I was in Tokyo this past weekend for the first time in a long while. In Shinjuku’s Sega arcade, they had a location test (sort of like a beta test) for a new arcade shooting game called “2 Spicy.” Despite the somewhat tooly sounding name, this game was really awesome. It was a bit like Time Crisis, with an improved gun controller and foot pedals. You choose your character out of about 7 or 8, each with different attributes for attack, defense, speed, and zoom (for shooting). The characters all looked pretty cool, but seemed somewhat unoriginal. From what I can remember, there was a fat guy, a crazy Chinese girl, a skinny psycho guy who looked like Marylin Manson, average white guy with a super hairdo, and the guy that I played as, Alexander, a Russian guy with scars. And of course he was wearing a wife beater and cargo pants. I don’t even need to tell you their different attributes and I’ll bet you can guess them from the character descriptions.

Anyway, there is story mode and versus mode. VS mode was only 100 yen as opposed to the 200 yen for story mode, so I played VS. There were 2 machines set up together, and you can battle the other player. The setup seems smaller than you would expect, but each player has a sweet HD monitor that’s really close to your face. With the really colorful art style and the awesome next-gen graphics, playing this game was fun to just look at. Luckily though, the visuals weren’t all that this game had going for it. The play was actually pretty fun in VS mode; you are ducking behind some kind of obstacle like a car or a box or a neon light. You hold the gun up to the screen to stand up and you can then shoot. You use the left and right pedals to move, and when you point the gun away from the screen you duck back down again and also reload. The game was really fast paced and fun. You can either shoot the opponent directly, or aim for the stuff around them. When, for example, the car that your opponent is hiding behind takes enough damage, it blows up and does major “crush damage” to them. Since everyone has robot eyes or scopes on their guns, if you hold the gun in place for long enough, you zoom in and are able to shoot more accurately. You have to be careful though because when you’re waiting to zoom or are trying to aim for their head, they might hit you instead.

Apparently the story is set in the year 20XX, as all sweet futuristic things are. There is some kind of war going on with androids or cyborgs or something. Either way, you have a bunch of bad dudes shooting each other, blowing each other up, and jumping around all over the place. It was a fun game and I hope this game makes it to more arcades soon. It will give me even more reason to waste money at arcades in Goi and in Chiba. I ended up spending maybe 500 yen on the game in Shinjuku, playing through VS mode myself, killing some random Japanese guy who challenged me at the other machine, then again when he came back with a vengeance and neither I nor Blanchard could beat him when he used the fat guy with the shotgun. I will be back, guy with trenchcoat..

Official Sega 2 Spicy website