Two posts in a row, I'm having to start with a controls disclaimer! Truly, we live in unprecedented times. Again, I'm playing this game via an emulator with a regular controller, but this time it was originally an arcade cabinet with a specialised joystick! As you can probably surmise from the title, it's a rock-paper-scissors game, and the controller was designed to be as immersive as possible: it used a slightly bigger-than-usual joystick with two buttons along the length of its shaft. Rather than rock, paper, and scissors each having a button mapped to them, the player instead makes the actual handsigns by pressing or releasing the buttons. So holding both buttons is rock, holding only the bottom button is scissors, and releasing both is paper! It's a pretty cool system, right?
Now that I've explained the controls, let's get onto the game itself. You start by picking one of four opponents: a cat, a geisha, a schoolgirl, or a fisherman, then you'll repeatedly play rock-paper-scissors with them. Whoever wins each round then gets to guess the direction the loser's going to look in. (Kind of like the early 00s Dandy Sakano GETS! trend, if anyone remembers that?) Whenever you beat the opponent, and when you guess the direction correctly, a meter at the top of the screen fills up, and things keep getting faster with it.
When the meter's totally full, one of the other opponents will suddenly barge in and knock your current opponent offscreen. Then you'll keep playing against them, and proceedings will continue to speed up, until you run out of time. I'm not sure if there's a way to get more time, or if it's possible to be lucky/speedy enough to move onto a third (or fourth) opponent on a single credit, though.
Playing it for free via emulator, it's pretty addictive, though if I was paying for each credit, the fact that it's a 100% luck-based game with no skill or strategy involved would be offputting enough that not even the interesting controller gimmick would get me to part with my money. I think there's also some kind of prize/redemption aspect when it's played on a real cab, but there's almost no information about the game online, so I haven't been able to confirm or disprove that.
I think it's also worth noting that this is a game released in 1997 by Data East. I didn't even think they were still around that late in the nineties! Furthermore, when I think of Data East's games, I associate them with a kind of grimy, otaku-focused sci-fi aesthetic. Two Crude Dudes, Karnov, Atomic Runner, and so on. But this game's got a really clean, contemporary (for late nineties Japan) look to it, so I guess as a last grasp at solvency, they were making an attempt to get the kind of mainstream audience enjoyed by SEGA's Print Club series of machines? Anyway, if you're curious, play this in MAME. In the unlikely event that any of you find a working cabinet out in the world somewhere, I hope you'll at least spend one credit to find out if it does give out some kind of prize, and then come here and tell me about it.
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