Jean Snow

This book is wonderful for anyone interested in Japanese culture. It truly exemplified the intricacies of the culture. Of the nine sections of the book, each provided insights on topics ranging from the popular (in the West) fighting games, and rhythm games to the more obscure such as crane games and sticker picture machines.

The book is presented in a family friendly manner with comments and pictures providing an immersive supplement to the text. I recommend this book to both gamers and non-gamers of all ages.… (mere)

This breezy read covers the Japanese game-arcade community, as broken down into a variety of categories, including music-based games, card-based games, dedicated-cabinet games, etc. Each chapter handles the history of its area well, running through the requisite iterative improvements -- the evolutionary changes that turned Pacman into Grand Theft Auto -- and interviewing programmers, players, and other digital-entertainment figures. The list-like nature of the writing can become a bit routine after a few chapters, and the interviews are less insightful than one might hope for, but extra points for including among them a model for one of the major photo-booth franchises (heck, extra points for including the photo booths in the first place) and the manager of a retro-gaming mecca. The book is designed like a very long magazine article, with colorful headers and little sidebars.
… (mere)