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I just finished reading Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers, a book by Brian Ashcraft (of Kotaku fame) with Jean Snow. As the title clearly states, its a book focused on Japanese arcades, the history behind them, and the games you might expect to see inside one today. If you're at all interested in the history of arcade games, you'll probably enjoy seeing bits and pieces of it from the Japanese perspective. Ashcraft and Snow do a good job of digging up historical information, though the book is more squarely focused on more recent events, up to and including the current sensation, games that combine card collecting and strategy gaming.

In fact, the book is broken up by genre, rather than going in some kind of chronological order. It's pretty natural, though, and each section reads like a separate, compartmentalized essay on the subject. It covers crane games (or UFO catchers, if you will), Print Club-style sticker machines, rhythm games, shooters, fighting, gambling games, big dedicated light gun or driving cabinets, retro classics, and the aforementioned strategic card games. Having been to a handful of Japanese arcades over the last decade, where I would occasionally hopp into booths to get some purikura stickers made with my face on them, I found it especially fascinating to read about how those machines developed, and why they aren't the moneymakers they used to be.

The book is peppered with brief interviews and quotes from the people in and around that business. So you'll get to see some of Alex Rigopulos' take on the music genre, Goichi Suda's thoughts on the classics (including his love of Elevator Action), and words from Yu Suzuki on After Burner and some of his other early big-cabinet hits. The book keeps a pretty personal tone throughout and brought back some pretty vivid memories about the time I've spent in Japanese game centers while over there to cover Tokyo Game Show, SpaceWorld, or even JAMMA's show devoted to showing off new arcade games.

If you don't have those specific memories, though, you'll probably learn even more about what makes Japanese arcades tick, and it provides some meaningful insight into why they still exist today, while over here in the States, arcades have practically become a distant memory. Actually, reading the book made me wish I was back over there. I could be sitting in a smoke-filled basement right now, getting worked over badly by the locals in a game of Street Fighter IV. Man, TGS 2009 can't come soon enough.

But I'll refrain from waxing nostalgic about all the weird stuff I've encountered in Japanese arcades and just say that this is a well-written and knowledgeable take on the topic that I think anyone with a real interest in games would find fascinating. If you're interested in checking this out for yourself, it's available on Amazon.

In the interest of maintaining transparency, I should also note that we're messing around with Amazon affiliate links at the moment and that we get some sort of percentage of kickback when you buy things (not just the book) through the provided link. That makes it a viable way to support Giant Bomb, if you're into that sort of thing.