The last few games I played in Japan that I haven’t already mentioned are related to Mario, so I’ll put them in one last post here. I already talked about the SMB3 pinball and the two medal games, but there were more. Most of the Nintendo merchandise available from gachapons and cranes was also Mario, regrettably, although Splatoon had its fair share of tat.

Mario Kart Arcade was fairly common, one of the three released versions anyway. Even though we have a unit of the second game here at home, we ended up playing that in Japan anyway. It’s not great, but DX (the third one) was more fun; the controls felt better and the track designs more interesting, not to mention looking nicer. But despite this and its bizarrely large selection of items (although you are randomly assigned only 3 per race), it feels lesser than the home versions. Of course, the full-body experience with the wheel and pedals is a novelty, but on the other hand the running commentary I could do without.

Luigi’s Mansion Arcade feels like a pretty standard arcade co-op light-gun shooter, but with a charming layer of Luigi’s Mansion theming over it. You get to hold a vacuum cleaner and try sucking everything in sight, but it skewed quite difficult so we didn’t play long. I guess it turns out we sucked at it. That was a vacuum cleaner joke.

Mario & Sonic at the Rio Olympic Games has an arcade version that’s already out apparently. It has a selection of events that use its unique input system which involves you running on the spot and two movable joysticks with buttons. It’s all a bit unwieldy; I tried the hurdles and did pretty poorly. I didn’t get anywhere near the full grasp of the game though, since your credit only lets you into one event and there were around six or more.

And that’s it for my experiences in Japanese arcades. Stay tuned for another post on my game-related purchases, and then finally I can get around to 2015 look-back stuff.