Ok so there is a bit of news to get to this morning.
First off, the teaser site for Taito’s upcoming arcade game Project Z (which we covered back in February) has been updated with an interesting collaboration – apparently Project Z will be some form of Valve’s popular Left 4 Dead game tailored for arcades. It certainly is possible that Taito could be releasing this as an update kit for existing Half-Life 2: Survivor or Cyber Diver cabinets which were designed for providing first person gaming to Japanese arcades. No cabinet has been shown yet however so we will have to wait and see. Here is the new image added to the Project Z website:
Speaking of Taito, I found out what Rhythmvaders is all about. It is Groove Coaster Arcade, and it is in English, renamed to avoid trademark issues. However it is not being handled directly by Taito – Sega is releasing this into “Asian territories” which means areas like the Philipines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, possibly Australia. I checked with Sega Europe and they stated that “we will not be distributing in Europe and US as far as we are aware.” Although I have to imagine that if a venue in North America/Europe really wanted to get their hands on it then it wouldn’t be too difficult to land.
Finally a tip sent in by Kieran that should be good news to Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune fans – on the WMMT4 Facebook page they floated this question:
I would say that pretty much locks it in that there will be tests but what will be telling is whether or not the fans will put their money where their mouths are. I have seen a lot of noise online about WMMT4 coming to the US, fans do want it but I’ve seen that with other games that don’t get any play once the manufacturer finally tries it out. I’ve had a few games where I hear “oh if you bring in ‘x’ game, I will be here every day” – I get the game after hearing that many times over a length of time; it bombs and it is never played by any of those people. This kind of “arcade trolling” makes operators take the players less seriously since at the end of the day what matters is earnings, more so on games which are on the high-end of the cost scale and thus are a higher risk. I still try to listen to what people ask about and look for trends but I am less prone to giving that weight than I used to be after getting financially burned more than once. I know other ops have gone through the same thing so it’s nothing new, just one of those sad side-factors of operating an arcade.
What kind of control setup does the Half Life 2 / Cyber Diver cabinet have? There was an FPS by Atari, its very last game actually I believe. It had buttons for movement and a flight joystick for aiming/looking. War: Final Assault was the game. It worked OK but definitely had a limited audience as far as a coin-op goes.
I had War for a time but I needed more than one cabinet to draw attention. While the original control scheme on War was a little clunky, I played the game a lot at an arcade that modified the controls to remove the buttons for movement and they tied those to a joystick with a button on top. That worked REALLY well for the game.
As for HL2/Cyber Diver, it’s a little strange. I got to play HL2 once and it had two joysticks for control – one was like WASD but it was a stick that was flat, very different from anything else I’ve seen. It also had foot pedals but I can’t remember what those did off the top of my head. Overall I remember it being a little strange and you had to get used to it, for a Western release it would have needed some slight modifications to become intuitive (Namco did test out HL2 Arcade in the US back in 06/07 but it flopped).
I’d say Namco waited too long on this since MT5 is coming out soon, just like Namco waited way too long to bring out Tekken Tag 2 Unlimited to the states. If they brought it to Houston, I’d definitely play it.
It’s sort of different for tekkan though and it was because the tekkan tag 2 server was acessable from the US to japan where as WMMT 4 didn’t as it only had one. It’s not too late to bring it out though even if the 5th title isn’t too long around the corner as the 3rd game is always been played the hell out of it every time I come across that game and with the updated cabinet design the 4 game should be even more sucessful 😀
Is Taito going to use the same controls as War Final Assault for the L4D Arcade Edition or the same one fro HL2: Survivor, because that game was now playable for domestic PCs, also BTW Taito, upgrade your Taito Type Xs to Windows 7 because Windows XP support is already dead and it will affect all your business.