Half-Life 2: Survivor Arcade

With bonus shakey-cell-camera!

Every once in a while (aka, very rarely), I stop into a game arcade. This mostly happens when my wife wants to hit up some purikura (Photobooth) action. The last time I was walking about around Namba in Osaka I stopped in a game center in one of the arcades near the central train hub. (You'll notice the terminology, dear Americans - where an Arcade is not a room full of video games, but a long strip feature hundreds of stores and restaurants.) I found this. Half-Life 2: Survivor, a seated shooter based on the famous PC/Xbox game.

It's a big, speaker laden chair equipped with foot pedals and two flight joysticks. After putting in your 100円, You can choose from a multiplayer mode that uses some characters from the game, and some new ones as well. This I didn't try. Instead, I went for the campaign mode where you do your part to save the world from the evil Combine.

The game is missing something. That, pizzaz, that life that Half-Life had. It was just wave of combine soldier after wave that comes after you, slowly. The little snippets of game that you play come from the game, but so much is skipped. Especially anything involving the zombies. Didn't see a single one.

Not to mention the controls are ludicrously horrid. Trying to use the two different joysticks is a wreck, with all the buttons and configurations. Simply moving forward was not happening at too many points during my time. And such a short time it was. New games today let you play on a time limit, instead of being based on wins. Back in the day, if you died in a game, you pump in another coin. Now, you have to drop some dough every five minutes, two songs, three levels, etc. BOO!