#a-button

Pengo is a very early, perhaps prehistoric, Sega game. It comes from the Pac-Man maze game craze, and in this one you are a penguin who runs around hitting monsters with ice blocks. There was actually a very minor revival a little while back, complete with an HD Pengo that was eventually ported to 360. The sign is a remnant of that campaign. If you go to Mikado you can play an original Pengo on a cocktail cab, which I was thrilled by. Like all Sega mascots, Pengo is inherently comforting. Approaching A-Button at night is nice: the rest of the area is asleep and you're walking towards one dim source of light. Despite the nice TV setup, A-Button is not really a place where you go and play videogames; it's a place for people who like videogames to go have a drink. I found it because a good friend of mine used to live in Akiba and became a beloved regular there. When I was in Tokyo for the first time back in '12, I was there pretty frequently: I even celebrated the new year there! Not so much this trip, as I was on my job (this project) the entire time. Early to rise and early to bed didn't didn't leave me a lot of time to settle down with a beer. The night these photos were taken was actually the first time, two days from the end of my trip, that I let myself relax. Right before that I had had deer and sake at a yakiniku place, and I was so tired that pretty much any alcohol hit me like a ton of bricks. So uh, then I took all these pictures! It was honestly kind of a challenge not to use everything I had, and the one thing I didn't have was a nice long view of the bar (as, uh, we were kinda sitting at it). Not pictured are the shelves full of game hardware boxes from 32X to Densha de Go to Super Scope. Honestly, there might be one more page in this section when I'm done with the project. You'll also note that everything is really close in: well, it's a tiny place. You'll note that a lot of this doesn't necessarily have the girls in it: I realized after the point that because a lot of these pictures are so packed with stuff that putting the characters in there blocks the view of something interesting. This is directly referenced when we get to the autograph wall. The MD+Mega CD+ Mega Adapter you see here is the other version of the “Sega Tower”. You know, when you put together a Genesis and a Sega CD and a 32X. The Mega Adapter allows Master System games to fit as well. Technically speaking, the MD is based on the SMS and it can already play SMS games: it just needs a port for them. There's a couple of lines of arcade cabinet model kits lately. I nearly bought Hang-On on this trip, but I didn't come back to Natsu-ge after the first time like I had expected to. When things are slow and it's late (it was late when we got there!) it's time to chill in the back of the bar with its big TV and array of consoles plugged in. Last time I was there we all watched Exceedraft. I'm not going to make notes of every single thing on the shelf, but it's a pretty impressive collection. Those are my friends there. I put Necomasa heads on them, but it's significantly more difficult when you have a close-up like this. In the case of the guy who (in the actual photo) has his hand over his face), there was really nothing I could do to replicate that pose, so I didn't try. “Compu gacha” was a free-to-play practice in which the game would offer a special bonus for players who got every item being offered on the rare gacha during an event. Basically, the last one or two items would have ridiculously bad odds to obtain, but the player, feeling invested and obligated, would spend as much as it took to get them. Basically, developers had whales on the hook and were shaking them down for everything. This practice was actually made illegal for being too exploitative even for mobile games, which is really saying something. There's a “hall of fame” here for the gifts that folks left. I did some of the research on who was who here, but ultimately I left that research out since I didn't have it all (especially the signed FC games). The most famous is certainly the signed copy of ZUN's Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. You might also recognize the authors of Tokyo Toy Box (center) and Eroge no Taiyou (left). I couldn't find anything on the one on the right! Continuing the joke, I put Necomasa over Shin, the owner's, face here in his photo with Takahashi. Finally, the business card wall. Again, I tried to keep visible notables... visible. Swery is conspicuous, and I'm fond of Jake Kazdal's games (Skulls of the Shogun, Galak-Z). If you don't know any kanji, you probably would still like to know that Takenobu Mitsuyoshi (!!!) is on the right of the wall too. There's also Chibi-Tech, who will help the girls personally later in the book~ I really did forget to bring a KKC card. It was something I had specifically intended to do. Finally, I snuck in the wall of gamepads over the bar. Necomasa wants to paw at them.