Sega’s Block People: Slab Stacking Fun
Sega’s Block People is an well done new arcade game — what makes it cool is that like a typical video game you have these cute creatures who need to crawl over blocks to get to their objective. But the twist that makes this arcade game is that the building blocks aren’t on the screen, but are in fact physical blocks that you have to place in front of the screen:
To me the physical element makes this game brilliant — it’s like taking the peripherals we see on the Wii to the next level. And best of all this makes the game very family friendly, and while most people use that as a code word to mean “just for the kids” in this case I mean a game that would appeal to a wide audience who aren’t hardcore gamers. Part of what help this is the incorporation of cartoon characters to engage the audience combined with a colorful cabinet design:
It breaks my heart, but sadly my guess is that we’ll never see Sega’s Block People in the United States. Firstly we just don’t have the arcade game culture that exists in Japan, but secondly my guess is that the blocks used in the game might be just a little too close to Lego blocks and thus might be a licensing issue.