Arcades may be dead throughout the world, but Japan continues to host a small but diverse arcade game industry.

The annual AOU Amusement Expo was held this past weekend in Chiba’s Makkuhari Messe. We had the chance to check out the offerings from all the major publishers. Here's a company-by-company wrap-up to guide you through our full event page.

Konami

Konami put Metal Gear Arcade at the center of its line-up this year. Within twenty minutes of the show’s opening, the line to try out the game was over two hours long. After a little fancy talking, we were able to gain access to the business line, shortening our wait to an hour. Check out our impressions here, and see all our Metal Gear Arcade stories and media here.

Aside from Metal Gear, Konami’s booth hosted a large section dedicated to the newest versions of the company’s rhythm franchises. See our recap here for details and screens.

The latest DanceDance.

Sega

Sega put virtual idol Hatsune Miku front and center with their new game, Project Diva Arcade. The game is a fairly standard Japanese rhythm game. We gave our thoughts here. For PSP owners, there's a similar title already available. See all our coverage of that here.

Aside from Project Diva, Sega had very little of note. As we mentioned in our live Twitter feed, the new Melty Blood game, which uses Sega's Ringwide arcade hardware, was underwhelming. Meanwhile, the new Virtua Fighter was video-only.

Also check out our report on some of Sega's other unveils, including card game Sengoku Taisen, a Border Break update, and Let's Go Island.

Let's Go Island

Taito

While Taito had a fair number of titles on display, there were very few standouts.

Gaia Attack is an FMV-based rail shooter. The cabinet allows four players to shoot at polygonal enemies atop FMV backgrounds.

Gaia Attack 4

Other titles on display included Hopping Road Kids and an expansion of Music Gun Gun, one of the first games in the "No Kou" series of casual titles.

Hopping Road Kids

We put all our Taito coverage in one place and will continue to do so until they give us an arcade version of Cooking Mama with an actual stove as a controller.

Namco-Bandai

Namco-Bandai introduced its promised new entry in the Gundam VS series, Gundam Extreme VS. Unveiled during a special stage event, producer Ryuichiro Baba promised that “even though this game is really good looking, fans shouldn’t worry. The gameplay will be very much the same.” Check out our full coverage of Gundam Extreme VS here.

Dead Storm Pirates drew quite a crowd. We played the game and found that, despite the rocking hydraulic booth, it was was still a fairly standard rail shooter.

More on Namco Bandai's AOU showing here.

Wrap-up

Be sure to check out our live mobile blog of the show for as-it-happened commentary and pics. Also, head here for all our AOU articles and galleries.

[Additional reporting by Anoop Gantayat]