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The consoles are typically either located in the room or can be ordered via room service, often with a surcharge for games.

Now, a hotel in Kobe called "Swing" is under investigation for renting games like Mario Kart Wii and Resident Evil 5 to guests, a violation of Japanese copyright law. In Japan, renting video games and consoles is generally not permitted. According to the Japanese reports, the hotel in question is a "camouflage love hotel", meaning that it looks a bit classier than your typical love hotel(habbohotel coins), but functions in much the same way, renting rooms by the hour. The hotel, however, does say it accepts families and vacationers as well.

This all falls into the gray area of Japanese law, but Nintendo was able to successfully side-step all this during the 1980s and 1990s when the game company released Famicom and Super Famicom coin-operated consoles. Guests in hotels could feed the "Famicombox" or "Super Famicombox" yen and play various games for anywhere between 5 to 15 minutes a pop.

Culture Smash is a daily dose of things topical, interesting and sometimes even awesome — game related and beyond(habbo credits).