Quick TGS Recap

Oooooops. It would seem I made promises about "covering" Tokyo Game Show and then failed to deliver. Truth is, I was going to make a video post about it, but none of the footage I took there was really interesting enough. That, and I've just been too busy over the past two weeks to undertake such a project. So here's a quick rundown of how it was and what we saw.

I was pleased to see that the Tokyo Game Show has gotten bigger since I last attended in 2005. Publisher booths are more extravagant, the fighting tournament now has its own entire room and there has been a much-needed improvement in merchandise presence.

Still, Wife and I were surprised to see foreign publishers rather under-represented. THQ didn't have a booth…EA didn't have a booth…in fact, the only major foreign console game company with their own booth was France's UbiSoft (whose smallish booth was dedicated to promoting their upcoming Wii dancing title, The Michael Jackson Experience.

The fact that it took the advent of Kinect for the Xbox 360 to get developers to start making dancing games for the Wii seems at least a little ironic, dontcha think?

Domestic bigwigs, on the other hand, showed up in full regalia. Especially Capcom, whose Monster Hunter-inspired village looked like something out of a theme park.

Visiting on general attendance day meant lines. Long ones. But between the two of us, we did manage to play Xbox 360 titles Dead Rising 2 (by Wife's request), Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Gun: Loco and Onechanbara Special for the PSP. We also watched a few minutes of a very heated Street Fighter IV tournament and passed judgment on countless costumed fans and booth girls.

In the interest of getting TGS out of the way so that I can blog about more current affairs, this will conclude my comments on TGS.