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Against the infamously difficult arcade games, sometimes you just can’t win, even when you just won.

UFO catchers, also called crane games, can be pretty cold-hearted. Some of them have diabolical traps to keep you from claiming your prize. Others taunt players by placing their goodies tantalizingly near the hole for prizes to drop down into.

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In this video, the machine is stuffed with Umaibo, a popular puffed corn stick snack that comes in a variety of flavors, and because Umaibo have a long shelf life, a war chest of them represents weeks’ worth of snacking. So when two high school girls saw this opportunity to score a huge haul of Umaibo, one of them threw a 100-yen (US$0.83) coin into the machine and grabbed the controls.

At first, it looks like she’s grabbed two, but as is often the case with UFO catchers, the prizes slip out from the weakly gripping claws and fall back into the pile. The girls quickly harmonize with a dejected “Aww!”, but it turns out they spoke too soon, because…

▼ Avalanche!

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The impact from the two Umaibo falling back down shifts the snacks underneath just enough start a chain reaction, and with the pile’s structural integrity suddenly gone, dozens of Umaibo come streaming into the target area.

However, the emotional roller coaster wasn’t over yet. For reasons unknown, the arcade staff declared this gigantic edible windfall to be in violation of the game’s rules, despite the fact that the girl hadn’t been engaging in hitting the machine, rocking it, or any other of the standard breaches of UFO catcher sportsmanship. In the end, she was awarded less than half the umaibo that had fallen into the prize area, prompting complaints from online commenters that the arcade was being a sore loser. The label seems all the more fitting when you consider that Umaibo generally sell for just about 10 yen, meaning that even awarding the entire drop to the girl would only have entailed an expense of 3,000 yen or so (assuming the arcade bought the snacks wholesale).

It’s really a shame, because while we’re sure the girl still ended up with enough umaibo to fill up on, had she received everything she’d rightfully won she could have been well on the way to building herself a house.

Source: Gogo Tsushin via Hachima Kiko
Top image: YouTube/Twitterで話題の動画
Insert images: YouTube/Twitterで話題の動画 (edited by RocketNews24)