Friday, January 25, 2008

Shooters and weird music videos at ATEi

I got myself immersed with amusement park, arcade and casino games at Earls Court where ICE, ICEi and ATEi expos were held this week.

The first floor was bling-bling casino games and slot machines. My favorite ones were Big Tony's Casino (Texas Hold'em), Aristocrat's Zorro and Aruze's Lucky Frankie. There were not many mind blowing innovations but some novel features at least.

At the second floor Sega, Namco and Konami and a number of smaller companies were present but Sega pretty much stole the show. There were a lot of shooting games of different sorts at the arcade section. One of the coolest ones was dinosaur shooter Primeval Hunt by Sega.
The main innovation of Primeval Hunt was to utilize free roaming environment. A player would control his path using a touch screen placed near the gun holsters (Ref: ArcadeHeroes). That way it was possible to plan out the entire path at the start of the round. Another cool thing was the way the promoted the "love seat" game see the image :)

Another game which got a lot of attention was UFO Stomper (TrioTech) with its interactive touchscreen floor. ATEi was also full of different types of music and dance games where you could personalize animated characters like in LoveAndBerry or attach your face to animated characters and make a music video out of it. I made a few and they are pretty hilarious! Also guys in green and one guy shooting the "Let me Dance" screen (first two photos) are laughing their heads off with the dance/music video games. Besides cool games different touch pads and screens were vastly used.







Yep you got it - we had a lot of fun at ATEi, ICE & ICEi :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Sonja, Can you play Let Me Dance online? Which company made the game?
Cheers, Bill

Sonja Kangas said...

Hi, Korean company K-River has developed Let me Dance machine. http://k-river.com/eng/product.htm. It is somewhat in line with "prinkla" and "stampla" machines of the 90s. Instead of stickers or stamps people can print out their own music videos in a CD format with covers.