The news in brief, once again secondarily reported from excerpts of The Stinger Report.
At the recent ATEI gaming trade show in London, two new dance games were displayed: DDRX and Pump it Up: Absolute. While reading through the report, these two excerpts caught my eye:
“During the show, the machine was overrun by the leading Dancing Stage fan players from across the internet. ATEI’09 had worked with Stinger Report owners KWP to come up with a comprehensive plan to deal with the Non-Trade problem at the show. Though it is impossible to hold back the tsunami of fan players interested in the latest BeMani titles, a need to manage the needs to promote the game and to sell the game (without a hoard of sweating players) proved an interesting challenge.”
“On the UDC booth the company had the highly anticipated ‘Pump It Up!: NX Absolute’ (PC Hardware) – the game was mobbed by fans of the dancing stage title during the show.”
Let me be the first, and perhaps only person to say: WTF. Two things catch my attention here. First, a horde of sweaty players? That’s awesome. A special Infinity Injun shoutout to S34n, who was among those sweaty players, and who I can only assume was one of the first people to have to deal with the retarded cultural logistics programme these morons apparently decided to implement.
Second of all, is the entire industry collectively retarded? If you operate an arcade, of all the factors you could possibly know about a game, which is more important: that it uses a USB memory stick to store player data, that it has a 37 inch screen or, oh yeah, that “it is impossible to hold back the tsunami of fan players”?
One of these things is not like the other. Maybe the only reason arcades are dying is because operators don’t actually know how to run a business.
-Kilroy Del Dancefighter Economist the First
Infinity Injun no Chousenjou 