A day among my people.
It’s that time of year again – and this year I get to go!
Last year I couldn’t make it to TGS due to work, but thankfully schedules worked out this year and I was able to go.
I just had to get up real early to get there.
I figured it’d be best to get there before the show opened for the day, mostly to try and beat the lines and get as much gaming in as I could before things got too packed. A solid plan, too bad it involved getting up at 5:30.
Yes, another drawback to living in BFE, Tokyo.
I caught the bus at 6:30, which got me to to station around 7. Then it was about 90 minutes on trains to get out to Chiba, home of Makuhari Messe. The trip was uneventful and I got to the Messe about 8:30. So I had 90 minutes to kill waiting in line.
Well, first I had to find the line.
I don’t know who dreamt this plan up, but he’s one twisted dude. The entrance to TGS was on the backside of the convention center, which means you’ve got to walk all the way around it. Unfortunately for a crowd that’s not keen on a lot of exercise, we were forced to go the long way around. Ah well, can’t be helped I guess. I had my DS and my nano, so I was all set to kill some time. Here’s how the line looked when I found the end of it:
Fun, eh?
It wasn’t that bad of a wait. I played some tunes and made some progress in Sword of Mana. I’d brought the DS in hopes of finding some downloadable demo stuff for it at some of the booths.
No such luck.
(As I’d later find out, if I’d brought my PSP, I could’ve tried a lot of different demos. Oops. Sony also had a station set up to upgrade people’s PSPs to the 2.0 firmware. How thoughtful of them….)
I’d decided before going that one thing I wasn’t going to do was take photos of booth babes. I mean, really – why bother? Yes, they’re hot chicks. But this is Tokyo. You’ll see hot chicks every day of the week. Okay, maybe not dressed quite so sluttishly, but still, hot chicks abound here.
That said, I did take this pic while waiting in line:
I just thought it was cool to see them hanging out before they had to go and get gawked at all day.The wait wasn’t too bad, aside from having the sun on the back of my neck (isn’t summer over yet?!?) and before we knew it we were at the entrance:
Let the fun begin!
I’d gotten inside and I had just one thing in mind:
Finding the Microsoft booth!
The main reason for my trek to Chiba was to get my hands on an Xbox 360 controller and see what the fuss was about. Here’s my rundown of what I saw and played:
The Good:
Ninety-nine Nights – Sweet. It was the most “next gen” of any of the playable demos. Tons of enemies on the screen at once for you to beat the snot out of. A handy counter keeps track of your combo (hits in a row). I was mostly mashing the attack buttons and using the special moves as best I could and managed to get it up to about 350. The guy I was watching while waiting in line had things figured out already. He got his combo up to 1940 right before he got killed. (Sadly I only got a pic of it at 1376.)
Kameo: Elements of Power – This one was nice too. The graphics were sharp and the gameplay was pretty much spot on. My favorite move was in her Yeti (best name I can think of for it) form – grab an enemy, toss ’em in the air and skewer them on the spikes on your back. (I had three on there at once.) Want to make use of their corpses? No problem! Just grab one off your spikes and fling it where you’d like. Or use his body like a club and beat other guys senseless.
Dead Rising – Wow! This was the best of al the demos I played. It’s just like what you’ve seen in the gameplay videos and trailers. (Thought the in-game graphics on the build they had out for play weren’t as crisp as the shots in MS’s TGS brochure.) Multiple weapons, health items you can use all at once (small ones) or as you need them (larger ones, like a gallon of milk). You start off with a bat but can grab a 2×4 pretty quickly. (The bat’s better, since you can swing it a lot faster. The reach of the 2×4 isn’t worth the loss of speed.) Dozens of zombies on screen at once, all trying to get you. The game has a much different feel than any other undead game you’ve played.
The Less-than-good:
Need for Speed: Most Wanted – How about “least wanted?” This game did not look like a next gen title at all. It may have been the age of the build, but I was seriously underwhelmed. The visuals were very muddy and washed out, and there was no real sense of speed like some other racers have. It looked and played below most PS2 racing games. It wasn’t all bad, though. The audio was nice, especially the police radios. They seemed to dynamically respond to in-game events. For example, I pulled into a bus station to turn my car around to try and get away, and I hear a cop on the radio commenting that I was trying to lose him in the bus station. Very nice. I just hope they get the rest of the game working that well.
Test Drive Unlimited – More like “limited.” This was a joke. I didn’t even wait in line (a three person long line) to play it. It looked bad and wasn’t even running at 30fps.
The Others:
Final Fantasy XI – This had the longest line of all the 360 games. It looked nice and the units it was running on had keyboards hooked up to them. I’ve never played either the PC or PS2 version, so I gave this one a pass. (Plus, my Japanese isn’t good enough to try and jump right into an RPG.)
Call of Duty 2 – Playable, but I skipped it. Looked like any other PC-quality WW2 FPS. The WW2 thing just isn’t for me. Give me a blaster or rail-gun or something equally fun – then I’ll try your game.
eNCHANT arM – Playable, but I skipped it. Looked nice, but I was moving on to other things.
Every Party – Playable, but I skipped it. I’m not into party games. It was the only game to have two controllers hooked up, though.
As for the 360 itself…
The contoller feels great. Even better than the Controller-S on the Xbox. Very comfortable and everything feels like it’s just where it should be. The addition of the second shoulder buttons is welcome, and they’re located so that you can hit either them or the triggers without a thought. They only had wired controllers set up at the demo stations.
I think the reasons for that should be obvious.
The 360 and most of the accessories (with the exception of the various video cables) were on display, but only behind glass. The only exposed 360 I saw was at the Atari booth, and there was a guy sitting next to it who never moved. It was hooked up and powered on, but I never saw it being used for anything.
It wasn’t all about MS though.
I did check out some other stuff. Katamari Damacy on the PSP was very nice, and I’ll be picking it up when it comes out in December. I tried Ratchet and Clank 4, since I’ve always dug the series, and it was more of the same. (Which is a good thing.) I watched Sony’s PS3 trailers, too. The Metal Gear Solid 4 one was nice, but the pimping of the PS3 and the Cell chip was a tad cheesy for my tastes. The Killzone video from E3 showed up again, but in a shortened form.
Too bad. I wanted to see if the pop-up guy was still in it.
They had new footage for Warhawk, old footage for Motor Storm and a nice look at the next gen Sonic game.Sony was paranoid about people taking photos or shooting video of their stuff, so they had people carrying placards around reminding attendees not to do that stuff.
Never mind that a cam of the MGS4 trailer was online yesterday – a day when only industry and press were allowed in.
“No photos” was a theme of the show, as evidenced by this sign:
Yeah, like that’s gonna stop anybody. I think I saw more people with cameras than without. And those that didn’t have cameras most likely had ones on their cellphones.
I’d gotten my fill of gaming in early, so I spent some time wandering about seeing what all there was to see. Plus, after the crowds had gotten thicker the lines (and therefore wait times) for games had gotten a bit long for me. The game lines weren’t the only ones that were long.
Companies at TGS isn’t as big on giving away cool shit as they are at E3. No, they’d rather sell it to the fans at TGS. And why not? People were lining up to buy it.
This was the Square-Enix line:
And it wasn’t the longest line inside. Amusingly enough, this one was:
(Sorry about the blur.)
That line was for people waiting to change into their cosplay getups. And not only did they have to wait in line for the dressing rooms – they had to pay to use them as well:
All in all, it was a pretty good day. I played some new stuff, saw some other stuff and got a bunch of free stuff – some of it better than other bits. (I’ll post about the swag tomorrow.)
I’m glad I went, and I’m also glad there’s not so much that you’d need both days of the show to see it all. It was fun, but the three-hour+ round trip is a bit much to do two days in a row.
But I’m certain I’ll be back next year. ^.^