|
Roughly a year ago I traveled to Tokyo, Japan for the DiGRA2007 Conference. During the trip I frequented Tokyo's numerous arcades - here's an article from my old blog republished to coincide with my friend Mika's month-long trip to Japan. Mika, if you are reading this, don't forget to visit the arcades!
I was really drawn towards the arcade / CCG games in the arcades I visited in Tokyo. Unfortunately, the language barrier (I must admit that I can't read a word of Japanese) combined the relatively high cost to start playing one of these games (1000 yen for the starter deck, 200 yen for the arcade card and 200 yen per game, totaling just under 15 dollars or 9 euros for your first game) prevented me from testing them so I just stood and watched.
 
The World Club Championship Football Game seemed amazing. The cards used in this game are very similar to the collectible football cards of famous professional players. The player puts the footballer cards on the pitch thus creating the tactical formation in the game. The screen then shows the progression of the game. The player can use various action buttons to give orders to players during the gameplay. How specific those orders are, I'm not sure, but I would imagine that they are more general in nature (e.g. use the right flank, long pass etc.) than very specific ones. The player also can make substitutions as well as changes to his formations by moving the footballer cards. I think that this kind of gameplay is really easy to grasp because of the familiar cultural objects like the collectible cards with famous footballers. I wish that I could have played a game like this with my football cards when I was a kid (I had the whole set of EC '84 cards available in Finland)! So if the game simulation engine is good, I could see this being a great success in Europe, too. And I would really like to see it imported as well.
Of the other games, the baseball game (with similar gameplay) seemed to be very popular. As the sport itself, the gameplay seemed to be very slow-paced, with people smoking and sometimes even reading manga comics while they were playing. The were also a couple of fantasy-themed games, of which one seemed to be a strategy game while the another was a RPG-type of game. The game uses RFID technology with the cards (a fact that I checked from this blog entry on CCG games in Japanese arcades in The Asian Power Hour blog). The blog entry also has more information about the RPG CCG games so go check it out!
Closing thoughts on these kinds of games: I think the notion of CCGs in various types of games could work very well virtually, too. Maybe as a way to introduce micro-transactions and/or item trade to your own indie multiplayer game?
A year later: I haven't really been active in the arcade games area, but from what I've seen there have been no massive arrival of these kinds of games to Finland. We'll see if there ever will be. If you've seen something like this, please enlighten me.
|
