Guest columnist Vourbot has returned once again with an exclusive hand on review
Hi this is Vourbot, checking in from PAX West with an arcade update. Up the long escalator to the third floor of the new convention building in downtown Seattle. The weather is great, politics are approaching the first world, I’ve bought my can of soda and the sugar tax has been paid, now let’s enter the dark room!
The candy cabs have been sourced from someone’s prized collection, some big rhythm games and other novel cabs line some walls, there are aisles of other more modern Exa Arcadias and Viewlix’s, it’s actually an unbelievable collection. If you followed this stuff and came to PAX this year, you would say something like, “OMG I never thought I’d see this stuff in the same room as long as I lived”.
These are some of the highlights that caught my eye:
First, I played Mushihimesama. This is the cave shmup from 2004 that features the purple bullets and the bugs. And by bugs, I mean all bugs. you ride on the back of your beatle and shoot at giant bugs, ala Nausica of the Valley of the Wind. This game is so rare, I doubt you’d ever see one in the wild. It was a miracle to see it there, loaded up in the Japanese cab.
The Second Miracle: right next to Mushihimesama was one of my favorite pieces, Dodonpachi Daioujou. Dodonpachi Daioujou is the Cave Shmup (again) from 2002, the sequel to the classic, Dodonpachi, third down the line after the original Donpachi.
Next, I visited the Exa Arcadia cabinets. Through some careful four-times-reading of the crazy instructions on how to operate the Exa Arcadia machine, I was able to load up another couple of amazing pieces. First the fantastic Aka & Blue Type-R. This one is special for a few reasons- it was made by ex-Cave team-members, so it’s got all those subtleties locked and loaded, and the other thing is its great bombing mechanic. I this game, you collect golds to boost the strength of your super bomb, which generates golds when it’s released into bullets, which in turn build up your next bomb, so ideally, you could repeatedly drop bombs into bullet-dense areas perpetually, but the invincibility lended by the bomb-drop is just the instant you drop it, not throughout the cycle of generating more gold. So what really happens is you have to adjust your eyes to dodging bullets over a background of bright sparkling gold. It’s hard. But the game is beautiful- soft polygons in high def, often looking pencil shaded or with hand drawn elements. On the negative side, the game was programmed in widescreen format, displayed vertically on the already wide screen, so I experienced all this in a narrow stripe, a little more than Ipad-sized, running up the middle of the screen. Reminiscent of telephone sized, which is the other place you can play this masterpiece, sans joystick.
The Exa Arcadia machine is at the cutting edge of arcade technology, but the navigation of the menu is clunky. I was still able to load up the next, and another favorite of mine, Dondonpachi Saidaioujou. This is the last game Cave made for the arcade before closing shop, and I like to think it is their swan song. The game is just bonkers, and gorgeous. It explores the multi-dimensional cyber-ethics drama of the series over cities on the moon (I think), with enemies as numerous as the bullets, but still shooting the bullets. It truly is a bullet heaven/bullet hell/bullet world. I played the EXA arrangement, and was pleasantly surprised by the subtle changes to the original release- though the volume was low, so I couldn’t check the new music, which I believe was there.
Seeing these rare games was a highlight of the convention for me. So special to have those pieces there!
If you’d like to see more of these games, Mushihimesama and Dodonpachi Daioujou can be loaded up in MAME Multi-Arcade-Machine-emulator, and AKA & Blue Type-R and Dodonpachi Saidaioujou both have telephone iterations, plus there’s some home console ports, but there intended form is Cabinet, Joystick, Buttons.
If you live in Salt Lake City, where I returned to, you can see some of this stuff on the Exa Arcadia cabinet at.