Net Select: Salaryman Kintaro

The story

Net Select: Salaryman Kintaro takes its name from Hiroshi Motomiya's manga. It ran on a touchscreen cabinet and offered three table games: three-player mahjong, Daifugo (a Japanese climbing card game) and Reversi. Players at different arcades were matched against each other over AW-NET.

The game changed on the way to release. Adverts in late 2003 listed a fourth game, Tactics, and aimed for winter 2003. By the February 2004 AOU show it was down to three games, about 70% finished. The location test started on 26 March 2004, and an early release of the commercial version followed on 23 June, with test players' data partly carried over from 24 June. Test players who moved to production cards got a special pre-game chat message.

A public visitor site opened on 4 October 2004, explaining the records, rankings and shop to non-members.

Playing online

Daifugo was played in sets of three rounds, Reversi in single games, and mahjong with three players. A withdraw button let you leave at any time, but leaving counted as a loss, or as last place.

Chat was limited to preset phrases. The cartridge holds 24 of them: greetings, remarks about winning and losing streaks, and prompts at the start of a match. Members could buy more as message packs. There was no free typing.

When the cabinet was online, the AW-NET logo at the bottom of the screen glowed white. Offline it went dark, and you couldn't play against other arcades.

Records and rankings

Your card recorded a company position, a job title that rose as you won, alongside a rank for each game. Both went up as you won.

Members could see much more:

• Per-game records: winning hands, riichi success and deal-ins for mahjong; finishing positions, revolutions and demotions for Daifugo; stones, corners and wins as black or white for Reversi
• Rival search by name and region, showing another player's record and what you'd gain by beating them
• A promotion simulator estimating how close you were to the next company position
• National statistics by game, position and region

Rankings covered overall results, job, region and month, plus game-specific tables such as yakuman and dora counts for mahjong, revolutions for Daifugo, and perfect games for Reversi. A card alone was enough to appear in them.

Points

10 points for starting a game and 10 more for a win.