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You can also download the Ogg Vorbis codec installer separately, though it is included in the download:
Pachinko a Go Go! is quite possibly the world''s first 3d pachinko video game simulation.
Pachinko a Go Go! uses 3d graphics and physics systems. Atrai-chan is beautifully vertex animated and lip synced. The music is seven tracks of the kind of Japanese europop you might expect to hear in a real Japanese pachinko parlor. Eye candy includes shaders and particle effects. Taking all this into consideration, you will need a fairly good system for Pachinko a Go Go! to run smoothly.
One of our beta testers confirmed that Pachinko a Go Go! did run on a PIII, 800Mhz system, However we recommend:
PIV 1.8 Ghz +VGA Card with 64MB+Aftermarket sound card: not onboard chipDX9 drivers required
Every evening in a small farming town somewhere in Western Japan, Mr.Tanaka goes to a small retaurant near the station for sashimi and rice wine.
Across the road, on the corner of the main street and the entrance to a ramshack shopping mall, where now most of the shopfronts are screened by roll-down steel doors, is his pachinko parlor. Tonight there are no gaudy lights or high energy music mixed with the sound of dozens of amusement machines competing with one another for attention. Mr. Tanakas Shop has been closed for two weeks, the victim of new laws to give the police greater power over industries for over eighteens'. Here I caught up with him to get ome inside information on the Japanese pachinko industry.
Grumbling as he crushed a pickled plum in his rice wine with his chopsticks, he explained that under new laws, parlors cannot use machines that are over three years old. Mr.Tanaka's parlor has 165 old machines, some of which date back to the 1960's. Also, recently Japan has changed its bank notes, requiring updating all money changing machines. The cost of bringing his parlor up to these requirements would be millions of yen.
Firstly, I wanted to know how much it was possible to win at Pachinko. I've had a few pachinko wins myself that ranged between 5000 and 25000 yen (about US$50-250). Mr.Tanaka announced you could win 800,000 yen (@US$7,500) in a day! This raised some objections from other patrons of the restaurant who considered it only possible to win 150,000 in a day by playing honestly. Playing Pachislo gives higher rewards, and it is possible to win twice as much without cheating the system. Rewards are a little lower when the parlor is full and a lot of machines are jackpotting at once. With pachinko, one ball is worth about 4 yen, and buckets of them can spew forth, while with pachislo the tokens are worth about 20 yen each.
Pachislo are a Japanese version of the one armed bandit machines. They sometimes have buttons on them to stop the reels. Although they look very much like their Western equivalant, their behaviour is very much like that of pachinko machines. They have lots of oh-so-close dramatic reaches, and when they jackpot the reels will keep coming up winning combinations and coins will spew out for some time with much fan fare. Recently Pachislo has been more popular than pachinko since, even though they don't jackpot as often, the wins can be bigger. Whole parlors are devoted purely to pachislo, and even regular pachinko parlors are often devoting as much as half of their space to the pachislo machines. Pachislo parlors are usually not as gaudy as pachinko parlors, and they usually try to capture the Western casino image. Pachinko parlors are more like video game parlors covered in flashing lights.
Naturally, I was keen to get some inside information on how to win jackpots; if there was some technique that would guarantee big wins. I learned that it is all controlled from another room. The machines themselves are set to give a certain percentage payout. Over that, the security cameras are used to scan the isles and select stategic targets to give jackpots. A parlor might give more jackpots at a certain time to raise the excitement in the room and keep the customers coming back for more. A common practice is to play the Warship March, an old navy song, when the machines will start jackpotting.
These days the machines are rigged by integrated circuts, often installed at the factories. Mr. Tanaka reminisces of the days when parlor owners had to rig their own systems for controlling the machines. Of course, fiddling with the circutry of pachinko machines is illegal. If one machine jackpots too often, it may be investigated by the police. With some disdain in his voice, Mr.Tanaka says the police can't actually know when the machines have been tampered with, since it is done at the factory and the police aren't smart enough to know how it's done, but they'll take the machine out of circulation anyway -unless perhaps a little kimochi, "gift" money, is paid. Parlors will pay as much as 150,000 yen more to the manufacturers for machines that can be remote controlled.
Japan's largest union for pachinko parlors and associated industries "Yugi" wants to exclude parlors that use these techniques for controlling the machines. However, because the machines are rigged at a very low level by the manufacturers it is impossible to know who is cheating and who isn't.
A lot of pachinko parlors are owned by Koreans. It is these parlors that Mr.Tanaka considers are the most suspicious. About half of them are North Koreans, and the other half Koreans who were brought to Japan during World War II and treated as "slaves" ,as Mr. Tanaka termed it. After the war their employment options were fairly limited. A lot of them took to pachinko parlors and were very successful at running them. Often these parlors will have a Japanese manager so that the patrons will not know of their Korean ownership.
The yakuza do not directly own pachinko parlors, since the police monitor their activities too closely, but often a parlor will be owned by a family member or close friend of a yakuza member.
In recent years the Japanese police have been promoting pre-paid cards for use in pachinko parlors. Mr. Tanaka, a samurai of the spirit of pachinko, felt this was wrong, and that the cards could easily be forged and they would promote pachinko as gambling rather than a fun past-time. He travelled to Osaka to visit the company that made the cards to complain about them, However, when he got there he discovered that the head of the company was a retired police officer. He decided not to voice his concerns for fear of anything happening to his business.
Mr.Tanaka remembers when pachinko was more for fun. The parlors were much simpler than today. Today they all have bright lights and "girls giving you a flash of their panties" to draw you inside. In the good old days a pachinko parlor was a place where you could go after work, dinner or having drinks with friends. Parlors often had air conditioners in a time when most people couldn't afford them for their homes. The machines were much simpler. They didn't have animated screens and the balls had to be launched by manual flippers. The prizes were small; you could win some sweets for your children and cigarrettes for yourself. In those days cigarrettes were a treat for most men. Optionally you could take a cash prize, but it would only be about 100 to 400 yen.
After this the conversation drifted to a foriegner who had been seen at a local bar. A man of the cloth who could drink whiskey like water, and did I know him? How about that movie about that ship that sank?
After another glass of rice wine I thanked Mr.Tanaka, paid the cheque and left the friendly atmosphere of the restaurant for the cold. almost deserted station. Back in the city new pachinko parlors becon me to try my luck in electric neon. Perhaps tonight I'll be the lucky one selected by that little man in the back room for a raucus cascade of shiney pachinko balls.
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ar (Shiawase Usagi) 2006
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