Inside Japan's Addictive Arcades

[Taro Toporific]

Inside Japan's Addictive Arcades....
...In one Shibuya game room we saw two students smiling from a public service poster from the National Police Agency....
[floatr]
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[SIZE="6"]MANY ADULTS CARE FOR YOU...
NOW OUR FUTURE IS IN YOUR HANDS. YOU DO NOT BELONG ONLY TO YOURSELF. YOU HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY FOR ALL OF US.[/SIZE]

[Mulboyne]

I didn't notice that you had posted that article in the "Newbie Reporter" forum so I didn't bother to read it. Then I noticed MutantFrog had been similarly appalled by the piece and the penny dropped.

[Kuang_Grade]

I actually thought the piece wasn't half bad, considering the writer (according to his blog) had been in country for a whole 7-10 days before writing it. Its a bit simplistic and breathless and suffers from selection bias-most of the arcades in Shibuya seem to be getting clogged up with these card based games (with their dedicated high spending customers), squeezing space from the more traditional arcade machines...but if you go to Shinjuku (the Tatio inn in Shinjuku 3-36 has a pretty large selection of both new and old school games) or Ikebukuro or Odaiba (where's there a massive arcade under the fairris wheel that has rows and rows of the larger, more activity based games like taiko no tesjun or sit down version of tokyo metro bus driver) he might have seen a different picture.

Mutant Frog is a bit breathless in its criticism as well

My Japanese interpreter, fighting as a boxing-gloved Kangaroo with a snowboard on its back and scuba fins on its feet, was defeated in the game by a tattooed girl. [Ed: Wow! A Tattoo!! Japanese arcades really are so much cooler than the US, where you would never see a kid with a tattoo!]

Well you almost never see a female in a US arcade and the few that may be there are not there by choice and probably aren't playing any games, let alone a fighting game.

He said he plays about twice a month at about $3 a game, though the stack of character cards in his hand betrays a deeper addiction. “I can learn all the background and histories of the characters,” he said, adding he also reads manga related to the Sangokushi saga. [Ed: Clearly he wouldn’t be playing the game because of a pre existing interest in the Chinese history/classical literature upon which it is based.]

I'm sure SEGA's #1 goal for Sangokushi Trisen was being historically accurate to Chinese history/literature vs creating an profitable game that would suck money out of people's pockets....if Koei can effectively release the same hack and slash Sangokushi game umpteen times for the PS2, then there is probably a market that rests more on that game type vs. its historical background story. Playing video games for their historical educational value is like watching Space 1999 for its scientific educational value....there's not much there.

[Mulboyne]

Mutant Frog is a bit breathless in its criticism as well

My Japanese interpreter, fighting as a boxing-gloved Kangaroo with a snowboard on its back and scuba fins on its feet, was defeated in the game by a tattooed girl. [Ed: Wow! A Tattoo!! Japanese arcades really are so much cooler than the US, where you would never see a kid with a tattoo!]

Reading the piece again, it's entirely possible that the tattooed girl is just a character in the game.

[Kuang_Grade]

Reading the piece again, it's entirely possible that the tattooed girl is just a character in the game.

You might be onto something...Tekken 5 features a kangaroo character and apparently one the characters, Asuka Kazama has some tattooed...haven't been able to find any images of it, however. But video game costume blogger, Wataru Maruyama, has this to say about it

http://costumeget.blogspot.com/2005/03/best-and-worst-costumes-of-tekken-5.html

Asuka Kazama
This is painful because she is my favorite character in the new game. So generic. P1 is just ugly, but it can be saved if you change up the colors in the customize mode. P2 is over used in other fighters and I hate its inclusion here. Alternate outfit 1 is your average schoolgirl look and that’]BUT Alternate outfit 2 is AWESOME. Yakuza style look complete with tats on her inside thighs. She looks like she should be presiding over an illegal dice game. Oh mama! [/b]

But either way, the original sentence is poorly written.

Just found a you tube video of the outfit in question....I'm in total agreement with Wataru. Writing about a kangaroo getting beaten up by a yakuza moll would would have been more interesting than "tattooed girl"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=GsSqefbmq6M&mode=related&search=