Last month when we went to Keyaki Walk Mall in Maebashi, I found another big display of Dragon Quest merchandise at Loft! I showed the Dragon Quest sale at Loft last year on my blog. This time it was for the release of DQ I and II.
“Welcome to the Loft Dragon Quest I & II 2025 goods campaign!”
The first things I noticed were all the plush dolls. These retro character sprite cushions look cool.
Cups and silverware.
So much random stuff. Soap dispensers, clips, pins, stickers, and so on.
Another iron beads project finished! This is Nakoruru from SNK Gals Fighters for the Neo Geo Pocket Color. I’ve added her to Athena, Mai, and Yuri on the wall, all from that game.
On August 21st I returned to Japan from my trip to Arizona. I stayed a night in Tokyo before proceeding home. I looked up how to find the Mikado game center in Ikebukuro. This was my first time visiting there.
I didn’t take a whole lot of photos, actually. By then I was getting very hungry, so I went to Ueno and went to an Irish pub called The World’s End where I had fish & chips with two pints of Guinness. It was great.
That night I also went to Taito’s HEY game center in Akihabara and took these photos there.
Coffee Boss is doing a retro Dragon Quest campaign where entries to the contest can win limited edition prizes, as seen in the top picture. I love the pixel art on the cans. I didn’t buy the Black ones since I just cannot drink coffee black. I did buy the Cafe au Lait and Premium ones. I’ll feature this in my next Japanese Snacks video at the end of the year.
My friends and i visited the brand new Outpost Arcade on August 16th. It’s small, but cozy. No booze at the time of the recording, which was a shame because I could’ve gone for a beer if one had been available. I settled for an IBC Root Beer instead. Lots of great pinball games and video game cabinets too: Tempest, Star Wars, Tron, Marble Madness, Joust, Afterburner II, and a couple of games I’d never seen before! https://www.theoutpostarcade.com/
From left to right, here are Star Wars, Tac/Scan, Robotron 2084, Joust, After Burner II, and Centipede. I’d never seen Tac/Scan before and it was a very cool vector graphic game by Sega! I also didn’t know that there was an Atari 2600 port of this game which uses the paddle controller. Neat!
Here I am, playing Tron. It’s one of my favorite movies, but I admit that the game is only so-so. As a kid, I really enjoyed the successor, Discs of Tron, far more. That said, this game cabinet is an exquisite work of art, with all the glowing detail which matches the movie, and the blacklights that create that fantastic glow. These two aspects really capture the ambience to the movie so well.
This really matches the Syd Mead/Moebius design work of the Tron movie so well.
Star Wars. Oh, heck yeah!
Somehow, the arcades when I was a kid only had Asteroids and not Asteroids Deluxe. The 3D look to Asteroids Deluxe is quite exquisite, with the background and the vector graphics projected onto it. Fantastic.
And of course, plenty of pinball goodness. I really liked the Doctor Who Daleks.
My friend Lou knows this Star Trek: TNG pinball game well. How appropriate, since he’s the biggest Trek fan I know.
So while I got to spend time with friends on my recent trip to Arizona, on the day which I visited Andy’s Hobby HQ and Book Off, we also went to AZ Mills Mall in Tempe. TiltStudio is there, and this is where I found the Pac-Man Capsule Factory I posted about earlier. Tilt is what used to be Gameworks which opened in the ’90s when I was in college, and I took videos of Gameworks back in 2010 in the early years of my YouTube channel. Here is the playlist for those videos. At the time, the guy who ran that arcade was focused on bringing in many arcade cabinets from Japan, including an incredibly awesome air hockey table I’ve yet to even come across in Japan even.
Tilt now focuses on a great selection of pinball games, thus the name.
This is cool! It’s a Beatles pinball game. My friend Kevin is a huge Beatles fan, and so is my wife.
An OT Star Wars pinball game! Righteous.
Ghostbusters pinball!
This is a JIBUNGOUS UFO catcher! Holy crap. I had to have my picture taken with it.
Tilt also has a nice collection of some great classic arcade games. The rest of these photos are a collection of pictures of those games.
On my trip to my hometown of Phoenix, AZ during my summer vacation, I was able to visit a Book Off on Bell Road! It opened within recent years. There have been Book Off stores all along in California. When Mayu and I used to live in America, we would visit the Book Off locations in Torrance, Garden Grove, Los Angeles and other areas. But now both Book Off and Daiso stores have opened in the Phoenix area.
Here are the signs outside.
Look at all the books! The books are in English, of course. Otherwise, the experience is just like a Book Off in Japan. This makes Book Off a direct competitor with the long-standing Bookmans store locations in Arizona.
The store clerk says that so much of this stuff is imported from the Book Off locations in Japan. I guess they buy so much stuff that they just export it to the USA for sale there.
So many anime figures for sale in the display case.
So many pin buttons, keychains, and small figures. Just like a Book Off in Japan.
They have import Famicom games from Japan! Star Wars, Red Arima, Parodius, Galaga… neat stuff!
Import Famicom and Super Famicom games too.
Domestically-released modern games are sold used there as well, of course.
This is the Grave of the Fireflies movie soundtrack on vinyl record. I was surprised to find this.
Huge selection of used, English-language manga. I bought several used volumes of Spy Family.
Gunpla! There were also other model kits there too. I even saw an Eggplane Girl resin figure by Hasegawa there, and for a good price. This is so cool.
Dollar books. Very neat. I didn’t have time to look at the SF book selection there. It would’ve been nice if I had more time to spend, but I had quite a busy itinerary with my friends Kevin and Brian. (Our next destination was Andy’s Hobby HQ which I featured in my previous blog post.)
I haven’t played Super Metroid for about 15 years or more. I love this game! It’s actually the only Metroid game I’ve ever played. This wireless gamepad is a recent purchase. There was no name at all on the package. I got it on Ali Express for something like 1500 yen. It comes with a dongle to plug it into the SFC/SNES Mini or you can take out the USB WiFi receptor and use it with your PC. Ali Express claimed that it’s compatible with RetroPie, but I couldn’t get it to recognize it. Steam didn’t like it, either. Maybe because I was using the wire? The wire is for charging the controller. Maybe it’s not meant for gameplay.
My goal is to hack this Mini console to add more games to it, especially shmups since it does not come with a single shmup! Not even Gradius III! I’m making a list of games like Area 88 and Macross to add to this. I found a page saying that the program used to hack it can actually be used in Linux, so hopefully I won’t have to get out my grodie Win10 SSD.
Mikado had these pin badge buttons in their gachapon capsule toy dispensers, so I got three. One big one that says “PUSH START” (I’m not sure why it says “2006” because according to the Japanese Wikipedia, it started in 2009), and a set of buttons for the Mikado location in Ikebukuro (top) and the original in Takadanobaba (bottom). As I mentioned in the previous post, Mikado is a legendary spot for retrogaming.
I visited Mikado next to Takadanobaba Station in Tokyo. Here are some more screenshots of game screens. (I made an earlier post of closeup screenshots of arcade games in Akihabara’s Hey and Super Potato here.)
