It’s Halloween today. I drove to Video Game Museum Robot in Fukaya, Saitama Prefecture with my friend Adrian to play some retro games.
The place looks like a dump from the outside, but that adds to the charm. You might just drive right by without realizing that it’s a treasure trove of retrogaming.
The arcade is mostly Sega cabinets: Astro City, New Astro City, and Blast City cabinets. They have one Neo Geo Mini Cute cabinet. When we walked in, I was expecting to see row after row of glowing game screens. It surprised me to see that aside from the newer games in the front near the door, nearly all of these retro game cabinets were shut off. To play them, you have to switch them on. This really threw me off at first because for a moment I was wondering if most of them were out of order. Then I saw the signs printed in Japanese asking customers to shut the cabinets off after using. They had switches dangling on the top right corner. Apparently this is both an effort to conserve energy and to prevent screen burn-in. Some of the screens were in better shape than others.
The first game we tried was Capcom’s Dungeon and Dragons, and the first player’s two main buttons weren’t working. So I was afraid that the place was a dump. But the rest of the games turned out to be fine. It certainly isn’t on par with Taito’s HEY arcade in Akihabara, but we still had fun. Since D&D was a disappointment, we moved on to playing Gradius.
Adrian had never played a Gradius game before. He wasn’t used to the powerup system.
Under Defeat is one of my prized Dreamcast possessions. I think this was the first time I ever saw this game in an arcade.
Adrian grew up playing Raiden Fighters Jet at an arcade in Los Angeles.
YES! I got to play Arkanoid with a wonderful knob controller! This PCB is the North American version imported from the USA, a Taito game licensed to Romstar.
I played some Mushihimesama Futari next to Arkanoid.
They have an excellent selection of retro game magazines to peruse! I wish I had more time to look at them more. DOS/V was the Japanese version of DOS for Japanese PCs up until Windows 95 took over in the ’90s. I thought for a moment that this was an old magazine, but it’s from April 2018.
I played some Gal’s Panic 2.
They had the Konami classic multi-game selector, so I introduced my friend to Gyruss.
I had to do it.
I was surprised to see Puzzle! Mushihime-tama there, so I played a round.
It was surprising to see a 4 player Gauntlet cab! It’s always refreshing to see an Atari game in a Japanese game center. The Mikado in Takadanobaba has a Marble Madness cab and I got to play it, but the screen was pretty messed up and the colors were weird. This Gauntlet was in better condition. We could have given it a shot, but by that time we had to get going as it was getting dark and I wanted to get back before it got too late. We were hoping to play some Marvel vs. Capcom against each other, but they didn’t have this game. I did see Vampire Hunter and Vampire Savior and I had practiced this game a bit at home on Steam recently, but maybe next time.
Oh yes, and before we went to this arcade, we had lunch at a place called King God Burger in Maebashi. Fantastic food!
