Not just another NPC - (ds-x2 ver.)

An acquaintance of mine walked up to me on Tuesday and flashed an Initial D Arcade Stage 4 license. This could only mean one thing:

The Sega Lindbergh -was in town!
(to the uninformed: The new Sega arcade platform, think Naomi)

In case you’re wondering, yes, there are not many arcades around here. To compensate the arcade in “Sunsplash waterpark” doubles as my local “arcade”. It seems they get new arcade releases too so it’s not all that bad I guess. When my friend “chase” came over randomly yesterday I reminded him and we sped off to Sunsplash in the classic Miata. Quarters on hand and drifting in mind.

The Initial D Stage 4 cabinet was right at the entrance to greet us when we arrived. It’s a very nice cab, very. Padded seating, displays are WXGA(1366 x 768), and the steering wheels are well built and beautiful. Chase broke a 20 for… some reason…(gave him an insane amount of tokens) so for 20 tokens he bought me a license! Thanks Chase!

Hey guys? It’s not working in my E-reader!

He wrote up some nice impressions too, I’ll link and quote some of them:

The Physics are a little wierd, still. The car I was driving (Roadster, of course) wanted to slide every dang time I turned the wheel with the gas on. Although the “mystery-power-braking” is gone (you actually need time to stop, now), the car wants to automatically countersteer for you. And that “downshift-to-turn” trick still works to a degree, as does left-foot-braking. As NPC pointed out to me, there is a degree of weight transfer, but it is marginal. Overall, in the passes it still feels like youre riding a roller coaster and not driving a car, but less than the previous one.

I really like the license too, it’s not just for looks, it actually stores a good amount of data. It is essentially a 5 dollar memory card with a randomly generated dot-matrix avatar. Worth it if you visit the arcade enough.

I have this week off for thanksgiving! But I have a… *sigh*… insane amount of homework. To top it off I’m going to my grandmas for the holiday(Thursday) so I’m a bit jammed on time. I’ll try and take a picture of the bay though! Expect a really short blog on that one.