AAA 2025 Day 3: Rounding Up China’s New Arcade Games

Day 3 means the home stretch for our coverage of the AAA 2025 trade show in China, but it is going to be a long one, rounding up all the other, smaller names who attended the show. Those that had more major new titles on offer can all be found up top, with the latter part of the post covering the rest, from China-only oddities to a few nods for redemption and pure VR (which is less of our focus here).

Massive thanks one more time to Oga-Shi from Sega Amusements, without whom our coverage of Chinese shows would be so much worse off, as well as Ted for bringing it all together. Check out AAA 2025 Day 1 (Wahlap and Bandai Namco) and Day 2 (UNIS and Ace) here and here, respectively.

Arccer

Going by alphabetical order, we first have one of a few proponents of original Chinese rhythm games in this post. Whilst Wahlap sell the officially licensed Japanese games that started it all, this doesn’t stop China’s factories from doing their own thing, and as some rhythm gamers have come to know, Arccer are now one of the most established examples of those (with an additional throughline in pushers – Bandai Namco sell Tower Island by them out West, and they had a couple new ones here).

As well as their massive Dance Battle riff on DanceRush out front there, the main showcase for Arccer at AAA 2025 was the latest version of their Dance Cube rhythm game, Dance Cube Show Evo. This series has been going since the 2010s, and was partly made because Sega stopped selling Maimai officially in China for a little while. Evo updates the game’s newest hexagonal-based cabinets, which debuted this past couple years, naturally adding a ton more music and graphical upgrades. By all accounts, it’s evolved into more of its own thing now, which the company has to be happy about:

Interestingly Arccer seem to have gone above and beyond in promoting this, not just with the display you see there, as TRG, a noted overseas Maimai player who performed well in the game’s recent official tournaments, posted a ton about the game online and even appears to have been invited to their headquarters. Could it get a proper shot outside China? The biggest issue is whether the music licensing is actually legit… but a few locations have already started to get their hands on it via some sort of means.

Baohui

Baohui have been going for about as long as veterans like Wahlap and UNIS on the Chinese scene, but aren’t quite as big or well-known out West. Still, they have worked with names like IGS in the past, and are repeating that with their big debut at AAA 2025: Speed Rider 4DX. Previous entries in this series have had some international representation (3 and 3DX were brought to the US by Fun Hoops around 2019, although they didn’t seem to sell all that well), so maybe this one will get a chance too.

The cabinet for this sequel feels like a number of recent racers bunched together – in shape and size, it looks very close to Asphalt Moto Blitz DX, but the dot matrix marquee above with the course map brings Apex Rebels to mind. That perhaps runs the risk of blending in too much with the competition, but it should still stand out in action with all the lights and perhaps some new gameplay features.

Flamestone / Leon Amusement

Though the different names may be confusing to anyone not familiar with them already, all you need to know with Flamestone/Leon Amusement is that they generally originated the comeback trend for shooting gallery games with metal guns over the past few years (what we know as On Target and Mega Shot are theirs). That’s not all there is though, as they have been branching out with other shooting games such as Thunder Attack, and that approach seems to be continuing from what was at their AAA 2025 booth.

As well as the four player shooter seen at the front of the photo there, the bigger shooter that they debuted was Dragon Knight. This appears to be the first traditional stacked two screen mounted gun shooter – Godzilla Kaiju Wars‘ cabinet has two also, but only for spectator display purposes of course. In fact this seems to share some small similarities with that, though they look like more subtle design choices than out and out copying (the game itself, like Ace’s Dragon Kingdom from yesterday, seems more like Drakons Realm Keepers). It’s anyone’s guess as to who might sell this out West, although at some point I expect someone to slap a Dragonheart license onto one of these dragon games, or maybe Eragon.

HY Technology

Like Baohui just above, HY Technology ended up in our recent GTI Southeast Asia coverage, but like most companies who attended that show, they had a much bigger booth here. That said, they didn’t seem to have anything new-new (at least in video games), however what was there is still interesting. As mentioned previously, they have partnered with Sega Amusements to bring some of their pieces to China, and a big example of that is the Chinese version of Apex Rebels on behalf of them and 3MindWave.

The interesting thing with this one is that besides some design differences, there are the smaller 49″ screen cabinets which were initially promoted out West, but quietly fell off the radar. These do still use the motion base and a LED dot matrix marquee, so the difference in cost wouldn’t be huge, but hopefully a more cut-down, cheaper version could still happen for us too. Then on the other hand, the second game out of this partnership, Bop It! Arcade, looks much the same besides the Chinese text:

Lilian

Back to rhythm games now, as this company (who is only now being covered for the first time on AH) debuted not just one, but two brand new titles in the genre. Over the course of more recent years we’ve mainly came to expect those from Arccer, but the rising success of such titles and the official imports from Wahlap has clearly spurred others on to ship out fresh product to compete.

One is the revival of an old name that some longtime dance gamers might be familiar with – Dance Super Station E5. This series has appeared overseas from time to time, but never consistently. At first glance it seems like it is getting the StepManiaX DX treatment in a sleeker, more LED lights-heavy cabinet, but the game instruction standees suggest there are a lot of changes to the gameplay too:

Then we have their brand new Stellar Echo. This is clearly an attempt to compete with Sega’s Chunithm, which Wahlap only started selling officially in China a few years back. It’s to the extent where a cabinet render actually displayed a game screen from it… which might not please those at Sega Japan. The game itself is slightly different to that though, using pad controls too and some sort of strange vending feature.

Superwing

Last up among the big companies who have been around for a while is Superwing. They have slowly been coming up on the Western rails ever since they made Ice Man, which popularized that omnipresent genre of kids redemption water gun shooters. Other pieces of theirs like Smash DX have came out over here via the likes of LAI Games, and every year they seem to have something new which could release in the same way (though not all of it does). They did have a booth of their own at last IAAPA, and that showcased a Air Strike-like piece called Skywalk, which already has a sequel. I came across them in the last hour of that show however, and wasn’t able to get any decent footage of the games they had on hand.

It seems they have moved on somewhat from the kiddie water games now, as not only do they now have a sci-fi themed environmental shooter called The Future (which was revealed last year, and released in China recently), their new effort in this space is Mini World. This obviously borrows Minecraft’s blocky art style, and makes the lesser seen choice of supporting three players on the same motion platform:

Superwing are also another company to be jumping on the two screens bandwagon, as they have produced a title similar to Ace’s Bikers Madness in the form of Flash Rider. More original however is the alternate cabinet to the right which uses a vertical screen – you don’t often see motorbike racers with those.

The Rest

Now onto all the odds, ends, and downright bizarre things that caught our eyes and Oga’s from AAA 2025. There always seems to be plenty of that to go around, though from here on out, expect little to none of these games to leave the confines of China.

First off, you may remember that last year’s AAA Expo saw the showcase of several mysterious multigame cabinets, with a heavy focus on SNK’s fighters and the somewhat dubious claim on their booth that they were officially licensed. This year, a number of sleek-looking new ones with LED dot matrix marquees (and a big old Sega Megalo-like cabinet) appeared on the booth of Quanhun Entertainment, plus with that, some more information on what’s going on here.

The long story short is that these are officially licensed, but only for Chinese sales. This is apparently a case where SNK China has managed to approve everything here, against the best wishes of the head office over in Japan. How that has happened is unknown, but the main crux of it is that they clearly have some bizarre interregional power dynamic issues still going on. To make matters worse, Oga said their catalogues didn’t even make it clear that these are only approved for Chinese sales…

This deal they have with SNK China even extends to newer King of Fighters titles now, which is a bit of a surprise. It would be doubly surprising if these are actual arcade versions of them though and not just an existing one retrofitted into this big cabinet (the DLC screen here seems to indicate that is indeed the case).

If anyone is playing the ‘two screens’ drinking game, they must be getting tipsy, as for our third example of that in this post (and fifth across all of AAA 2025…), Yuto Games are stacking those screens up too in their new Crazy Drift racing game. Surprisingly, this has a more creative use for them, with a rear-view mirror up top and positive affirmations scrolling across as you drive. Rear-view mirrors have never really been prolific in even single screen games though, as most don’t seem to care anyway (only Sega Rally and the first-person view in Maximum Tune 5DX+ come to mind). If you have LinkedIn, you can see this one in action by clicking here, or there’s this direct capture on YouTube that only shows a single screen.

One company covered as part of last month’s GTI Southeast Asia Expo was Joint Fun, who only featured for the first time on the blog last year (none of what they have made has had any major representation overseas yet). Most of their newer games were represented well there, but one that debuted at AAA 2025 is this Saga of Knight, which goes for a concept we don’t see often: knighting crossed with horse riding. Oga also sent over a photo of a game by another company using this concept, so interest must be peaking in it, but not confusingly at all (!) it uses the same name as the earlier Dragon Knight shooter.

A third new rhythm game now, with it being represented by at least one company (Raisefun) that we saw at the GTI Southeast Asia Expo last month. Magic Sound Pushing Rhythm has a similar basic shape to Stellar Echo above, but is completely controlled by touchscreen, a choice that though once popular with arcade rhythm games (think ReRave, CrossXBeats etc) is less so nowadays. Like the games shown by Lilian, this is also an example where we’re not sure who actually developed it, as Oga couldn’t find that information anywhere, and it looked like it was at as many as two or three booths on the AAA 2025 floor.

One of the remaining virtual reality companies out there who we haven’t mentioned before is EnjoySport. They showed off a few VR Agent-like cabinets seen below, with the difference of them being a lot more sci-fi/UFO looking. In the background you can additionally see the sequel to a 3D glasses shooting game called Galaxy Squad (also known as Interstellar Team), which was seen on test in the UK a while ago but disappeared after that. Everything that had been seen of it before pointed towards this being a Superwing game, but it appearing here with the logo of another company (Maiteng Animation) is all very strange:

Now onto a couple redemption-focused producers, as though they are not our niche here at AH, some are growing. The biggest example of that would be Playmore, whose salvo of pushers has been coming over via LAI Games, and others like Sega Amusements have been doing business with them too on their High Five crane. At AAA 2025 they unveiled three more pushers which we’ll likely see soon with a license:

The other big name in pushers is Tong-Li, who have worked with Andamiro and UNIS in making their successful releases in that genre. Even if redemption was covered more, in this case a lot of their new original products would not be shown, as they all had photo sharing bans. It seems that they are rapidly expanding about as much as both Playmore and Ace though, from the sounds of things:

As they’re still worth a brief nod, here’s also one of the innumerable neon crane manufacturers out there these days, Yingpin. There has been a huge volume of locations focused on these opening up in the West over the past months, but that boom now seems to have burst somewhat (a few AH readers have said how they’ve seen places near them closing within weeks of opening, and their equipment flooding the used market). Cold feet over the tariff situation or a novelty already worn off? You decide…

Finally, a few more unusual AAA 2025 things that Oga highlighted for us (there were others, but these are the best). One is this huge armored jeep-based shooter, with support for not just two but four players. This weirdly has the vibes of games we might have randomly seen out of China some 10-15 years ago.

Someone has clearly been studying the old Sega Super Circuit attraction from many years ago, as this all but brings that concept back to the fore again:

Elsewhere was this retro 8-bit style card game cabinet, which Oga took a shine to. Apparently he wants to change the cabinet to a mid-century style, and use Shogun or something similar as background music…

Then possibly the strangest of all: a digital/electromechanical hybrid golfing simulator, where when you pull the tee handle, the golfer doll below swings. But if that wasn’t enough, if you score a shot, a little pigeon comes out of the cabinet! According to Oga, “This is what an arcade should be like”:

Overall

All in all, it looks as if AAA 2025 was a definite success. Despite the fluid challenges posed by the tariffs situation, it sounds like there was still an increase in English speakers at booths compared to pre-COVID-19 times, which is good news. And although the number of Japanese-made products has decreased there, the merchandising of Japan-originated IPs by various companies might mean increased interaction with players and fans compared to previous years for the Chinese factories.

One key trend Oga pointed out to us after the show ended was that most companies are exploring various themes after a phase of car racing games, moving on to bikes, dragons, and airplanes. This reminded him of the NAOMI era at Sega and the wider Japanese arcade industry when many offbeat concepts emerged. While it’s easy to welcome this diversity, it can’t be forgotten that trend coincided with a wider decline for the industry over there. Still, hopefully it ignites more creativity in this case.

In tandem with that, Oga also predicted the further rise in combination of physicality and IP in card and game content. With the prominence of things like Cyberpunk 2077 Turf Wars’ shooting range and card games, he believes there will be a further acceleration in arcade experiences that cannot be replicated at home. This leads on to an important observation from myself…

Once again, we have seen a significant draw backward in virtual reality products, with perhaps more innovation on the AR/MXR side. I don’t find this surprising, given that it seems to be happening across the board right now, but the silence from all of the “VR will replace all other displays!” crowd is noticeable. I’ve already seen a few from that group move those ever-mobile VR goalposts to some other place where it is sure to rule the world next. I wouldn’t buy their promises personally (how many times can VR acolytes pull the “foooooled you!” bit?), although I would leave room for the occasional VR success like Godzilla and hopefully Alpha Ops VR Strike soon in the arcade arena.

To anyone who still believes it, maybe stop acting like Ready Player One is the future – it is not, at least on our watch. The Holodeck (aka Mixed Reality) holds that promise better because it doesn’t require wearable hardware in a public situation. Nowhere had tried to embrace the VR arcade idea as much as China did, so it is telling that they have decided that it’s not for them either. Although the people who made bank off of it when the technology became hot again sure aren’t complaining.

A more immediate trend should be obvious for what we can expect to see more of – dual-screens, microLED dot matrix displays, and motion seats. These would also fall under “Simulated Reality”, in that simulating a real-world activity doesn’t go out of style, but it is a challenge to find new ways to innovate that without being derivative of others. A number of photos seen out of the show (which mostly aren’t featured here) did display some very obvious clones and rip-offs by other companies, using the exact same hardware and software as existing pieces… which is a shame, but somewhat inevitable.

Also trending harder are rhythm games, from those officially licensed examples carried by Wahlap to the newer homegrown Chinese games detailed here. It’s to the point where you have to wonder if anyone in the West is looking at rejoining the fray, given the success of StepManiaX and the big Japanese titles starting to come over; only time will tell on that front (and if the Chinese companies can get their act together with licensing songs properly for their own overseas rollout), though.

In closing, AAA 2025 being a generally strong show is good for the industry at large, and there’s still a decent chance that many of these games will find their way over here. Thanks as always to our true blue Arcade Hero Oga-san for all the photos and insight on them – which of those seen over the course of these three days would you like to see at your local arcade?

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