So, yesterday my wife and I joined some friends to celebrate one of our friends’ birthdays.  They are comfortably settling in to the post-40 club but, like us, refuse to grow up.

So we went to Round 1 and threw money at crane games.  I did very poorly in general, but DID manage to win my wife a very cute Hatsune Miku figurine.

However, during a break in the craning, my wife pointed to a maimai cabinet and asked if I had tried it yet.

And, well, I thought maimai was offline?  But this thing looked like it was up and running with a network connection.  So maybe it’s a new version.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I tried it out and it was a lot of fun and I will be going back to it.  It’s not quite as energetic as Chrono Circle but it has the same sort of round interface that I enjoyed there, minus the circle controller around the entire display that you spin.

However, one cautionary tale:  When I swiped my card to start playing, it prompted me to present an Aime card or continue as guest – and since I’m a nerd and happened to HAVE an Aime card on me, I dutifully touched it to the NFC reader on the cabinet.

What followed seemed like an eternity of creating an account and acknowledging all sorts of event notifications and just screen after screen of making choices from menus that were entirely in Japanese with too many kanji for me to quickly read.  I quickly adopted the strategy of pushing the default option until it let me choose a song, but the next time I go over to Round 1 I will need to actually try to read some of them.

Because, yes, I will be back.