Newsbytes: Big Buck Hunter Championships XV; New Pokémon Ball Toss Game; & More

Welcome to Newsbytes, a collection of news from around the world of arcades and pinball. It’s been a little while since we last had one of these but enough stuff has come together for another round. Let’s go!

Big Buck Hunter World Championships XV Day 2

The 15th annual BBH championships began in earnest yesterday and today marks the 2nd and final round of the event, with around $100,000 in total cash prizes up for grabs. As in previous years, the event is being streamed on Twitch and YouTube, allowing for some nice exposure to our industry in the mainstream that it otherwise rarely sees. Who will walk away with the grand prize? Watch it live to find out:

New Pokémon Ball Toss Game Launches In Japan

H/T to @AmaniSchneider1 on Twitter for bringing my attention to this one – a new Pokémon licensed ball toss arcade game has launched in Japan via Bandai Namco Amusements. That does make one wonder if this game could find it’s way over here – while Pokken Tournament Arcade flopped here, it’s really hard to go wrong with a ball toss game for kids, especially where this involves throwing pokéballs at Pokémon to catch them. This takes the unusual step on this genre of game to give it an enclosure and seat ; it also appears to have been upgraded from a previous model to increase the size of the screen to 43″. Official page is here; Article in Japanese is here.

Legends of Valhalla Classic To Launch

American Pinball is ready to launch the Classic edition of their Viking-themed pinball machine, Legends of Valhalla, now that LD & DX orders have been fulfilled. This version lacks some of the niceties found on the more expensive versions but should play just the same; Here’s a chart to help know differences:

FnF Arcade Single

H/T to Jdevy for bringing up this listing for Raw Thrills’ new Fast & Furious Arcade game that lists a price; It’s also the first instance I’ve seen of a single cabinet image. I’ve not heard of this particular distributor before and listing the prices online is unusual these days. Do note that pricing will vary between distributors (even then there’s usually haggling that goes on) but this does land it around where we’d heard at Bowl Expo – in the $25k~$30k range. I’ll hold out hope that a lower priced SD version is coming in 2023 but for now this is looking to compete with LAI’s Asphalt 9 Legends Arcade DX in the FEC space.

Bobblehead Baseball Has An Amusement Mode

As a friendly tip to any manufacturers out there – if you create a videmption game that has an amusement/non-ticket mode, it’s quite nice if you mention that on the game page & marketing materials. I say that as sometimes it’s unclear. Anyways, Andamiro’s new Bobblehead Baseball does, as you can see here:

Roger Sharpe Talks Williams

This is about an hour and a half long but one of the rather interesting things he mentions is that ICE was interested in grabbing the company. I have to imagine that they could have done well with it since the redemption side could have helped keep things going if the pinball side would struggle. Along those lines, and to the subject of the video, Stern once toyed with doing a redemption game, as did American pinball(neither was released), but I’m surprised that these companies haven’t branched out into some “low hanging production fruit” like arcade basketball games or some other kind of novelty to help the bottom line.

Speaking of Roger Sharpe, the movie about him was made available online for a limited person event but that’s already sold out. Hopefully it will be seeing a wider release here soon (I wouldn’t complain if it came to theaters – that might actually help bring some people out to visit the arcade).

More Midway History

Insert Coin Doc has been busy lately, posting old footage from Midway in the 90s. Most recently they’ve posted stuff from NBA Jam, including the pitch tape used to help convince the NBA to grant Midway the license and this ACME Show presentation:

Samurai Shodown V Perfect Gameplay

As promised, here’s some footage of the new AC version of Samurai Shodown V Perfect; I’ll do another comparison between the Switch and AC this next week.