Good morning all! Just a quick news item here.
The Fishing Spirits/Pokémon Cross Promotion
You might recall a few IAAPA’s ago that Bandai Namco had brought their own fishing videmption game to the West. Called Ace Angler, it was different in that it used realistic fishing rod controllers to cast your hook and choose your bait (most fishing games in this top down style use joysticks). While I’m unsure as to actual numbers out there, you might have come across this one (here is the IAAPA 2015 Namco booth that had the game on hand):
Before the game found its way to our shores, it had been released in Japan under the name Fishing Spirits. Today, Famitsu is reporting that Nintendo and Bandai Namco have teamed up to promote the new Pokémon Sun & Moon games via Fishing Spirits thanks to a new software update. I have confirmed that this is a Japanese market promotion only at this time so if you want to see this in action, you’ll have to hit up one of the 170 Japanese arcade locations that have this game. It’s also only for a limited time but hopefully it is something that can help bring in more players to locations running the promo.
That’s always a great benefit to online enabled arcade titles…hopefully we can see more things like this over here but not many games have the network structure in place to do that – the only ones that come to mind are: Big Buck Wild, Mario Kart Arcade GP DX, Maximum Tune 5, Golden Tee, Pump It Up Prime 2 & (correct me if I’m wrong) DDR A. I can’t think of any Western videmption games to have an online option so perhaps this Japanese promo is a prelude to seeing more like it if successful.
What cross promotions would you like to see with your favorite arcade games?
Can’t really think of anything to be honest but it’s a good way to keep an arcade title fresh for content. Reminds me of sega ford racing full blown where new tacks are added but are really just switched out I think to give it the impression the game has changed.