Anyways, I was in Tokyo again a month or two ago, and got some footage of me playing this game that essentially tests your Shmup skills.
It runs you through a randomly selected series of six mini-games, although out of the 30 or so minigames, they seem to be grouped by areas of skill, such as;
-dodging bullets (well, almost ALL of them do this, but some are specific on it, as in you're supposed to fire as little as possible)
-manuevering your ship around objects (as in, immoveable, large objects)
-killing off as many tanks/planes etc. as possible
-protecting an object from enemy damage
-collecting only items of a certain type
-quick "reflex" stages where something suddenly happens and you have only a split second to react to it
Most of the levels have a level meter that goes up steadily and increases more and more from your performance (destroying enemy ships/objects/collecting items etc.), and once it reaches level 99 (something NOT easy to do; some of the difficulty in these reaches mid-level Dai-Ou-Jou stuff), you immediately exit the level and have succesfully "won" it.
There's no lives; regardless of how much you suck or own the game, it will end after the six stages and the final bonus stage which i'm not sure factors into your final grade (more on that later). The bonus stage is quite interesting; in some locations it actually tells you to "recycle" in english, while in others it says it in japanese, but the objective is to shoot aluminum cans into a trashbasket floating around; if the cans or the trashbasket hit you, you lose immediately.
You get points for all the cans shot in, and the stage ends after 2 minutes. Sadly I didn't get video of this level, however; an arcade guard started walking around the area we were at so we had to cut the video short.
After all this, you're graded on your performance in areas relevant to the stages you completed, and if you do good enough, you get to enter your name in the rankings for that machine (not sure if there is any "nationwide" online ranking).
A LOT of the stages will have you doing stuff at a level you'd never see in most modern shm'ups, such as the asteroid level where you have to basically have the fingers of a guitarist to even remotely get to level 99 (you'll see what I mean in the video, pressing and holding the fire button does NOT work, you have to press it repeatedly).
I've gotten on the ranking boards on only two machines in Tokyo, one at Hey! arcade and one in a Sega Club in Shinjuku while I was there, and I only placed about 30th (it only keeps the top 50 rankings), but I was satisfied with that =P Got to level 99 on a few stages too.
So, here's the video after all that; it's in quite a few arcades in Tokyo, so if you ever go there, i'd highly advise you to check it out
Oh, and there's a second game that's on the machine too; it plays like a traditional shm'up, has high score boards, etc. but I feel the testing version of it is much more interesting and unique, and is what really makes it stand out.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3_O_wnVch8
EDIT: and yes that's me playing, my friend filmed the video, but that's my Youtube account it's on. I actually do a lot better normally, that video's one of my kind of off days :/ and in the video where the buildings are at, it shifts according to your movement; i.e. if you move to the left, the buildings wobble to the right, and so on, it gets pretty nuts later on.
