EAG 2018: Racecraft & Zombie Land

As we approach JAEPO with anticipation, here are a couple of videos taken at the London-based EAG show to enjoy. Captured by our friends at Arcade Belgium, they also posted other EAG videos to their YouTube channel if you are curious to watch. But for this post, we’re going to focus on two games we have not seen in action previously: Racecraft and Zombie Land.

Racecraft

Once upon a time, if you went to an arcade looking for a racing game, chances were it was something based on Formula 1 style racing. Pole Position, Final Lap (which was pretty much the PP series), Continental Circus, Ace Driver, Indy 500, Virtua Racer, etc. After Virtua Racer and improvements in 3D hardware, the focus in development shifted to other styles of racing games, putting F1-like racers into a similar category as beat ’em ups (excepting those super expensive professional motion simulators). Technoplay recently added this picture of the game to their Facebook page – it certainly carries the Sega Indy 500 vibe with it (click to enlarge)

As you can see from this video here, Racecraft happily brings the sub-genre back to arcades. As mentioned in the previous post about this, the main hook of the game is that it procedurally generates the tracks, allowing for a different course every time. Graphically this looks pretty sharp and by the appearance it seems to handle well but that’s something you can only tell for certain by hands-on play. Here’s the game in action as captured by AB:

Zombie Land

UPDATE: Arcade Belgium sent some info on Zombie Land so I’m just scrapping what we had and going with the accurate info. 🙂

The game is developed by Ace Amusement, a company based out of China. The cabinet is a bit massive as expected as any game using four mounted guns is going to be. At almost 200″ across, the cabinet uses two benches next to each other to achieve the quadruple gun feature. It doesn’t say how large the screen is but I would guess somewhere in the 70-80″ range.

The next question about either of these games will be about distribution – who will sell them will determine in good part where you might find the games. With Amusement Expo coming at the end of this month, I’ll certainly keep an eye out for them in case they show up at Vegas.

What do you think about these titles from the videos?