Okay, this is the arcade everyone insists to me is the biggest and most retroiest in the area. This is my best bet to satisfy my desire to play some original Gradius series cabinets. If I find nothing interesting in here, this will be the last post in this thread.
*Walks in the door, first thing I see* WHAT!!!
Oh god. Oh god this was a mistake. I'm going to lose so much money here

Is that good

(It's not very good, I can do better at home gradewise if nothing else. In my defense I was adjusting to a new control surface?)

All of my respect to Sex
They have the money exchanger game! (It's really good, it's Magical Drop but better.)
Is this… did they… is this a fucking Tokemeki Memorial tie-up block drop puzzle game??!

They had everything I was looking for here! Gradius II, Salamander/Lifeforce, Gradius III. The cabinets were all modded for auto fire, with little knobs to adjust autofire rates. My RSI appreciates it.

NES Gradius II was Japan exclusive for mapper reasons; it is lightyears beyond the US Gradius. But it turns out when this impossible-feeling NES title is a pale shadow of the arcade version. I have no words for the scale of this thing.

Now, Gradius 3 on the other hand.

I learned things. About the world, and about myself. I thought I was good at Gradius. I am not good at Gradius. I am nothing.

The Gradius III for Super Nintendo is a cheat. A lie. The world made soft and survivable, for us fragile fleshy things. The true Gradius III, the arcade Gradius III, is not for beings of flesh. You must ascend to something greater to survive in that space. I spent $9 and could not escape level one.

Gradius II does something interesting on the high score entry. It lets you pick a gender and shows a corresponding icon on the high score screen. But in *II*, unlike III at least, it also lets you pick an *age*… and your gendered headshot ages depending on what you enter!
Here is @spookysquid playing "Tower of Druaga"

So this is "Quartus", the game that asks the question "what if Tetris were a shmup?". It does *not* ask the question "*should* Tetris be a shmup?"; and for this hubris, I love it.

EDIT: That is a typo, it is Quarth

@mcc this was my childhood favorite!
@mcc Where is the Metal Hawk cabinet pictures?! Don't tell me she's not there anymore.

@mcc

Oh, arcade Gradius III is a bullet hell game. It's fuckin INSANE. Supposedly, you can unlock that mode by hitting 'A' very very rapidly at the title screen on the Super version, but I could never get it to work.

I do remember loving the music. Wonderful music. TBH, I play it every now and then almost exclusively for the music and a pretty distraction (I love the level designs, too). I cannot play fast twitch or real bullet hell games, so I don't even bother going on anything but Normal. 😅

@mcc I guess that's why in the last starfigther, they come find one of the human able to defeat a game on arcade cabinet
@mcc Dropping this here in case you need help coming down off a Gradius high:
https://youtu.be/wtAg2t5P-cE?feature=shared
KONAMI lofi hip hop for chill/study/relaxing beats!

YouTube

They had some VERY good t shirts here, but this lead to only frustration for me as

- City Connection shirt but no City Connection cab

- As with every graphic tee I've seen in Japan, and in general almost every graphic tee in nerd space, only the unisex cut!! No baby tees, no tanks. How do you make a City Connection shirt that girls cannot wear!! How *dare* you!!

The Nintendo Store has the same problem.

Oh, and speaking of the Nintendo store—

I am about to make an *extremely* poor financial decision.

@mcc

Ooooooh. I too would make a poor financial decision.

@The4thCircle I actually sent this post after the picture was taken and in retrospect I made a good financial decision.
@The4thCircle I am an excellent gambler. Do you know why? Because I don't gamble

@mcc

I don't gamble for money but I'm a sucker for randomised trinkets.

@The4thCircle I gambled for randomized trinkets and I made an extremely rational decision about when to stop

@mcc

Which one(s) did you get?

@The4thCircle Actually, this is just about everything I'd hoped for.

The only thing I'm missing from the set that I actually wanted is an AB from an NES controller. But my estimation is that if I were to play the gacha until I got that particular item, I'd have spent more money on the gacha than it would cost to buy the AB by itself on ebay or something. EV is everything.

@mcc @The4thCircle are these literally just trinkets of components of Nintendo controllers?
@tedmielczarek @The4thCircle yes. You can get them only from a gatcha machine at the Nintendo store.
@mcc @The4thCircle I don't know why but I love those

@mcc

Cool you got the best one (analogue stick from a N64 controller).

@mcc do they function as fidget toys or are they solid?
@whimsy they are fidget y! Someone said you can even use the N64 stick to repair a real N64 controller. I assume this is the same production line/specs as the NSO controller
@mcc @The4thCircle I can't stop smirking at the dumb idea of someone shouting, "GIMME THE D... uhh, pad" at the machine.
@kevingranade @The4thCircle actually, and this is not a joke, it sort of gave me too much D

@mcc

https://jp.mercari.com/item/m77521225636

Need to count time to make sure the person ships if to you on time (if you’re in a place a week that should be good enough, usually people are good enough to do a couple days especially if you message them)

@mcc @The4thCircle Oh! I would love to have a real working split SNES controller! https://mastodon.social/@vl_tone/109844157104236825

@The4thCircle Update: ヤッタ!

(It turns out the Japanese local equivalents of eBay are really good…)

@mcc @The4thCircle Perhaps the prevalence of gatchapon generates a consistent secondary market that props up internet auction websites?

@01d55 @mcc

That makes about as much sense as anything else.

@mcc

So uh.... What search term should I use if I wanted to find one of those gacha N64 analogue stick units online?

@mcc oh! we've read about one-handed controllers! supposedly they became popular for use with RPGs, where people would use the other hand to write notes. that looks fun!
@mcc but this one's just a toy...?
@ireneista they're not real! They're fidget devices.
@ireneista @mcc there is a one handed switch controller shaped like a pokeball for pokemon let's go. I think it could also be used to store a pokemon and keep it with you?
@mcc 600 JPY currently are 3.87 USD. Where's the poor decision?
@mcc I can’t start to express how badly I want those things.
@Sylvhem obtaining them has been a core goal of this trip lol
@mcc lately my move has been buying tee shirts that are way too big and wearing them as boxy dresses but this only works if your body type is wacky wavy inflatable arm flailing tube man, *and also* requires that the store carries sizes above XL which is also very rare
@mcc I felt similar distress when BoxLunch only had 'Daria' apparel in women's cuts. No 'Sick Sad World' t-shirt for me.

@mcc the autofire mod sounds pretty sick.

and gradius 2 is a blast, i have the saturn port which i think is pretty accurate to the arcade?

@mcc This is delightful. I do love Gradius 3 and accessibility options. One of my favorite things about my steam deck is how you can set up a turbo for any button. Great for not reinjuring my RSI.
@mcc Does that cab have a knob for autofire speed??

@leona yes. Yes it does.

The gradius 3 cabinet had *four* auto fire speed knobs. I never figured out how the fuck they worked, and lost a whole credit to trying to fiddle with them as spaceships flew at me.

@mcc Yeah, that one's considered the best licensed version of that game (←saying "licensed" as if both games weren't Konami IP)
@leona before I realized this was tokemeki memorial I took a video specifically to send to you and ask what it was