Today we did some running with a couple in-laws. In this case “running” typically means going to Aeon shopping center in Joetsu City and window shopping whilst our oldest and youngest play games in an arcade.

Japanese arcades (which they call game centers) are overwhelming experiences of noise and light. When I was a kid the closest we got to this was a proper pinball arcade with lots of bells, clattering, flashing lights and swearing. The later arcades with computer games and skee ball and Pop-a-Shot didn’t have that level of sensory overload. (That didn’t, however, stop me from spending my future a quarter at a time.)

Japanese arcades, though, seem designed to be loud. They all seem to play music and they all have flashing lights. A lot of the games also involve physical exertion: beating on drums, dancing on foot pads, and shooting things that scream. The worst was a horse racing game that required the contestants to ride a plastic horse. this involved holding a ski position and rocking the horse for three or four minutes.

Some of the Japanese games also have the potential to lead to fights.

My favorite was called World Cup 2000 (or something like that) and it was best described as a “versus” game. Imagine two identical games sitting back to back and connected by cables. It was designed, in theory, for friends to play against each other. However, if you’re by yourself, as you’re playing a game, someone on the other side puts 100 yen (about a dollar) into the machine and suddenly, your game is interrupted and you are playing the other person for control of the console.

Whoever wins gets to keep playing–if you win, you go back to your old game–whoever loses has to put more money in and play for control or move to another machine. You may never see the face of the guy who steals your best game (and it’s always your best game ever when someone hijacks it). Or you may go to the other side and strangle a dollar out of him.

Our girls are big fans of a game called Pretty Rhythm and it’s sequel Prism Paradise. They combine fashion and trinkets. Each time they played, the first game gave them a computer readable stone that could be used to change the clothes of the game character. The game was popular enough it spawned an Anime series the girls were also fans of. My oldest is enough of a fan that she follows the voice performers like rock stars. Our house overfloweth with heart-shaped stones about the size of a US quarter. Some of them are rare, some of them are ordinary.

Luckily, the threat of having millions of little plastic hearts dumped on their property by thousands of irate parents encouraged the maker to incorporate a way to use the old “stones” in the new game. The new game issues tickets with removable tabs that can be shared between friends. After designing the outfit, the player than has a series of games involving pushing various buttons in the correct rhythm to make the fashionable characters perform music better. At the end of the game points and results can be stored on cards.

When this game finally fades away, I’m going to have a lot of cards and “stones” to dump in front of the Takara Tomy headquarters.