Journalists have it easy when it comes to the Tokyo Game Show. Get put up in a hotel across the street from Chiba's Makuhari Messe, have ample time to cover the show on the two press days and take pictures and video of girls in silly outfits on Saturday before doing some shopping and heading home. Sure there's the pressure of posting news stories and such, but that's what they're paid for, and if the show doesn't generate enough news for those oh so precious page views, you can always run a pathetically lazy story about porn stars who play games from time to time. Or, more than a decade after this sort of thing stopped being funny, how the Japanese are so kure-zi. Sorry, crazy.
While the journos experience of TGS is summed up by this however:
The zoo going public is subjected to this:
I swore I wouldn't actually go to this year's TGS, my fifth, after a flimsy show last year that offered nothing new except the ongoing slow painful death of the Japanese games industry (according to Keiji Inafune, anyway) and insane wait times simply because there was so little on display, everyone was trying to play the same thing. A friend who'd never been twisted my arm though, and poor organisation at the start of the show made me start to regret my decision. Usually a reasonably painless experience, getting in to the exhibition hall this year took a massive two hours from arrival, thanks to a long line that reached entirely around the building. It wasn't clear whether the wait was down to huge attendance (CERO, the Japanese equivalent of the US' ESRB had predicted 180,000 visitors over the two public days). Or whether it was a ploy to make things seem busier than they were by putting the show entrance at the far end of the Messe complex.
Alternatively it could have been a ploy to allow consumers to enjoy the national pastime of queueing, since once inside lines were incredibly short. Granted Kinect had a three hour wait by the time we got in (scantily clad booth girls guiding you through the experience and the fact MS' was the first booth most would see on entrance helped) but most waits were under the hour mark. Not ideal, certainly, but pretty good.
In terms of what I actually played, there's little that media pass flashing websites haven't probably said already to speak of. Marvel versus Capcom 3 was spectacular, Castlevania was slightly less so, being enjoyable but let down by the fact that it is God of War in disguise. In fact, not even a particularly good disguise, as if Kratos was wearing one of those Groucho Marx glasses/moustache combos you get at a joke shop and it kept falling off his head.
There were two standout experiences to me, however. Konami's Crossboard 7, a launch title for Kinect, has received little attention from games press most likely because it is staggeringly poor, but with MS' booth having those three hour waits and Konami's offering a paltry twenty minute one, it was the only chance of trying Microsoft's new hardware. It failed on a variety of levels- looking like a PS2 game didn't help, nor did the fact it appeared a stone's throw away from Sega's Sonic Riders, a game that doesn't look all that great in itself but still seems to do the same hoverboard racing thing as Crossboard but a lot better. Still, leaning and jumping to lean and jump worked well, akthough doing as our guide suggested and flailing limbs while in the air to get trick points really didn't. It was the sort of thing that I fear will plague both Kinect and Move in their early lives- a game that was amusing for one two minute run, but that I would never ever want to play another race of again, much less own it. What happened to the first six Crossboards, anyway?
On the other end of the quality spectrum was Ignition's El Shaddai. Probably the best equipped booth at the show, Ignition had twenty or so PS3s and 360s all running the same game, which meant traffic through was brisk, and everyone got ten minutes or so of hands on without a painful wait in line. Divvied up into 3D combat and 2D platforming sections, El Shaddai manages to combine a refreshingly easy to handle three button control layout with some incredible art, and while neither the combat and the platforming felt quite right and responsive enough yet, the art style and interesting story premise loosely based on the Dead Sea Scrolls will likely win the game a lot of plaudits even if issues aren't ironed out.
In fact, between El Shaddai and Last Guardian winning the arty farty gamers' attentions, the possibility of hardcore Kinect games one day appearing thanks to the likes of Steel Battalion's annoucnement, and the wonderful bizarreness of Tokyo Jungle, a game which I never got to play but looked on in amazement at a small child going hand on with, playing as an annoying small yapper type dog gruesomely taking down larger beasts in post apocalyptic Tokyo, it may be that rumours of the Japanese games industry's death have been exaggerated somewhat.
Unlike the decidedly western leaning in the last couple of years' offerings, TGS 2010 marked a mini Japanese renaissance, with the above games joining sure fire hits like Level 5/Studio Ghibli's Ni no Kuni.
Armed with free swag on the train home- a sweet MvC3 holographic file folder, a Monster Hunter Freedom trial pack for 360 (I tried it, it was rubbish) and a Kinectimals plushy that was amusingly outdated, screaming from its tag 'scan in to Natalimals!' in case you were wondering. Sony's booth offered a free Move demo disc if you wenty hands on with that, but by the time we got around to them it was too late (an aside-Beat Sketch, which is being packed in with Moves here, was on display and a feed of what players were doing in the dull looking draw on the screen game was played on a big screen on the floor. Knowing this, it was a disappointment, and possibly a case of sadly conforming to national stereotypes, that everyone drew exactly what was prescribed to them by the game, and not, for example, as many phalluses as possible before being thrown out. Sigh)- I felt as if my TGS frown had been turned upside down. Same time next year? Maybe.
