A Different Kind of Card

Think of this post as part 2 of things I found inside Swedish arcades.

So if you remember a long long time ago, I made a post talking about stat cards in Japan.  I used a picture of my old E-Amusement pass as the image and it looked like this.

Just so those who didn't read that post last summer don't have to dig through the archive, these cards are used for certain games inside Japanese arcades for tracking your play records and unlocking new things within the games.

Now if you look back to the first picture, you may notice there is a card reader strapped to that crazy taxi machine, but it's not for stat cards.  Sweden, unlike Japan or the UK doesn't have this nice convenient coin that you can just drop in like a £1 or 100 yen.  If my memory serves me correctly, the standard price for 1 credit in the arcade was something really awkward like 16 Kroner or some such nonsense so you have to swipe some kind of credit card in the machine in order to get a credit.

At least I think that's how it works, I don't know any Swedish and the one Swedish guy I do know doesn't know anything about games.  Still, the awkward pricing of arcade games out here just makes me yearn for a good Japanese game centre or even just a simple Time Crisis cabinet in a British cinema that takes a single fucking coin.