Weekly Obscure Arcade Games

Posting about 1 interesting/strange/obscure arcade game a week, DM for submissions (may not post every week)

[1arcadegameaweek]

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Welcome to Weekly Obscure Arcade Games!

This is a blog ran by @pulstar-tb where I post about arcade games I find interesting every Wednesday!

Have a game submission? Send it in DMs!!

(PFP is the eye from the X-DAY duology, taken from X-DAY 2, games shown in the banner are Balance Try and Gynotai)

[1arcadegameaweek]

Flamin Finger Tournament Edition (2005)

Developer: Dell Electronic Labs

Publisher: Namco

Hardware: Unknown (Likely hardware made for these games specifically?)

Dump Status: Undumped

Flamin Finger was originally a redemption arcade game released in 2003, where you have to quickly trace a randomly-generated maze from start to finish before time runs out. The amount of tickets you get once time runs out is dependent on your progress through the maze. However, when you start getting near the end, the timer will rapidly speed up. If the game hasn’t been played enough for it to decide to let you win the jackpot (achieved by finishing the maze), the timer will speed up an unfair amount.

There was also a merchandiser variant released in 2004, which would allow you to pick from a number of prizes behind locked doors once the jackpot is won, rather than tickets.

However, the final version of the game, Flamin Finger Tournament Edition, was released in 2005. This version of the game is HEAVILY different from the others, as it is entirely designed around competitive multiplayer!!

The game allows for up to 8 people, and even supports multiple games going at once!!

Due to now being designed as a multiplayer game, it’s now completely different from the original version. Before, you only had 1 single maze, and a timer that would speed up near the end. Here, however, the timer does not speed up, and, depending on how much time you have left at the end of a maze, it’ll warp you to a higher level, with a more complex maze!

When you run out of time, it will save what level you achieved to both its daily and all-time leaderboards! This is also when it will dispense your tickets, as it’s still a redemption game.

Unfortunately, this appears to be the rarest version of the game, as I have only ever found a single video of this being played, and it’s only a single player game as well.

[1arcadegameaweek]

Abnormal Check (1996)

Developer: Namco

Publisher: Namco

Hardware: Namco ND-1

Dump Status: Dumped

Abnormal Check (アブノーマルチェック) is a quiz game from Namco that determines how weird or abnormal the player is!

The game starts out by showing how many coins have been inserted, which determines how many players (up to 3) will be playing.

After this, each player will choose their gender, and whether or not they're an adult or a minor. Once this is done, the players must select a category of questions. These include categories based on finance, personality, 'taste', 'experience', love, and even a category based on the location in Japan the players are (this is configured in the game's service menu)!

Once this is done, the game will now start the quiz, which consists of multiple rounds with several questions relating to the category. Each player answers the question provided with either the A or B buttons, and when everyone has answered and/or time runs out, the game reveals what % of people have picked either A or B. If any player is on the majority side, they get more points, while players on the minority lose points. When the game is finished, the cabinet prints out the game's results.

The amount of points each player has affects how the final cutscene plays out. These can be very bizarre, as one of them involves the male character sleeping with the female one, before reaching for a gun. However, when he turns back to shoot her, it turns out she was holding a knife, planning to kill him as well!

These characters also have a ton of animations that can play out after each answer! There are many for picking the majority, as well as picking the minority, and there's even animations that can play out differently when there's multiple players! These include getting picked up by an eagle, getting struck by lightning, flexing muscles, smoking a cigarette, and some even involve legacy Namco characters, such as getting eaten by Pac-Man and getting blown up by Dig-Dug!

The game's soundtrack is also very notable, being composed by Akihiko Ishikawa, who later went on to create the 2000 song series for Taiko no Tatsujin!!

The Mishima family from Tekken makes a cameo in the game's attract mode, and one of the tracks in the game is even directly titled 'Mishima Family'

[1arcadegameaweek]

Polynet Warriors (1993)

Developer: Konami

Publisher: Konami

Hardware: Konami Polygonet

Dump Status: Dumped

Polynet Warriors is a first-person shooter by Konami. This game is highly notable due to it being their first 3D arcade game!

The objective is to shoot enough enemies to get more points than them when time runs out. If you die, you jump back in after the game shows what killed you, though this gives the enemies a point.

The game starts out with a choice of 3 courses, with the third one being the hardest. Each one has their own ending theme once cleared, complete with vocals!!

The game was also designed to be played with other people via linked cabinets, and it allowed for a maximum of 4 players!!

This game specifically was never released outside of Japan, but it served as the basis for the tank game Polygonet Commanders, which was released in the US. This game retains many features from Polynet, though it is very different, from not just controls but also how the single player mode plays out.

[1arcadegameaweek]

Ganbare Ginkun (1995)

Developer: Tecmo

Publisher: Tecmo

Hardware: Tecmo 16

Dump Status: Dumped

Ganbare Ginkun (がんばれギンくん) is a minigame collection where you play as either Gin or Ham (depending on if you’re P1 or P2), as they take part on a radio gameshow, hosted by GatsuGatsu.

When the game starts, you have the option to pick from 3 courses, which have an increasing number of rounds. Every round has a set amount of minigames that need to be completed before moving on to the next. Each course has their own set of unique cutscenes that can play out at the start and end of every round, which can change depending on a choice you get at the start of a round.

The minigames are very bizarre, matching the game’s unconventional doodle artstyle. They range from getting your head blown off into the sky and having to move to have your head land back on your body, to keeping a bomb from detonating by urinating on the burning part of the fuse (which also turns the character into the Mannekin Pis statue)!!

The boss theme from Final Star Force is used in some of this game’s minigames, and is titled as ‘FSF!’ in the soundtrack.

Gin and GatsuGatsu would end up reappearing in the Monster Rancher series, as Doodle and Sketch respectively. Doodle’s moves reference minigames from this game, involving the chicken motorcycle and the boot!

[1arcadegameaweek]

Gynotai (1996)

Developer: Namco

Publisher: Namco

Hardware: Namco ND-1

Dump Status: Partial (Only revision 1.04 is dumped)

Gynotai is the first in the Almighty Human Project series, a series of games centered around preparing the player for an apocalyptic event. It’s played with three balls, each on their own rail. The game has 3 categories for its minigames, which include SKILL, BRAIN, and BODY.

SKILL minigames consist of hitting targets at a very precise time, BRAIN minigames involve number puzzles, such as quickly adding 2 numbers of 3 up to 7, while BODY minigames mostly consist of hitting things as much as you can. At the end of each minigame, you’re given a rank from E- to A+, and each minigame’s rank is averaged out at the end. After a playthrough, you’re given a receipt which lists off your results, and has different things appear depending on your averaged rank.

The game is marked as non-working in MAME, but all you need to do to bypass the error that comes up is to turn off the printer in the service menu, though the graphics emulation is still largely broken and unfinished.

[1arcadegameaweek]

Tesou Uranai Chotto Misete (1995)

Developer: Sega AM1

Publisher: Sega

Hardware: Sega System 32

Dump Status: Undumped

Fortune telling arcade machines gained quite a bit of popularity through the mid-90’s, and Sega threw their hat in the ring a few times, but one of their most interesting attempts was Tesou Uranai Chotto Misete (手相うらない ちょっとみせて), which is special in the fact that it actually scans your palm!

Not much is known about it, as not only is it undumped, but it also isn’t very well documented online. The only good source of information is several blog entries from a developer who worked on the game.

(NOTE: As the source is entirely in Japanese, the information might not be 100% accurate)

The game uses hardware from a company named Omron, which is all used to scan the palms. The game takes a picture of your hand in the hand space, and the hardware looks for the shape of your life, head, and intelligence lines, and returns the results as numbers to the game.

However, the hardware was pretty slow, as it took around a minute to finish analysis. When it was all done, the game would then start printing your results, but this also took a while, as printers at this time were pretty slow. So to pass the time, the game displays your results on-screen, and runs a quiz about palmistry, all while the results are being printed.

The developers added a secret credits screen, which is accessed by inputting a code on the ‘genre selection’ screen, and by the end of the game, a staff roll would appear. This contained the entire team in the form of their own characters, which also had their own 10-second jingle per person!!

Nearly all of the audio had to be played via CD, as there was so much voice data in the results summaries.

The game was so popular at location tests and the AOU show, that they had to start manufacturing more System 32 boards to make more cabs, despite how the game was initially made on it to get rid of excess boards!

[1arcadegameaweek]

Enma Daio (1993)

Developer: Toaplan

Publisher: Taito

Hardware: Enma Daio Hardware

Dump Status: Dumped

Enma Daio was the last game from Toaplan before they went bankrupt, and it’s a unique game in that it’s a lie detector in the form of a quiz game!!

The player is told at the very start of a credit to place their left hand on this ball that has a polygraph sensor a finger slides into to detect the player’s heartbeat. After this is done, the player selects their gender, and then a category of questions.

The game works by asking you several yes/no questions, and after each answer it shows your heartbeat in the form of a seismogram. If your heartbeat increases quickly after an answer, the game considers you a liar!

After a short recording of your heart, the deity Enma Daio will appear, and will judge you based on if the game considers you a liar or not. He’ll be happy if you answered honestly, and very angry if you lied.

The game has a very large amount of voicelines (every single question is voiced!!), and it all amounts up to 25MB of ADPCM voice sample data!!!

The game was Toaplan’s most expensive project, as former composer Tatsuya Uemura stated that it “cost a lot of money” in a 2009 interview.

[1arcadegameaweek]

Aim For Cash (2004)

Developer: Namco

Publisher: Namco

Hardware: Namco System 10

Dump Status: Undumped

Point Blank is a series of arcade lightgun minigame collections by Namco where every minigame has a specific objective and quota, which is shown before the start of each one. People usually know of the first 3 games (which were also released on the PS1, each with more features, such as PB1's port having a full rpg mode!)

However, there was a very unqiue version of PB3 (which originally released in 2000) called Aim For Cash, released in 2004

It's a much smaller, more barebones version of the game where you can win money by playing well!!

The game deviates from the usual formula, as instead of the typical stage layout (multiple rounds, each with 4 stages to choose from), it instead has 8 randomly picked minigames where, once you clear 3 of them, you then go to the final stage, where you can win the jackpot. This stage has its difficulty upped to be even harder than the highest difficulty in the original trilogy (insane)!!

If you compare the harder-than-insane variant of a minigame from AFC to its insane variant from PB3, its obvious that it was made much harder so it's near humanly impossible to win the jackpot (the target can even end up being just a few pixels, and also moving quickly!!)