Tokyo Blog

Doosh! Found Super Potato as planned. It’s amazing, but if you want to pick up some archaic silicon, you’d better be packing a full wallet (Japan, being a cash culture, is a place where shops don’t often accept credit cards). That said, you can just as easily treat it like a museum. They have every console I can remember with a seemingly hand-picked selection of all the best and rarest games for them. They also stock a massive range of game soundtracks, including 8-bit, that they play in the shop, and broadcast outside the shop to guide you in. My new favourite hangout though is up on the top floor. A smokey room full of arcade machines, cocktail tables, a life-sized model of Snake from Metal Gear Solid, and some one-armed bandits. The machines are by Tecmo, and alow you to select any game from the extensive library stored within. A bit like MAME, I guess. Thinking about it, they probably are using MAME; I can’t see how else those machines could work. It was also funny how the natives watched my screen out of the corners of their eyes as I started to play X-Men vs Street Fighter, and were shocked when I started stringing combos up. Didn’t they know we imported this stuff into England since the 70’s? As I remember it, Cornwall was where I played the most arcade machines. Back then I didn’t realise that all the good stuff came from Japan.