As a graduated Japanese Language Major I’ve done my tour of duty in the land of the rising sun. My year spent doing study abroad was possibly the longest sustained period of fun I shall ever come to know (tear). I could go on at length about the virtues of the place (can anyone say 1000ish-year-old post-feminist—I think— literature?), as well as the defects. Of course this is all a good deal to do with taste, and we all know there’s no accounting for that. Like, when all my friends got into pachinko, while I was addicted to the arcade medallion bingo game.
I enjoy the good recreational gambling sesh, but I hate almost everything about pachinko (except when the ‘pa’ burns out on the neon pachinko sign). My games of choice when it comes to games of chance are bingo and roulette. Now, Japanese laws forbid casino style gambling (let’s forget about pachinko in this context for now, that’s a whole other post) so that rules out roulette. There are public outlets like the lotto, horseracing, bicycle racing. When it comes to bingo though, Japanese Laws are quite similar in that it’s ok for non-profits, churches and philanthropic purposes only. Online Bingo is hugely popular in Japan, however illegal. Despite this, the Japanese make up the second largest market for online bingo.
Being wary of breaking the law of the land (especially when it would have been through my host-mother’s ISP), and not being able to get myself sorted with these church hall style events I was rather crestfallen. That is, until I met ‘BINGO GALAXY’.
‘Bingo Galaxy’ is the latest in Sega’s ‘Bingo Circus’ series of bingo relevant medal or medallion games which have been around in various forms of whirring cacophony since at least 1989. I had the immense pleasure of seeing another entry in this series, ‘Pirate Party Bingo’, but I never got to play it.
For the uninitiated, medal (or medallion) games are varying combinations of skill and chance. There seem to be two salient differentiations: ‘pusher’ games, and casino type games. In pusher games the player tries to scoot medals off a shelf via what’s termed a broom. Casino type games are approximations of gambling games with the very important distinction that the medals won have no intrinsic value other than being able to be used in more medal games; you can’t sell them back to the arcade. This thought, though often neglected by my lizard brain, immediately took the wind out of my sails when winning. Though, despite this I’ve seen individuals spend long hours on these machines (as well as myself).
As can be imagined, the game play is a bit more involved than your garden variety bingo. The display features, along with your bingo card, a bonus card, dynamic odds, and the outcome of the last two games. Sega’s website insists that the layout of the controls is the same as previous games and so requires no learning curve for enthusiasts for the game (though the lay person will definitely need some time to adjust).
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