The video did feature 7 games that I had never heard of and that the roms had never been dumped, as far as I know and as far as my research was able to reveal. There were two games that appeared to be Breakout knock offs, which held very little interest to me, as I never found the original breakout to be very compelling. There was also a game called Dracula Hunter, which was said to have been a big hit in Japan, but appeared to not have been released in America. It said that the game was so popular it was featured in the comic Game Center Arashi, (Game Center is how Japanese people refer to arcades) which was also made into an animated series. This was also an animated series I had never heard of, and I was curious if I could track it down.
I did find episodes of the show on YouTube, though the subtitles were rather hit or miss. Oddly, the English subtitles, which are auto generated, sometimes appear for very short periods of time, meaning I have to often go back and pause the video if I want to read them.
The first episode I watched involved a game called Galaxy Wars, which I assumed was just made up for the series. The game looked some what rudimentary, as are many games that appear in the series, with the characters being only a single color. After doing a little bit of searching, I found that it was an real game, but again one that I had never heard of.
I was also able to come across the episode in which he played Dracula Hunter, as well as I was able to find a site to play it online. It's an interesting, but somewhat frustrating game, as your weapon is a kind of boomerang, that circles back to you, meaning it sometimes doesn't hit enemies who are directly in front of you. And there is a bat which flies down at incredible speed, making it nearly impossible to hit him, ending in the death of your character.
One of the oddest games I have ever heard of comes from this show, Heiankyo Alien. Heiankyo is an ancient capital of Japan (784 AD-1185 AD), as this game is set in that era and area, which part of modern day Kyoto. To me, it is extremely peculiar and uncommon to not only have a game set in the distant past, but also includes aliens, which were a completely unknown concept in the Heiankyo era. In the game you have to dig holes which the aliens may fall into and them cover them up. In the show they spoke about how the game was developed by the prestigious University of Tokyo Theoretical Science Group. I assumed this was just something that was made up for the show, but in fact is how the game was actually created. Apparently this game was very popular in Japan, and was released in the U.S. as Digger.
There is also one episode that features a game called Pak-Pakman, which appears to be a take off on Pac-Man which I am guessing they were unable to secure the rights to. The game looks vaguely like Pac-man, but the game play seems nearly nonexistent, and complete impossible to follow, as they don't really show any action corresponding with the movements of the joystick by the player. After looking into this further, it appears to be based off a LCD handheld game. The ghosts and player's character flash, making it difficult to follow the action and know if the player is in jeopardy or not.
The series is about a boy named Arashi, who is supposed to be excellent at playing video games is often challenged Chairman Nando, where he has to achieve a certain score or achieve a certain score before his opponent, to escape some trap or as a bet, if he were to lose would mean giving his opponent his red baseball cap, embroidered with an invader character, which appears to be from Space Invaders and his name. Arashi often develops some technique in order to win. Oddly, most of the action of playing the game is that Arashi will hit the buttons and the joystick exceptionally fast, while suspended in the air. I believe he is supposed to be suspended in the air due to his hitting the buttons so rapidly that the counter force of pressing the buttons keeps him in the air. This is one of many very illogical points of this animations. Obviously in any video game (with the exception of Track & Field) hitting the buttons quickly or exceptionally quickly would not help to win the game, in fact it would probably cause the player to lose the game. I wonder if this was done to make the animation look interesting, and perhaps had better and actually logical techniques in the comic books from which this series was adapted. Also, often the objective is to score a certain number of points, which is often something like 50 million. The scores in games vary wildly and arcade games very rarely have scores anywhere near that high (I cannot think of one) so that reaching such a score seems completely impossible, and was a concept added to the series to make the winner or the point at which a player would be declared the winner very clear.
One other odd feature is that Arashi has two extremely large buckteeth, which would be about 15 cm long in real life. It just makes me wonder how he is actually able to talk or eat, as it seems he would never be able to close his mouth.
Still, I am enjoying this animation as has introduced me to many old arcade games that I have never heard of before.
One small side note is that the first game mentioned in the YouTube video was rumored to have had a broken down machine in a amusement park Tamateyama Park, now abandoned, down the street from one of the schools I used to work in. I am rather saddened that I didn't know of that amusement park while I was working there, and may have even been able to visit it while it was still in operation.
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