Ok, made it out to Taito station yesterday but am only now getting to an internet terminal.
First, the game was running on an Egret 3 cabinet. Hardware wise I tried to peek into the cab while the attendants were adjusting the game (it seemed to have reset a few times, AOU style >_<) but couldn't really see much.
Game-wise, I saw three levels, one is the first level you start out in that ends with the Reindeer boss. Next is a 'City' and 'Ruins'. 'Ruins' is a vertically scrolling level similar to the canyon. Everybody playing couldn't make it past these three levels, but maybe with some practice we could. The Ruins level features these big snakes that come in from the side which take a lot of shots to kill. I dunno, maybe there's a trick to it.
You collect rings as you kill enemies, and foreground enemies seemed to give blue rings while background enemies seemed to give red. Not sure what the difference is if any. The rings do not bounce. When you active at 1000 on your item counter, you get more rings from enemies and bosses will give a steady stream of rings. Rings add onto your plus counter I believe MBL style, so the counter probably gets pretty high.
Graphic-wise it's not the hottest game, but it's also way better than for instance Mamoru-kun which had bad graphics but a decent enough game system for people to give it a chance. I think it's playable and will give it a try when it comes out.
At the same arcade, there were tons of CAVE boards, KOFXII, Senko no Ronde 2 and SFIV so I soon became quite distracted...
