Is there a classic you long to play in the wild?

Your glasses spike the screenlight at your face like a kid burning ants. HUD branded on your cheekbones.

Shibuya Sega: a down-and-out dive for the can’t-grow-ups.

Border Break: play online – with school-skipping kids during the day or with family-shirking salarymen at night.

Look at this coinslot flange, puckering up to take your hyakuen in an industrial-age kiss.

Who’s this cheeky chappy peeking out of the Kitchen Pocket hole?

Funabori is home to this perfect embodiment of the Sega World concept, flawlessly preserved from the 90s.

A few posts ago I mentioned Shinjuku Sportsland’s 32-cabinet Gundam setup. Well, here it is.

If you say the machines don’t need to be cleaned on the parts people don’t touch then that’s your thing, I guess. If you think it’s OK to laminate a “Watch it! Bagsnatchers!” Sign over the urinal instead of creating an establishment where it doesn’t happen, your call.

But…

The lights in Hey are famously blue. First foot off the IN escalator is *that* row of a dozen or so Egrets on either side. They actually have a Kodak PhotoPoint(TM) standee there now, yellow greyed by the blue light, with a cutout for where experts say to point your camera. That’s actually true!

Time blasts by. This is a 21st-century, networked, 3D, arena-based robo combat dreamboat by Capcom, playing on a cathode ray tube in a yellowing hulk of a Sega Blast City cabinet from the 1990s.

That Sega logo does well standing out in this Higashi Shinjuku square. The brand is so clear it’s like this here is the label on the insideout city of Tokyo.

I’m hearing bad things about the independents. Even Sega is shutting shops. Akiba 2-kan – iconic! – is gone. Photos of staff bowing outside in thanks for years of patronage from also-bowing, clapping crowds.

The Game P&Ps and Game Spot 21s of this world are slummish and gritty, reeking of urban overgrowth and smoked dry by cigarettes. But some places are smart and smooth.

Game Spot 21 is a real-deal arcade. Finger-crossing that it comes back post-Covid – and dirtier than ever.

Gun Bullet – also AKA’d as Point Blank. Not the usual conveyor-belt murder. Weird thing is you’re basically playing extremely simple kids’ games – picture pairs, snap, spot the difference – but looking like you’re playing The House of the Dead.

Easter eggshaped image from the loserdrop stairwell that squeezes you between the prize machines and a Chinese into a Fight Club-style fighting-game fight club.

A bunch of Capcom roms and a championship belt in the Battle Arena, Club Sega, Shinjuku.

The guy running P&P lives fussy, at his desk with his daily paper, ice tea just so. Everything’s covered in handwritten instructions: the Label Crazy Blast City I’ve posted before, the tiny washiki toilet with its triangular basin/cistern, and this old Astro, who’s been told what to do its whole life.

I feel like I should have an obituary prepared for this game. It’s on a hell of a run – since 2006!

In times gone by, when Sega made consoles, it felt like there was a clear path from arcade to home release. Back then, Gunslinger Stratos would have been ported to Saturn or Dreamcast and come with dedicated controllers.

Teeth bared; talons out. But look at the posture of their right hands. Claws, but relaxed claws, ready to swoop at the attack buttons with quite a travel. Wouldn’t your response be quicker if you started nearer the buttons? It’s not that kind of reflexes. You play with rhythm, where the travel helps. Reflexes are to quickly change rhythm. If fighters were music games they’d be jazz duo jam sessions.

Gentlemen reading this will know that sometimes there are splashguards and sometimes there aren't. In either case you just look straight ahead and mind nothing but your own business. But don't mind it too closely or you will raise questions.