Editor’s note: Ryan’s gracious enough to show us some of the choice items that he picked up — for free — at the Tokyo Game Show. Sounds like Level-5 was the MVP for swag! -Jason
Stepping into the main hall at Makuhari Messe for the Tokyo Game Show, everyone makes a beeline for a table with mountains of books. I have no idea what these books are for, but I assume it’s something that I want. I’ve been living in Japan for two months, and I now instinctually do whatever I see the Japanese doing, so I snatched up the various media meat on the table.
Ah, so it’s a couple of guide books. Oh, it’s got a map! That’ll be helpful. And it’s got a list of all the games on display. Yeah, I can’t read it, but who cares — it’s free! It’s swag. What good man or woman doesn’t love swag, in any language?
But eventually the charm wears off, or at least it did for me due to two reasons: I can’t walk a few feet without someone else trying to give me something, and I (foolishly) didn’t bring a bag to carry all this stuff with, and my backpack is loaded with clothes.
Avoiding getting stuff at the TGS seems to be like avoiding swine flu at PAX (side note: Japan is crazy about swine flu) — it’s a brutal game made more difficult by the fact that most of this stuff’s being given to you by smiling, incredibly skinny, dolled-up Japanese girls.
I didn’t get to pick everything up, but I thought I might give an overview of what I did get to give you a taste.
This is the aforementioned TGS catalog. It basically lists all of the games at the show and where you can find them.
There’s some other stuff inside, too, like a little comic. Looks like it’s about game ratings.
The Sony and Microsoft booths were interesting in that, aside from a few exceptions, they were both showing the same games, and their catalogs reflect this. You tell me which catalog these are from.
Figured it out? Does it matter? Not really. (The top is the PS3 catalog, and the 360 catalog is on the bottom.)
I’m still seeing predominantly Western or Western-style games on the HD-gen systems. It’s kind of a downer. Where are the obscure, niche Japanese-only games like those that came out of the PS1, Saturn, and PS2 era? These days, you need to have big guns and big funds to throw around to make games on these consoles, and I wonder what great ideas have fallen victim to this.
Both companies printed their books on glossy stock, which made photographing them indoors a pain. Sorry for the image quality.
Konami’s entire booth focused on Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. They handed out a nice oversized portfolio that folds out into a poster of all the game’s characters. It’s good to see more of Yoji Shinkawa’s art. I missed it in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
Your gift for waiting in line was a D-pad and analog-nub covers for your PSP:
Namco, among other things, is working on an iPhone port of the PSP game Ace Combat 10. I played it and was really impressed. When you finished playing, you got a matching iPhone decal set.
Level 5 by far gave out the best stuff of the show, though you had to stand in line and sit through something like a marketing presentation to get it (but I did get to see some nice trailers). After the presentation, they took you to a separate area to play game demos, and you got a gift bag at the end. One of the two available gifts was the actual demo cartridge you were just playing! I was lucky enough to get this.
The cart has demos for the cart for the new Professor Layton game (The Specter’s Flute), Inazuma Eleven (soccer meets Naurto), and my personal favorite, Ninokuni, the RPG that Level-5’s working on in collaboration with Studio Ghibli (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle). I’ll post more about that demo later, as I don’t see a lot of talk online about it.
That about wraps it up, but this hardly covers everything. Leave a comment if you have questions or would like to see something else!
EDIT (9/30/09): Correction on Layton title (thanks, Aldaberto! — though I think the spelling is ‘specter’?), and spelling of Ninokuni (I had it as “Nikuni”) Chalk it up to a late night and long shinkansen ride back home.