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
Morgan Magazine 