on after the monitor, which is the primary object I needed the manual for. There are two metal brackets that attach to the monitor via some small black screws. After those were attached I got some help in getting the monitor mounted to the cabinet and bolted the monitor in place. After attaching the cables from the monitor and getting the others in place it was down to turning the machine on and going from there.

As previously mentioned, the unit I have was actually a location test piece that was used in Japan at a Namco location as seen below. Using the touchscreen to navigate is pretty cool – not novel in a sense of using touchscreens since those are everywhere but just the size and sensitivity gives it a different than a Kindle or an iPad.  It is as close as using Dillinger’s desk in the original TRON as I can figure. If you have come across a Fruit Ninja FX or Infinity Blade FX then this will be a familiar screen since it is the same. At 1080p however, everything looks very sharp with no issues to report in the quality nor the sensitivity of the touch sensors. Now this means I have two 1080p@60FPS arcade games; this was the first to be released to the market, followed later in 2012 by Big Buck HD (although the SSFIVAE you see in the picture there is upscaled to 1080p but that doesn’t technically “count”).  Inside of the options I was a little surprised to see how extensive the settings are. Beyond the obvious of volume and coin/swipe settings, there is language support for dozens of countries, managing any songs by selecting whether or not they are listed, timer settings for various menus, online settings and more. The online portion was a breeze to setup – simply connect and go. It supports both wired and wireless functions and running the update brought on several songs to the roster. With no fees for the use of the network its a no brainer to connect a Rerave machine – beyond the constant updates for songs, it also allows users who register for free on Rerave.com to login to their accounts from the machine. The sign-in screen in the game is not intrusive at all so casual users won’t get hung up on figuring that part out as they just want to play.

With that out of the way, here is the unit ready to play. I would say it takes about an hour or so but I was mostly alone and had to flag down a mall security guard to help me lift the monitor into place after figuring out the proper way to attach the brackets. So far the game has been popular and it was helped by the local rhythm gaming community here that is called Beatgamer; but aside from that a few casual players have given it a shot and have enjoyed it. Looking at the cumulative machine scores, we’ve moved up pretty quickly already; at the time of this writing the cumulative score is 24,396,847, which puts us only thousands of points away from surpassing the machine at Disney Quest 1, FL. That’s a nice feature for promoting some friendly cross-arcade competition. There are some other features to but I will have to save those for a proper review. One last note, compared to other games I have, the sound system is only rivaled by Dariusburst Another Chronicle, which either has a stronger subwoofer or I need to adjust the Rerave subwoofer a little more. Its still plenty loud even at a low volume setting. Either way, if you find a ReRave near you, check it out. Its a fun game with great replay value; enough that my brother who works with me at the arcade has a hard time peeling himself away from it and came in on his day off just to play. 😉