NESiCA x LIVE Lands At Round1USA Plus Other Game Updates

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.

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.

Kancolle Arcade Released in Japan – Sega has started selling their latest 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.