For me, arcade machines are retro. They’re those strange little corners of retro cabinets in various malls. And museums. In Japan, it’s a different world.
People come to the arcade halls in teams. They play some kind of flying robots, 4 versus 4. Like Counter-Strike, basically, only with joysticks and flying Transformers. The graphics are excellent, by the way.
The music machines deserve a category of their own. And no, these aren’t just variations on Guitar Hero or DDR. They’re some kind of cosmic contraptions whose point I personally couldn’t figure out in 15 minutes of trying.
And of course there’s gambling — pachinko, in other words. Officially it’s banned in Japan. But when has that ever stopped people who love a bet? The mechanic goes like this: you buy a bucket of little metal balls and start pouring them into the machine. The machine does something. Honestly, I couldn’t tell what was happening in there. It all buzzes and flashes to a degree that really ought to give the players epileptic seizures. In the end, if you survive, you can win more metal balls and trade them for a prize — a Naruto figurine, say. And around the corner there’s always a shop that will buy that figurine off you for real yen. So technically you’re just winning a prize. But de facto — it’s pure gambling.
One more thing. All the arcade halls are extremely smoky. Japan doesn’t fight all that hard against smoking. Life expectancy is presumably too high there as it is.