One advantage of home console video games over their arcade cousins is that it's generally not possible to save one's progress on an arcade machine.  Consoles rely on hard drives, memory cards, and even trusty battery paks to record accomplishments, but arcades are usually limited to marking high scores.  Anyone who felt the sting of being told "We have to go now" by his or her mother just as the battle against M. Bison began knows this complaint well.  Capcom is looking to do something about this issue, it seems, as there are plans to offer some kind of special card alongside Street Fighter IV in the arcades.  Kombo has the details.

Capcom had hinted in the past at some sort card-based save system to allow players to record their progress in the arcade version of their newest king of fighters-- whoops, that's someone else. Anyway, they've announced an upcoming location test for the devices in question.

No one is quite sure what the cards (seen above) really do, exactly. But according to the ol' official Japanese blog, the tests will be at Osaka's High Tech Land Sega Avion from March 20th to March 23rd, barring the 21st as that's a holiday. It will mark the beginning of user registration and rankings, and the card may have a bar that allows users to view those rankings.

I'm reminded of F-Zero AX, the Sega/Nintendo co-production that not only recorded data to Nintendo GameCube memory cards for home use, but also the special license cards that saved information such as user ID, custom machine data, race data, and pilot points.  Here's hoping that Capcom's cards will be easier to find and use than their F-Zero counterparts.  What's the point of these neat arcade gimmicks if they're nearly impossible to find in the real world?