fwiw the reason london is The Place for arcades in the uk is because the big arcades there don't sell drinks or food or anything and just charge for the games. the reason they are able to do this is because they make zero money at all and are basically community projects

a load of the nq64s actually have maimai now! but yeah fair, i know there was at one point a fairly large scene in edinburgh but i think that was mostly private cabs/data stuff and it would've been years ago, some people up there went on to work on piu as well i think!

maimai finale is *everywhere* now, ddr is doing great, the various arcade club locations across the north have dancerush, ddr, jubeat, popn, nostalgia, sdvx, iidx, wacca, chunithm, gitadora, reflec (bury's being the biggest), and london has probably the best maintained bemani cabs in the whole world

found this while looking at various cohost retrospectives the other day (also hi cohost oomf been a minute) but I'm surprised you didn't think arcade rhythm games don't exist in the uk? the scene here is absolutely massive especially compared to canada :p

sure yeah if you've got anything, i recall on cohost people didn't really seem to like pillowfort but id be willing to check it out, it's all on activitypub right?

it's a konami USBio2! using it for my iidx setup ^^

also wacca and chunithm in general are just "yeah man hit whatever the fuck who gaf" games like chunithm 14s are basically an exercise in how well you can jank the airs

the difference i think with something like wacca or chunithm is you don't need to hit any of those lanes exactly, you can just roughly hit like 15 of them to get the note you want vs having to hit one lane and only one lane in popn/iidx/etc