AKB48: Sailor Zombie

So yesterday I went to a place called Spo-cha which is a kind of public sports centre.  Aside from all the sports and physical activity stuff, they have a game arcade where all the machines are set to free play so you can get your entry fees worth of money just by playing a few rail shooters.  One of the rail shooters that they had this time was the rather strange AKB48: Sailor Zombie and thanks to free play I managed to play it from start to finish so I better say something about it.

If you don't know, AKB48 is a pop group consisting of a large number of young girls performing catchy yet ultimately terrible J-Pop and they have a stupidly large following of rabid fans who are almost completely on the wrong side of obsessive.  Personally I don't give too many shits about them, if you're drunk in karaoke then they are there to provide stupid songs that are easy to sing in Japanese but I'm not the kind of person to put them on by choice.

Anyway, this isn't the first game I've seen from them, they have some kind of dating sim looking thing which I THINK is called AKB 1/48 but that game kind of makes sense to me.  The idea of being able to romance your favorite member of AKB must have been prime spanking material for the aforementioned rabid fans but the idea of a game where you shoot the group in the face strikes me as kind of odd.

I skipped almost every cut scene during my play through but from what I could tell there is some kind of zombie outbreak that has changed a bunch of the members into zombie and it is up to you, the player, to use your vaccine gun and un-zombie them.  You are joined by the one remaining not zombied member who will give advice, get in the way, spout nonsense and help combat the outbreak with catchy pop music.

Game play wise it's a standard theatre type rail shooter.  You sit in a dark booth with guns that are attached to a pivot and you use those to shoot school girl zombies in the face until they un-zombie.  There is also a boss monster that sort of looks like a big wolf thing that you have to fight a couple of times during the game who likes to jump around and be generally hard to hit but this wasn't an issue for me because ha ha free play.  However, this game isn't JUST a rail shooter, oh no, it's also a rhythm game!

 At the end of every stage you have to play a simple rhythm game where you use the guns triggers to hit notes to some of the most well known songs of the group.  They are pretty easy and it's hard to fail but if you're playing 2 player then your partners fuck up can cost you health which is a little annoying.  Then again, providing that you have a working brain these rhythm sections shouldn't pose any difficulty, it's overly simple and is more of an annoyance than anything else.

Anyway, just to round things off have a short video of some of the game play.  It would have been a little longer but my wife, who was recording the footage, wanted to play so this is all you get.

Time Crisis 5

Holy crap this series is STILL going?!  I thought the genre of light gun based rail shooters had gone almost completely out of fashion with the exception of a few sit down cabinet games but guess I was fucking wrong.  Granted this appeared in my local arcade quite a while ago but I only just got around to playing it .

Just in case there is anyone stumbling on this blog who has never played or heard of this game, let me give you a quick primer.

Time Crisis is a long running series of rail shooters that has been going since 1995.  Most games in this genre usually just put you on a straight rail and had you fend of a bunch of enemies and not taking damage was based on knowing where they are coming from and picking and choosing the right targets.

Time Crisis was a little different in this regard because the machine (and the later console releases) used a pedal to duck in and out of cover.  That's right motherfuckers, before we had all this 3rd person Gears of War cover based shooting crap, it was done in the arcade with a pedal and a light gun.  However, in order to stop people cheesing out the game by just hiding behind cover and waiting for the opportune moment, each screen had a time limit (of 40 seconds if I remember correctly), meaning that you had to take a few risks if you wanted a chance to survive the timer.

It was an interesting title and the sequels only went on to build on the concept.

Time Crisis 2 and up were essentially the same game but what made them interesting was the multiplayer component.  Usually in these games 2 players would work together on one screen but in Time Crisis each player had their own screen.  This meant that each player was seeing each screen from a different angle and that they could help each other pick off enemies from the other screen.

So that's old school Time Crisis, so how's the new one?  Well it's OK and while it introduces some cool stuff it's kind of short and a little bullshit.

The big new thing with TC5 is a dual pedal system.  Up to now, every Time Crisis has had 1 pedal but this one has an L and R pedal.  All this means is that each character has 2 vantage points per screen from which they can shoot from but using the pedals effectively is paramount to winning some battles and boss fights.  There's also a couple of QTE's and a number of slow motion "shoot the targets" sequences that are used to award bonus points or to take a life off if you fuck up.  It also utilities the Aime/Banana Passport stat cards to track high scores and achievements if you're into that kind of thing.

The game pisses me off a little because it's too short and it cops out at the end with "ANOTHER CHAPTER COMING SOON!".  This wouldn't piss me off it was normal priced but the cost for entry into this thing is fucking 200 yen with 100 more to continue if you die!  Almost every game ever in a game centre is 100 yen per play but this huge fucking thing wants 200!?  There is less content here than most 100 yen rail shooters too so I don't know why the fuck the price is double what it should be.

Still, as much as that pisses me off it's nice to see that the old school stand up rail shooter games are clinging on for dear life in the modern age.  If you get the chance to try it then you absolutely should, but I can't imagine it seeing the light of day in the west because the cabinet is HUGE and the western coin-op scene sucks.

Please let me know if anyone finds one though, especially in the UK!

I Miss Quirky Peripherals

My post yesterday evening about rail shooters got me thinking about video game console peripherals and just how boring they have become in the modern age.  We have stuff like the Kinect, the PS4s pad thing but I only seem to ever come across people complaining about those.

I mean what the fuck happened to every console having a gun.  Back in the day, every motherfucker and it's dog had a goddamn gun in order to play all those arcade rail shooter ports.  The Wii kinda had a gun thing going on but that was nothing more than slotting your remote into a hunk of plastic.  I want shit like the Sega Saturn Predator back.  It was fucking heavy as shit, lit up when you fired it and it was fucking big.  You knew that when you got that motherfucker out the draw, shit was going to go down.

Back then, developers were always trying to do interesting shit with their systems and giving you interesting ways to play.  NiGHTS on the Saturn saw the release of a "3D" controller which looked kind of like an arcade stick and was designed to make playing that game a bit easier or something.  The Dreamcast had a fishing rod for use with Sega Bass Fishing but also worked with Soul Calibre so you could swing it around like a sword.  This resulted in getting smashed by someone with a controller but it was fun nonetheless.  Nintendo were famous for their weird fucking peripherals such as ROB the Robot for the NES and the Game Boy Transfer Pack back when Pokemon Stadium came out which blew peoples fucking minds back then

Sure, they were gimmicky and the number of compatible games was kind of low but the point is that a lot of the time they were fun to use.  I spent HOURS playing ports of rail shooters and HOURS with the fucking DC fishing rod just because it was a novel way to play.

With modern systems, a lot of the shit is built in or has been done before a long time ago and it worked better (Kinect and Eye Toy for example).  Things like touch screens were novel back when the DS was new but in 2014, a touch screen on a modern device is fucking standard.  The closest thing we have to a proper interesting peripheral is the Occulus Rift or any other VR headset thing.  That thing is pushing boundaries and giving people a chance to experience games in a way they never have before which is awesome.

It also makes the console a bit more interesting I think.  I'm constantly finding weird bits and bobs in the retro stores around Japan and sometimes I have no idea what the fuck they would ever be used for.  40 years from now when people are going around retro stores for PS3s or whatever, there isn't going to be anything all that interesting to find in a junk box because aside from the standard console/controller/cables/games there wasn't really much else to fuck about with.

I know it's mainly a problem with technology being what it is and the need for all this quirky bullshit being reduced to basically zero but I'm sure the creative minds in the games industry could come up with SOMETHING that would make me want to play their game based on the method of input alone like they did back then. 

Maybe one day.