free play

FREE PLAY

Scott and I found a completely free play arcade with beers on tap in the basement of a grocery in our neighborhood. It even had a fleet of TV’s with SNES, NES, and Sega Genesis with seats and couches. I was astounded that literally no one is ever down there.

I was pretty excited at the prospect of being able to play TMNT: Turtles in Time from start to finish for $0. Even more excited about the Street Fighter II cab. The heavy kick button is a little sticky but a small part of me wants to show up one afternoon with a little rubbing alcohol to sort it out (a damp cotton ball in a Ziploc––normal behavior). I usually play Street Fighter Alpha 2 at the Barcade down the street from us and nothing will quite scratch a hyper combo finish the same way, but having a free SFII cab ain’t a bad thing. I’m a regular at the kind of gay bar that has a pool table, metal music playing, and a couple of arcade cabinets and I wish I could get one of these older, beat up cabs in there. The two cabs they have are out of service!

The past couple of weeks I’ve been on a troubleshooting journey with my 電車でGO! (Densha De Go / Let’s Go By Train!) controller. For the uninitiated, I am very into trains. And I love train simulators. In general, I’m very much into public infrastructure. I think living, social beings deserve robust access to their cities and communities and one fantastic means of doing this is through maintained, responsive train/lightrail planning and protected bike paths. Beyond this, trains are just fucking cool. It transports so many people at once, you get an impeccable view of the world, sometimes there’s a café car? So many good reasons to love it. Pretty much the entire developed world except the U.S.A. has robust public transit in and outside of their cities with government-subsidized ticketing. Of those, Japan has such a wide bevy of amazing trains and land by which they run through.

Densha De Go! is a 22-year-old Japanese train simulator series published by Taito (recently Square Enix via acquisition). It started as an arcade game in 1996 and was first released for the PSX in 1997. The game is known for its true-to-reality train routes and equally exacting demands for arriving at each train stop on time, sometimes within 30cm of the goal. Each Densha De Go! title typically comes with its own proprietary controller (with a cutout for a conductor’s pocket watch) for the player to use. I like most of the designs. Thus far, there’s a one-lever and two-lever system. In a two-lever system, one controls the brakes and the other controls acceleration. In a one-lever system, there’s one vertical range in which you can pull down to brake and up to accelerate. I don’t like it very much. I like occupied hands.

Some play Densha De Go to get near-perfect at being a fictional train conductor. I hope I naturally get better over time, but I play to exist in and enjoy the world I’m in as I ride through it. I love a nice ride through a rainy evening or a windy autumn day. Something about the paper mache graphics of the PS2 era is equally enchanting. Somehow it’s simultaneously nostalgic and unkown, as many fantasy worlds I’ve explored through RPG’s shared a similar fidelity.