While checking out Nisei week in Little Tokyo I revisited one of my favorite arcades, Japan Arcade. oh yeah!
This place is so cool the C is a Pac-man. Japan Arcade located on the second floor of the Japanese mall in Little Tokyo called Little Tokyo Shopping Center (well thats redundant) is blazing with fun arcade games to past the time. This arcade has a nice big selection of games to play. Many titles not found in the US are here. Many of the games are straight from Japan so the menus are in Japanese, but who cares when most of those games are light shooters.So just take your gun a blow everyone down. One of them I tried was based on the Lupin the 3rd anime. This was a very strange shooter as it changed from the first level of blowing guys away on a train to shooting rocket missiles on wheels, to shooting through glass at a jewelery store and then sucking up diamonds, until I finally died shooting police cars. It was still very different and strange and thats what you want in a Japanese arcade or any arcade. They also had a police woman trainer game I didn't try that had way to much writing on it
The best game you probably haven't tried it Taiko Drum Master. This is my favorite game they have. This is a big arcade machine with two big drums on it that you have to hammer away on in touch with the beat with drum sticks. It's really fun to team up with a friend and complete a
J-pop song. In Japan these machines were updated with new music, but here you only have a choice of about 70 songs. I actually owned the Region 1 ps2 version that came with a drum controller. I rocked out to the dragonball theme song. This is the best arcade machine to try out while your there.
The arcade has all the old stuff to like my old favorite Virtual On, I know it's available for 360 now, but it's just better to play at the arcade.
The arcade also contains a samurai game where you use a sword controller and Ninja Assault which is a Ninja shooter and is very strange.
This arcade has a lot of sit down machines, they even have the new Street Fighter 4 in a sit down style booth. They also have Marvel vs Capcom 2 and other common titles like Metal Slug. I think they have a funny strip video game, but the girls strip to bikinis. They also have one of those fully interactive Dance Dance machines where you have to move you whole body now. Arms and legs, it looks weird. I didn't list all the different machines, so go try it out and I'm sure they'll have at least one machine you like.
-The place seemed quite clean when I went and all the machines seemed to be working. Parking is easy, there are many lots nearby and the mall has it's own parking lot.
-The only problem with this place is that it can be really empty. I think a lot of people were there the day I came because it was Nisei week. Others day I've gone only one other person or no one has been there.
-The arcade is in the same mall with plenty of places to eat and even a supermarket. Try some Japanese snacks like I did. It's a upcoming review on my site.
