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.

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 I don't know why but I love those