Undercrank

If there’s one thing the Japanese take very seriously, it’s fun.  Amusement arcades seem to be part of everyday life and culture, and I got the distinct impression that dropping by for a quick game of Gundam: Senjou no Kizuna (that’ll be giant flying robots with guns to the rest of us) on the way home was quite socially acceptable.

That said, with the short amount of time I had in the city I took a hint from one of the my wife’s Japanese colleagues and headed over to Odaiba to the Sega Joypolis; a very much weather-proof ‘indoor theme park’.  Even better, being a weekday evening there wasn’t a queue to be seen and there’s even a discount rate of 2,500 yen for coming in at that time of day.

I’d gone in with some reasonably tepid expectations of arcade machines, maybe a few more interactive things along the lines of the content at the old SegaWorld in London’s Trocadero, but what I didn’t expect was this:

Basically, it’s a life-size snowboarding half-pipe simulator, and it’s the single greatest thing I’ve ever seen in gaming.   Yeah, gaming – it’s interactive. As you’ll see in the video, after a few initial ups and downs you get to tap the board with your feet to intiate a spin. Hit the board right on the bottom of the halfpipe and you’ll score three points, otherwise it’s just the one. The winner at the end gets a bit of self satisfaction and enthusiastic clapping from the Sega staff.

I don’t think I can adequately describe it better than my scrappy video capture.  The one thing that mightn’t come across is that it goes way higher than you think, and despite any suggestions that it’s nausea-inducing you’ll want to try it at least twice to double check that it really was that much fun.