It’s been a little bit since we had news regarding a game on location test, particularly something that was introduced at Dave & Busters. As you can recognize from the title, this one is from Taito, being their oddly compelling train simulation game, Densha De Go!!.
If you are unfamiliar with the series, it’s one of those games from the late 90’s that has mainly stuck to Japan outside of the occasional grey export. Taito did recently develop a new version, which appeared out West when Taito brought along some games to fill out their IAAPA 2019 booth. I got to play it and while it wasn’t in English, thanks to the help of a guide I had fun with it:
The machine on test comes in a different cabinet design than seen above, something that Taito introduced in 2019 as a way to get the game into more locations. The news was shared on the Dave & Busters Reddit forum, where it was also shown to have an English translation and online Nesica support. Here’s an official trailer of it in Japanese:
While certainly not as action-packed as your typical arcade game, something about this is rather compelling and it’s a fun game to play as mentioned.
To get more accurate info about the test, I reached out to Kevin Bachus of Dave & Busters to get the official word and found out the following:
- Taito did not initiate this test as one of the comments asserts
- D&B paid for the English translation
- This is a lone unit on test; More depends on how this does
- Expectations on this are in line with the current pandemic situation
- Taito is not exiting the arcade business [as I had personally heard about recently]
We’ll have to wait and see for more, but what do you think – excited at the possibility for this one or no?
