The first time I played pachinko (as a 5-year-old) the owner of the machine explained to me that it cost 1 yen per ball, which meant you got 200 balls for a dollar.
In addition to normal inflation, the slumping dollar is also against me. A dollar is worth a measly 105 yen this week, and I’m pretty sure I got 100 balls for my 1000 yen this morning. The machine I played was rigged with the same weird probabilities as the one in my basement — about 50% of the time two out of the three reels match, but all three match next-to-never. I’m no good at probability, but I’m sure that those facts can’t both be true in a random distribution. (The artificial-near-miss is a tried-and-true technique to keep gamblers playing — but in pachinko it is cranked up to absurd proportions.)
Pachinko parlors are the loudest place I’ve ever been — louder than a rock concert, by far. And it’s just the sound of thousands of little steel balls rattling, rattling, rattling.
Note the special display which, best I can tell, displays statistics on your play. Just in case you had any illusions about the odds.
In a video arcade I watched some guys play a MMPORPG which includes a flat surface with an RFID reader. You buy collectible trading cards (a la Yugioh or Pokemon) from a vending machine, and then feed coins into the video terminal to play online. The terminal scans your cards (and where on the surface you place them) in order to control your play and/or equip your avatar.
Which is to say, the makers of this game charge players money _and_ print their own.
The other notable arcade fact is that when a player gets a high score (I was watching someone play Tekken 6) their score and name are recored and displayed on ALL the machines throughout the country. Serious bragging rights!
(Disclosure: I haven’t been in a US arcade for about a year, so maybe they have all this stuff at home now to. But I doubt it.)