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.
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kiwasabi
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.