Japan Uncut: Taito HEY

The next arcade on my list of places to see in Akihabara, we inadvertently came across Taito HEY (Hirose Entertainment Yard) about a minute after leaving Club SEGA. HEY occupies floors two through four of the 5-level Hirose Honsya building. Hirose's basement level, like Asobit City and other places in the district, was dedicated to various manga including hentai, lolicon, and dojinshi (self-published works) in the form of a store called Melonbooks. The first floor, like GiGO and Club SEGA, was dedicated to claw games and featured a sign advertising a Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition playtest.

The second floor is where the good stuff started, and it was here that I had what was probably my favorite arcade experience of the trip. After browsing a floor dominated by dozens upon dozens of shoot 'em ups (and playing a bit of Dogyuun myself), I noticed a small crowd of people gathered around a Japanese guy playing Terminator Salvation. A light-gun shooter, the player is armed with a customized M4A1 carbine that features force feedback, a mechanic where the player hits the bottom of the carbine's magazine to reload, and a button on the side used to shoot grenades. I watched him and the crowd for a minute or so, wondering why no one joined him on the second gun. Was it a cultural thing? Would it be considered rude for me to walk up and join him? I figured one of the benefits of being a white guy in Japan is that I can get away with such behavior, so when he died I walked up to the second gun. As he inserted another 100-yen coin, I gestured toward the weapon, my way of asking if I could join him, and he gave a nod of approval. I jumped in somewhere on the first mission (out of two total), and we ended up beating the whole game together. The game was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the metagame of us trying to beat each other's scores. With the exception of one time, he consistently had a slightly higher score than myself. One of my favorite things to do in the game was pressing the carbine into my shoulder so I could steady it with my right hand when getting low on ammo, allowing me to immediately hit the bottom of the magazine to reload with my left. It was also a useful technique when digging through my pockets for some bills to give to my brother in exchange for more coins. It felt cool, and we must have looked as such, as the crowd around us grew to around 12 to 15 people by the time we reached the endgame (my brother was counting). I've never had a bunch of people watch me play a game like that in person before, and it made it all the more exciting.

The stranger and I made a good team, with our final scores fairly close to each other, and we parted ways after entering our initials. It's extremely doubtful, but I wonder if "CAR" is still written on the scoreboard.

I can't remember if that was the last thing I did at Taito HEY or not, but my notes end after that.

Here's a list of everything I saw at the arcade:

Taito HEY/Hirose Honsya Bldg.

Melonbooks - manga, hentai, lolicon, dojinshi, etc.

Claw Games

Claw Games
Aliens Extermination
Battle Gear 4 Tuned
beatmania IIDX
Bubble Symphony
Dance Dance Revolution X2
Dogyuun
DrumMania
Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom
Elevator Action: Death Parade
Gaia Attack 4
Galaxy Force
GuitarFreaks
Music GunGun!
Razing Storm
Runark (Growl)
Something I wrote that I can't read (Midnight ???? game. Might be Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3DX. Can't confirm.)
Space Harrier
Sunset Riders
Taiko no Tatsujin
Terminator Salvation
Tetris The Grand Master 3: Terror Instinct
Thunder Dragon 2
Top Landing
And a TON of shoot 'em ups (almost entirely on Egret II cabinets)

Arcana Heart 3
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift
Fatal Fury 3: Road to the Final Victory
Guilty Gear XX Λ Core
Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs. Gundam Next
A bunch of other Gundam games with weird titles
Street Fighter IV
Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition location testing
Tekken 6: Bloodline Rebellion
The King of Fighters '95
The King of Fighters '98
The King of Fighters 2002
The King of Fighters XIII
Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire

Capsule Machines
Border Break
Dragon Quest: Monster Battle Road II Legends
Eternal Wheel
Football (I think it was World Club Champion Football)
Lord of Vermilion II
Kamen Rider Battle: Ganbaride
Kidō Senshi Gundam: Senjō no Kizuna
Kidou Senshi Gundam 0083 Card Builder
Sangokushi Taisen 3 War Begins
Shining Force Cross
The iDOLM@STER
World Soccer: Winning Eleven 2010 - Arcade Championship

A Day in Akihabara (Episode 03 - Coming Someday)
Club SEGA
Super Potato - Coming Someday
List of Episodes
Introduction to the Series

Japan Uncut: Club SEGA

SEGA GiGO was a great experience, but I knew the best had yet to come. It didn't take long to see how other arcades in the area compared, as this was the first thing we saw turning the corner out of Akihabara Station on the morning of July 18th, 2010:

Similar to GiGO, Club SEGA is a six-level arcade complex with the first floor dedicated to claw games. Passing by some Hatsune Miku gear and Mickey Mouse pillows, we headed down to B1 to discover the Japanese arcade experience I'd been hearing about for so long. In front of us were a total of 45 fighting game cabinets. Divided between Virtua Fighter 5 R and Tekken 6: Bloodline Rebellion, this place was absolutely packed with people. If someone wasn't fighting, they were standing around watching the matches, and after taking a quick browse of the place, my brother and I split up to test our abilities against those obviously far more skilled than us. I started out on Virtua Fighter 5 R, a series I'm most familiar with via capsule toys in Shenmue. Having never been real deep into fighting games, the most confusing aspect was figuring out what buttons did what and knowing if I needed to press a specific button to block, like in Virtua Fighter, or if I just needed to push back, like in Tekken.

After getting my ass kicked pretty thoroughly, I purchased a Tekken-Net ID card and went over to my brother, who had been playing Bloodline Rebellion against a Japanese fellow and fared about as well as you'd expect. I decided to give his opponent a try, so I sat down, sliding the overflowing ash tray to my side (apparently people smoke a lot more when playing fighting games), and inserted my card. I chose Steve, a character I always stuck with for the rare times I played Tekken 4, and began to fight. My opponent stayed with Hwoarang the whole time, and though I did better than my brother, I never won a full match. Sure, I could get it down to a tiebreaker with us each having two wins, but I could never pull it off in the final round. I think he was messing with me and getting my hopes on purpose, actually. After coming to the conclusion that I would never win and not wanting to waste any more of my precious 100-yen coins, I got up to head to the 2nd floor. As I left, I looked over to see who my opponent was. I think he had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and was wearing a fedora, but that may just be my memory making him seem cooler than he was.

**This card holds the proof of my shame.**

If B1 was the fighting floor, then 2F was the racing floor. 20 racing cabinets - divided up between Initial D: Arcade Stage 5, R-Tuned: Ultimate Street Racing, and Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3DX Plus - took up the majority of the floor space. However, it seemed that most people there were far more interested in playing Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Arcade, even if it meant waiting in a roped-off line for a while. Not in the mood for racing or waiting, I decided to play another rhythm-based game where you hit giant buttons called pop'n music. Originally released in 1998 by Konami, the version I was playing had recently been updated in 2010. The game's difficulty is based on whether you want to play with five buttons or nine, and I was able to play five songs on the former for 200 yen. Here are my scores I wrote down:

Butterfly - 96
Gradius (Full Speed) - 75
Rhythm and Police - 99
Bonus Round: Battle W/O Honor or Humanity (Kill Bill theme) - ??. I wasn't looking at the screen when the score came up.

Another rhythm-based game on this floor was Taiko no Tatsujin 13, which you may be familiar with as "that drum game" from Lost in Translation (though that was an earlier version). I watched a few gaijin play it for future reference and scaled the stairs up to the third floor. Similar to B1 in amount of fighting game cabinets but unmatched in sheer variety, 3F contained: Sengoku Basara X, The King of Fighters 2002, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, Arcana Heart 3, Melty Blood, Guilty Gear XX Λ Core, The King of Fighters XIII, and Street Fighter IV. After playing as Terry Bogard in The King of Fighters 2002 and getting destroyed by another stranger, we went up to the fourth floor. With the exception of four Power Smash 3 (Virtua Tennis) machines, 4F was the mech floor, mostly consisting of Gundam. Intimidated by most of the games, my brother and I sat down and played a Gundam game that, like Cyber Troopers Virtual-On Force, was linked to the other cabinets, though I was able to grasp the game better. My boost ability, beam sword, and projectile weapon weren't enough to win, however, and I had to wait for my brother to play another round as he somehow wasn't defeated by the guys we were playing with. He had no idea how, either.

We went up to the fifth, and final, floor of Club SEGA, in which I soon witnessed the greatest arcade setup I have ever seen. Imagine eight players, all with their own arcade cabinets, controlling and managing their football (or soccer or whatever the hell you want to call it) players via collectible trading cards and then seeing the results of their actions on a 100-inch+ screen in front of them that's showcasing the match as if it were a live football broadcast. World Club Champion Football Intercontinental Clubs 2008-2009 made me wish I cared about the sport, and it was so impressive that I almost missed the three Shining Force Cross machines behind me. There was a guy at the end playing the game by himself, and from what I could tell by watching the demo, it was a multiplayer action RPG with touchscreen functionality, and it looked more fun and familiar than anything I had come across yet. My brother sat down at the middle cabinet, and I bought us each an IC card so we could save our progress. Nothing in the game was in English, but we managed to grasp things pretty quickly. Time ran out for me on the character creation screen as I was still figuring out all the options, like how to put "Charles" as my name and how to change the color of my hair, eyes, and skin. Not knowing how to go back to the creation screen and not wanting to play with a character I wasn't happy with, I bought another IC card and managed to get it right the second time. With my new character, "Charles", I was placed into a single-player tutorial before being able to play with others. By the time my brother and I finished and moved on to the multiplayer, the other guy had left. I was disappointed we weren't going to play with him, but that was before we met Yuto and $auels, two Japanese players who were who-knows-where. It was awesome, and the game reminded me so much of Phantasy Star Online, a game I absolutely loved. There was a little chat box where you could use emoticons to say things like "Thank you" and such, using smileys and other universal symbols to communicate with fellow players, which reminded me of the days when I had a keyboard hooked up to my Dreamcast and would stand around in groups of Japanese players saying things like "Hello" with a smiley face and thinking how amazing it was that I was communicating with these people from across the world on my gaming console. The game itself was also a lot of fun; I could have played it all damn day, really, but my brother and I agreed we should probably head out in search of the next place on our list. If I ever get to play Shining Force Cross again, it'll be as a level 7 character with 8302 EXP.

Both of my Shining Force Cross IC cards and a help booklet.

It was about a minute later after leaving that we inadvertently bumped into Taito HEY. I wondered if it could match up to the fantastic experience that was Club SEGA.

Club SEGA

MJ4 Evolution (8)
Tekken 6: Bloodline Rebellion (20)
Virtua Fighter 5 R (25)

Claw Games

Capsule Machines
Dragon Quest: Monster Battle Road II Legends
Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Arcade (4)
Initial D: Arcade Stage 5 (8)
Kamen Rider Battle: Ganbaride
Midnight Maximum Tune 3DX Plus (8)
pop'n music
R-Tuned: Ultimate Street Racing (4)
Sangokushi Taisen 3 War Begins
Taiko no Tatsujin 13

Arcana Heart 3
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift (8)
Guilty Gear XX Λ Core (10)
Melty Blood (6)
Sengoku Basara X
Street Fighter IV (6)
The King of Fighters 2002
The King of Fighters XIII (4)

Power Smash 3 (4)
Various Mech Games including Gundam

Shining Force Cross (3)
World Club Champion Football Intercontinental Clubs 2008-2009

A pamphlet on SEGA Moba and a hand wipe used for cleaning arcade buttons and headphones.

A Day in Akihabara (Episode 03 - Coming Someday)
Taito HEY
Super Potato - Coming Someday
List of Episodes
Introduction to the Series

Electric Town: An Akihabara Arcade Experience - Part II

This is the Electric Town: An Akihabara Arcade Experience - Part II piece that I wrote for The Luchazine (October 7th, 2010 edition of Issue #5) that was never released. I'm only including a small image of the design (done by JohnRabbit) this time, as the text included isn't final. You can read the full article below! You can read Part I in the fourth issue of The Luchazine.

Waking up at 5 AM, I was too excited to go back to sleep. Yesterday's experience at GiGO arcade left me wanting more, so I made a list of all the greatest arcades in the Akihabara area, including Club Sega and Taito HEY.

My worries of spending more time trying to find these places than actually playing the games in them were instantly alleviated. Turning the first corner after exiting Akihabara Station, I saw this in the distance:

Much like GiGO before it, Club Sega is a six-level arcade that continues the apparent pattern of having the first floor dedicated solely to claw games. Passing by some Hatsune Miku gear and Mickey Mouse pillows, I headed downstairs to B1, only to stand stunned at what I saw next.

"This is what I've been looking for this whole time." I thought to myself. In front of me were twenty-five Virtua Fighter 5 R machines and twenty Tekken 6: Bloodline Rebellion machines. The best part of all was that this place was packed—if someone wasn't in the middle of a furious battle, they were standing around watching matches. Trying my hand at Virtua Fighter 5 R and failing miserably (a series I am most familiar with via capsule toys in Shenmue), I purchased a Tekken-Net ID card and headed to the back corner of the room. My brother had been fighting this one guy for a while, and I decided to see how I would fare against him. As I sat down, I slid the overflowing ash tray to my side—apparently, people smoke a lot more when playing fighting games—and inserted my card. His Steve and my Hwoarang fought for quite some time, and regardless of how close I came, I just couldn't beat him. I guess that's the problem when you rarely play fighting games and then go to a Japanese arcade.

Coming to the conclusion that I would probably never win and not wanting to waste anymore of my precious 100 yen coins, I headed up to the 2nd floor. If B1 was the fighting floor, than this was the racing floor. Eight Initial D: Arcade Stage 5, four R-Tuned: Ultimate Street Racing, and eight Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3 DX Plus machines took up the majority of the floor space. However, it seemed like most of the people there were far more interested in playing Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Arcade, even if it meant having to stand in a roped-off line for a while. Not in the mood for racing or waiting in line for twenty minutes, I played another rhythm-based game where you hit giant buttons called pop'n music. A 1998 game by Konami that was updated earlier this year with new songs, you select your difficulty by choosing whether to play with five or nine buttons (insanity!). Most of the music was unfamiliar to me, though I did do pretty well when it came to the themes of Gradius and Kill Bill. Another rhythm-based game on this floor was Taiko no Tatsujin 13, which you may be familiar with as "that drum game" from Lost in Translation (though that was an earlier version). I watched a few gaijin play it for future reference (foreshadowing!) and scaled the stairs up to the third floor.

I cannot possibly overstate how popular she is here.

Another room packed with people and fighting games, there was a lot of variety to choose from here. You had your choice of playing: Sengoku Basara X, The King of Fighters 2002, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, Arcana Heart 3, Melty Blood, Guilty Gear XX Λ Core, The King of Fighters XIII, and Street Fighter IV. It was, to say, complete madness. Getting my ass kicked once again (my Terry Bogard just wasn't strong enough), I went up to the fourth floor to experience even more craziness.

"Actually, Charles, I think you just suck."

With the exception of the wildly out-of-place Power Smash 3 machines (tennis!), this floor was nothing but seemingly complicated-ass mech games, mostly from the Gundam franchise. Satisfied at being able to grasp Gundam far better than Cyber Troopers, I progressed up the final set of stairs to the fifth floor of Club Sega, only to lay eyes upon one of the greatest arcade setups I have ever seen. Imagine eight players, all with their own arcade cabinets, controlling and managing their football players via collectible trading cards and then seeing the results of their actions on a 100-inch plus screen in front of them which is showcasing the match as if it were a live football broadcast. World Club Champion Football Intercontinental Clubs 2008-2009 must be what Football Manager fans have wet dreams about. I know I would if I were into these types of games.

World Club was so awesome, in fact, that I nearly missed the Shining Force Cross machines. However, due to the awesomeness of the game (it being one of my favorite things I played in all of Tokyo), this author has decided to do a separate feature on it in issue #6.

Leaving the complex in a wave of euphoria, I went in search of Taito HEY wondering if my experience at Club Sega could hope to be matched.

---

Obviously, there won't an issue #6 of The Luchazine, but I will continue this series in blog format.

Taito HEY/Hirose Honsya Bldg.

A Day in Akihabara (Episode 03 - Coming Someday)Club SEGASuper Potato - Coming SomedayList of EpisodesIntroduction to the Series

Club SEGA

A Day in Akihabara (Episode 03 - Coming Someday)Taito HEYSuper Potato - Coming SomedayList of EpisodesIntroduction to the Series

A Day in Akihabara (Episode 03 - Coming Someday)
Club SEGA
Super Potato - Coming Someday
List of Episodes
Introduction to the Series

A Day in Akihabara (Episode 03 - Coming Someday)
Taito HEY
Super Potato - Coming Someday
List of Episodes
Introduction to the Series