There was a time when Japanese
company Konami was one of the most recognizable developers and publishers of
videogames in the industry. Their creative teams have churned out some game
titles that are remembered as some of the biggest franchises in electronic
entertainment. Sadly, over the past several years the company has since shifted
away from console gaming to mobile apps and arcades, particularly dance-rhythm
and pachinko gambling machines for the latter, while the developers of their
franchise titles have since departed for other pastures. But as if to remind
the public that they were there for home gaming, Konami has begun hyping their
new series of desktop PC units.
As The Verge tells us, Konami has started accepting preorders for
their upcoming gaming-specialized PC towers. They are called the Arespear, and
are set to ship by September 2020. A teaser video from Konami depicts their PC
cabinets as sporting the motif of the Greek god Ares, and his name is
configured into the branding acronym “Advanced Revolution of E-Sports.” There
are three models of the Konami Arespear gaming PC featured: the basic Arespear
C300 ($1,760), the advanced C700 ($3,017) and the bling-out C700 Plus ($3,227),
prices converted from Yen.
While the brand name cooked up by
Konami implies that the Arespear series was conceptualized for dedicated
E-Sports gamers in general, the internal components would actually suggest that
they are more biased towards the Japanese game-maker’s own e-sports circuit Bemani
Pro. That league features dance and rhythm games developed by Konami’s
still-active music gaming arm Bemani, famous for the “Beatmania” and “Dance Dance
Revolution” franchises, among many other similar arcade machines. This is
substantiated by the Arespears’ default Asus Xonar AE sound card. Other
prominent hardware names inside these PCs are Intel processors and Nvidia graphics
processor cards, though not the latest iterations of each.
In further detail, the Arespear
C300 by default comes with an Inten i5-9400F, Nvidia GTX 1650, DDR4-2666 8GB
RAM and 512 GB storage. The C700 and C700 Plus are both packing i7-9700 (water-cooled),
RTX 2070 Super, 16GB RAM, NVME M.2 PCIe SSD with 512GB storage plus a SATA HDD
with 1TB more. The Plus is also the show-off variant with its extra RGB light
setup and transparent side panels.
These specs further reinforce the
notion that they are approximations of the hardware in Bemani arcade machines.
The pricing scheme however comes across as a tad steep compared to the costs of
custom-building other gaming rigs. There is also no word if the Konami Arespear
PCs will see international distribution, or will remain in Japan only.
Image courtesy of Digital Trends
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