Japanese Medal Games

Up to this point, I've never seen the point of these things, but today I discovered why they are so popular!

For those that don't know, in a little area of pretty much every game centre I've ever been to, there is a section for "medal games".  These are games where you buy a load of medals, and feed them into a machine to earn more medals.  They are usually those push machines, you know, where you feed in coins so the machine can push a big stack and make coins on the edge fall off.  There are other machines such as non-gambling versions of pachinko and slots too, as well as an actual game that I will cover in a post tomorrow.

So what can you do with these medals?  Nothing.  When you are done, you feed them into a machine that tracks how many you have and then you can come back and use those medals later.  So you may be asking, well what's the fucking point then?  I know I was asking this question for a long time, but today I sussed it.

The reason these games are so popular is because they are a cheap alternative to actual coin-op gaming, or at least that's my theory anyway.  Just think, when I play Voltex Sound Booth, I spend 100 yen for 3 songs.  With a medal game, 1000 yen will get you a shit ton of medals, and assuming you win something (which isn't all that hard really) you can come back and play again for free.  Also these games are very laid back and don't really contain any potential competition, so people who like game centres but are worried about being bad at the proper games still have something to enjoy.  It seems to be quite popular with older people too, probably gives them something to do.

The cool thing about this whole medal thing is to access the account that you create with the game centre, you have to scan your arm.  Most games come with stat cards or something but from how the woman explained it to me today, the machines for medal games scans the shape of your veins or something, either way it's cool as fuck.

So, the next post will be the game that made me want to try this shit out, I want to pop down to the game centre tomorrow and play it a bit more before I write about it, so keep an eye out!