Here are the Pix’N Love fellas checking out the book! Below, boozing it in celebration. Congrats, Pix’N Love! I’ll definitely toss up some pics when I get my copy.

Working with Pix’N Love has been a pleasure — everyone on the Pix’N Love team is a class act.

Those interested in acquiring a copy of the French version, click here or check out more details in the embedded link.

Une journee avec Pix [Pix'N Love Editions]

Arcade Mania, the book on Japanese arcades I wrote, will be translated for an upcoming French version.

French game book publisher Pix n’Love Editions will be bringing the book to wider audience. Pix n’Love is best known for its books on the PC Engine and the history of Nintendo (Pix n’Love’s Florent Gorges has a monthly column in Japanese mag Nintendo Dream.)

Pix n’Love was planning to do an arcade book, but fell in love with Arcade Mania and wanted to bring it to the French speaking public. The book will be translated into French by one of the founders of Shmup.com, a great database about shooting games.

The French edition is slated for release this June. Can’t wait.

This week, Konami is releasing Castlevania arcade title Akumajo Dracula THE ARCADE in game centres across Japan.

The deluxe cabinet features a whip-like wand controller. Read game play impressions here and check out the game trailer here.

This is not the first Castlevania arcade game. Konami released Akumajo Dracula in Japanese arcades in 1988, two years after Castlevania first hit the Famicom Disk System. The game, which was an uneven remake of Castlevania, was localised for American arcades in fall 1988 as Haunted Castle. The title also received a Japanese PS2 port, which never got a retail release in the West.

名作アクション『悪魔城ドラキュラ』が体感アーケードゲームに！ [Famitsu]

Ever wonder why I’m in Japan? Or how I got this super duper job? No? Well then, don’t click past the jump. If so, hey, clicky-clack away.

A few weeks back, tech journo Victor Godinez from my hometown paper The Dallas Morning News did a profile on me — and I was finally sent the hard copy by my parents. I’m rather tickled to be in the DMN as it was the first newspaper I ever read.

The article is right next to Dear Abby, and there’s my picture — a picture that my wife says makes me look like it should be on a Wanted Poster.

In the profile, I talk a bit about how I got to Japan, how I got this gig and about arcades and Arcade Mania. There are two versions of the interview: a shorty and a slightly longer Director’s Cut version. Read either, both or neither. Whichever!

Dallas native chronicles Japan’s vibrant arcade culture in book [GuideLive — Short Version]
Interview: Brian Ashcraft, “Arcade Mania: The Turbo-Charged World of Japan’s Game Centers” [GuideLive — Longer Version]

Screw interest rates! Is there a better way to sock money away than this? No dear reader, there ain’t.

You’re looking at a mini replica Space Invaders table top arcade cabinet that’s actually a piggy bank from Takara Tomy. The bank’s LCD screen acts as the coin counter and lights up each time a hundred yen coin is entered. It holds 80 hundred yen coins, which is the equivalent of roughly US$89.

I love tabletop style arcade cabinets. Perfect for playing. Perfect for resting drinks on. Game developer Goichi Suda loves them, too. Learned that he has one in his office when interviewing him for Arcade Mania. One of this in your office — how cool is that?

Space Invaders Piggy Bank [JeanSnow.net]

Girls only. Japan’s Asahi Shimbun has an article about how Japanese arcades are banning men from sticker picture machines. Why’d they do that?

According to the piece, “A growing number of arcade operators are banning men from areas around these machines—popularly known as purikura—to protect customers, such as high school students, from men trying to sneak camera shots, steal their belongings or even pick them up.”

Male-female couples are okay, but not groups of guys or single dudes. Truth is, this has been going on for a while. A long while. A long, long, long while.

However! When I interviewed the folks who manage Shibuya landmark Purikura Mecca, Japan’s most famous sticker picture arcade, for Arcade Mania, I was told that male customers would not be kicked out as long as they were “well-behaved.” Because, hey, they have money, too. Ironic as Purikura Mecca was the first arcade not to allow male-only purikura customers.

‘Purikura’ booths take men out of the picture [Asahi]

Ashcraft is the night guy, so I generally roll into work right as he is hitting bed, and have finished up by the time he comes to work, so I hardly ever get to spend the amount of time talking with him as Crecente, Luke, and McWhertor generally do, so it’s refreshing for me to see so much background info about the process of writing Arcade Mania!. From where the idea first originated to how he picked Player 9, the adorable little scamp addicted to Japanese collectible card arcade games. I didn’t even know mini-Bash’s real name. That’s how little our time coincides.

Having read the book and now this lengthy interview, I now have a bit more insight into Ashcraft’s passion for gaming than our divergent schedules ever allowed me. Nice to get to know him!

GameSetInterview: ‘The Turbo-Charged Making Of Arcade Mania’ [Game Set Watch]

Like arcade game players getting chipped — as in getting some sort of motion controlled implant. While interviewing Suzuki for Arcade Mania, he told us about his interest in new ways of interacting with games:

In Medicine, you have artificial heart devices, or people that have some sort of chips in their bodies, to be able to keep track of vital signs. So, it doesn’t have to be a scary thing, but you could put a sensor here (points to his arm). You know, a bit like in The Matrix.

It’s not really something only in the future, some people already have them, chips in their bodies. If for some that would be a bit too scary, then you could also do something more simple, like using wristbands or a pendant. So using devices like these for sensing would be good I think. I think that for arcades games I want something that’s a bit futuristic.

In Arcade Mania, he also talks about things like the possibility of using cell phones to control arcade games and what “realism” means in arcade cabinet design. In an industry where so many of the pioneering game creators have moved on or have become complacent, Suzuki still seems fresh with innovative ideas for Japanese arcades.

[Pic]

About a month back, out of the blue, I got a phone call from a producer from Nippon Television, one of the country’s major networks. He said he’d seen very positive stuff on the Japanese internet about Arcade Mania. He wanted to know what foreigners thought of Japanese arcades.

We talked for a good bit and he phoned back several times in the following days. Then he said he’d call me back if there were going to do someone on arcades and Arcade Mania.

Time passed, my second son Micro-Bash was born, and I forgot all about it.

Got another call over the weekend from the producer, who said they wanted to interview me for Zoom In. Sure, I said, thinking I’d have to go to Tokyo, but no, they were going to send a camera crew to my house in Osaka to shoot. Oh, okay, great. Everything was happening so fast.

I’m really bad about stuff like this. Like, I get nervous, tongue-tied and generally freeze up. The last time I appeared on TV was for Kotaku when we were all in New York. It was incredibly stressful — and I was being asked simple stuff like when I first started writing for Kotaku and what I thought of blogging. VERY BASIC THINGS. And that was in English, too! I did horrible, I think.

This was gonna be worse: The Japanese TV interview was nationwide and, you guessed it, in Japanese. Wife was worried I’d start blabbering away in the Osaka dialect or come off as rude and embarrass myself into oblivion. I was worried that my face would contort and I’d simply go, “Eh…….” Father-in-law told me, “It’s worse to sound like a nervous idiot than just an idiot. So don’t worry about sounding like an idiot. Just keep talking — even if you make a mistake.”

That’s pretty much what I did. They interviewed me in Japanese. I was exhausted after — I did okay, I guess. Didn’t start crying or throwing up like I thought I would. But was extremely nervous during the whole thing. (I’m shy!) Good thing is that the next English language interview I do will be a cake walk.

The entire segment was something like 8 minutes long (or longer) and was quite interesting! Another reporter interviewed lots of foreigners at Tokyo game centres, asked them what they were keen about. Most said “sticker pictures” or “crane games.”

There was a really funny bit where one guy was just watching some Japanese dude pwn Beatmania and then went up to him after he finished and shook his hand. Another interesting bit: The program polled a bunch of Akihabara tourists about where they wanted to go. The second most popular answer? Game centers.

Arcade Mania is now available on Amazon.

Turns out it reads really well.

I’ve never been a huge fan of books about video games or gaming culture, mostly because most of them seem to forget about the people and instead focus on the technology. Not so with Arcade Mania! The Turbo-Charged World of Japan’s Game Centres. In it, Ash walks you through a typical Japanese arcade game type by game type. But instead of focusing on the games he talks to the people to whom they matter most. From Japan’s UFO Catcher Queen, to Street Fighter champion Daigo “The Beast” Umehara, to Shump champions and DDR dancers, Ash manages to put a face to every game and give us a glimpse into what makes people so fascinated with them.

My foreward for the book on the jump.

Foreward
A Word From a Gamer:
Growing up in the seventies, an Army brat of sorts, arcade games kept me company as my family ping-ponged across oceans and countries. It didn’t matter where we moved, everywhere from Thailand to Texas had arcades, making each new home feel welcoming. Reading through this book taps into those memories: days spent in an empty arcade in Korea playing shoot-em-ups; hours spent in an Officer’s Club playing Frogger; my first Street Fighter fireball at a Texas bowling alley.

It wasn’t until I was managing an arcade in college, years later, that I realised that the arcade cacophony, the flashing lights, the pocket full of quarters, were the hallmarks of a whole generation’s childhood memories. In Japan those memories are still being formed in places like Akihabara, the arcade-laden town of Shangri-La-like import for North American gamers, but the arcades of the West have long since fallen.
But don’t mourn the fall of America’s arcades, a place of pinball, not pachinko; of ticket games, not card games. Instead celebrate the confluence of culture and technology still thriving in Japan.

Brian Crecente
Managing Editor of Kotaku.com, gamer

This reminds me. I need to find an agent and get to work on my book.

Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan’s Game Centers [Amazon]