ARCADE WATCH
Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene
Maryland-based Unit-E studios is a relative newcomer to the arcade scene, only founded in 2011. And with its youth, it has brought some fresh perspective, challenging traditional arcade game design with its debut offering, Neon FM.
The gameplay is familiar enough, though: a beat-matching rhythm-action game in which you must tap one or more brightly coloured buttons in time with the plummeting circles onscreen. It’s predictably frantic stuff, but an easy option reduces the active buttons from five to three. More surprisingly, the cabinet offers a try-before-you-buy feature to sample songs before spending any money. And once you are playing, performing badly won’t end your go – instead, the game will reduce the difficulty as you play, allowing you to get to the end of the song every time. It’s an extremely welcoming setup, especially considering you pay per song rather than, as with many other arcade rhythm-action games, per set.
Unit-E will push new content to machines automatically, updating them every week, and players can use their phones to log in and keep track of scores. There will even be a mobile version of the game, which will deliver an industry first in the form of cabi cabinet and mobile crossplay multip multiplayer, enabling local or online competitive playme play. Unit-E may lack experience, then, but the small company looks on track to set some new industry standards.