Batman Arcade

Well, unpacking might be a more appropriate word but nevertheless, the new arcade exclusive BATMAN arcade game by Specular Interactive and Raw Thrills arrived at my arcade today so here are photos of it getting unpacked and put together. I also will record footage of this being played to do a video review of this but it will probably take a few days to edit and all that jazz.

Previous “unboxing” posts! : ReRave ; Pac-Man Battle Royale ; Friction ; Super Street Fighter IV

BATMAN comes in two pieces, the seat on one palette, the main game unit on another.

Fresh off the truck (the much easier to move seat). That’s my brother shovelling some ice/snow out of the way to make it a little easier and safer to get it onto the sidewalk of the mall.

The main piece off the truck and up by the doors. It was taken off the truck by the shipper before we had the cart there so we unboxed it outside. The main piece has wheels so it made more sense to get it off the palette and moved around that way. But they do have these cardboard bases glued to the bottom of the box that prevents the game from moving around in shipping. That made it a little bit of a pain to get off the palette but better to have these secure in shipping and deal with it.

Both the main piece and the seat had a large plastic bag over them for a little extra protection

Like most driving games, connecting the seat to the monitor piece is (usually) a breeze. The metal brackets that attach this are inside the monitor portion and you remove some bolts inside, flip the brackets around and slide them out, then re-attach the bolts.

The Bat Symbol Marquee

Attaching the marquee

Ready to go!

As we often find screenshots just don’t convey how nice a game looks. This runs at a silky smooth 60 FPS, even the attract videos look smoother on this than they do on Youtube. There are a lot of lighting effects the game throws around and overall it is a fine looking title. I haven’t had a chance to play more than just a few missions but I will get some more time on it so I can do a full video review. It does have more villians than the Joker, Bane and Mr. Freeze – I was surprised while on the Joker set of missions to come across the Scarecrow.

The steering physics certainly aren’t realistic but that seems to have been designed to prevent constant wall crashes so you can focus on objectives. It also would be nice if it gave you 30 sec to choose the Batmobile instead of 15. Anyways I’ll give it some time, get some footage and have a review to share soon 😉

Also, I took shipment of a new air hockey table this week. When I started my arcade in 2008 I got a Dynamo Photon air hockey table. It’s been a solid table most of the time, I did have to replace the fan about a year ago but overall it was getting older and it felt a time for an upgrade. There was an air hockey manufacturer I encountered at the very first amusement trade show I went to in ’08. Called Barron Games, they had some high quality tables to play on,with polycarbonate playfields, sounds and led lighting. I picked up one of their new tables called the Air Ride and it also came in this week, just a few days ago. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to get unboxing pictures on that due to a little battery problem at the time.

It came in a rectangular box that was also shrink-wrapped. After removing those things and opening the box we found the table upside down but with good reason. The manual package was stapled to the wood on the bottom and after removing that I pulled a few screws out of a small compartment on the bottom that holds the keys. That was a nice touch to keep that important part safe.

With the keys we gained access to the bottom panel and removed the legs. Bolting those on was easy enough along with the feet. Then came the fun part of tipping it over. Fortunately my brother’s friend was there to give us a hand and we got that part taken care of without too much trouble. The end result after hauling the box (and the stryofoam piece protecting the playfield) off:

What I like about this table is the scoring and timer built into the playfield. One thing that would occasionally throw people off on the Photon was that it had a timer but there was no indication of how long you had to play. Also the air flow on this is quite nice, I could feel it a couple of feet above the surface which I couldn’t on the Photon even after replacing the blower.

So that’s the unboxing deal for now, possibly more to come soon as an operator I work with is getting more content so stay tuned for a Transformers: Human Alliance unboxing (hopefully) in the next few weeks!