NESiCAxLIVE Lands At Round1USA – The rush to bring Japanese games to the US market continues and now with a surprise twist. For the past few years, there has been a lot of talk about bringing this unique system for bringing digital content to 
arcades in the US but Taito was always resistant to it due to the payment model (I personally sat down with the overseas Taito rep at IAAPA 2011 and we discussed it for about a half hour). Now Round1USA has added it to their Puente Hills Mall location, as shown by this tweet posted on Wednesday:
[NEW GAME] NESiCAxLive is now in store at our Puente Hills, CA location! 🙂 Be sure to drop by and check it out!
— Round 1 USA (@Round1USA) August 13, 2015
Assuming there are no restrictions, that means that every game available on the NESiCA network will be available there, although the games would likely be in Japanese. Many of those titles are fighting games, like Ultra Street Fighter IV, Persona 4 Ultimax and the Blazblue games but it is not exclusive to that genre. If successful, it would be very interesting to see this expand in the USA although to be ultimately successful on the wide market, we would need the games translated into English.
Disney Tsum Tsum Arcade Testing @ Dave & Busters – After testing at the Round1USA Puente Hills location, Konami’s Disney Tsum Tsum Arcade is now testing at the Dave & Busters in Irvine, CA for the next three weeks. People seem really excited about this from the online videos but that doesn’t always mean the earnings are what the locations want. We’ll wait and see.
Konami’s Disney Tsum Tsum Arcade officially in store today. #getyourgameon #tsumtsum pic.twitter.com/iS6MosykxW
— DNB Irvine (@dnb_irvine) August 11, 2015
Kancolle Released in Japan – Also know as “Ship This Arcade”, Sega has started selling their odd card vending arcade game in Japan. Given the huge interest in testing Japanese arcade games in the US market this Summer, perhaps we will see this one test as well but I will reserve getting excited for these things until we see them available in general distribution.
What are your thoughts on these developments, particularly NESiCAxLive coming to the US? I still think it is a needed system and could be big here as a way to get more content into smaller arcades, especially on a more frequent basis.
I think it’s good that Dave & Buster’s is finally testing out a game from somewhere else; they do not usually do imports.
The Nesica setup at Round1 is completely in Japanese, and is not localized.
You can follow updates here from a guy who seems to work there:
https://twitter.com/M8trixMatt/with_replies
Amazing!! Never thought I’d see the day to have Nesica in the West!
Hopefully check out Nesica this week. I wonder if it’s something operators might latch onto. I mean…I know there’s not many but, I’m hopeful.
As anime, manga and Japanese culture seem to be popular nowadays maybe Japanese arcade games might be more successful since Japanese things like anime and manga were still relatively new and alien to everyone at the time in the 80’s, 90’s and even the 00’s despite the sucess with Pokemon and dragon ball z. I think people in the west are starting to understand better thanks to popular stuff like naruto and as their culture becomes more popular the arcade scene may come around similar to theirs.