Well, another year and another Tokyo Game Show is finished and boy what a show it was. This year saw over 400 companies setting up shop for 4 days in the Makuhari Messe convention centre in Tokyo. Many of you may remember last year’s TGS if only for the fact that everyone was pretty peeved that the sole focus of the show seemed to be Japanese centric handheld gaming. Not so this year.

Of course, handhelds still made a big showing, being the biggest sector of the gaming industry here, but the big, AAA, new-gen titles also had a fair share of the limelight. I spent 2 days at the show and managed to see a huge number of games on display, as well as get my hands on a good number of upcoming titles. I’m going to be covering the games in depth in separate articles, so for this one I wanted to write about the show itself rather than the games.

For anyone who hasn’t been to Tokyo before, when I tell you the place is crowded, you should imagine the most crowded place you’ve ever been and then double it. No, triple it. Spend 10 minutes in Shinjuku or Akihabara and you’ll be ready to join a monastery and retreat from society altogether. Then, once a year, approximately 2.3 billion people (number may have been exaggerated) descend on the Makuhari Messe convention centre for 4 days of gaming madness.

As I said above, this year there were over 400 different companies on show, with everything from tiny Malaysian indie titles, Japanese mobile games and all the way up to big hitters Sony and Microsoft with all their whizz-bang magic. The first two days of the show are the business days, where only the press and members of the gaming industry are allowed in. I went on one of these days and it was a very well organized, fairly sedate day spent meandering around the different booths in a leisurely, I-don’t-have-a-care-in-the-world, sort of way.

I also went on one of the public days where everyone and their dog can, and evidently do, come down. This day is more like an apocalyptic nightmare scenario, as if the Earth itself were about to explode and the last spaceship to leave the doomed planet was leaving from Tokyo. The Japanese are usually a very polite, calm sort of bunch, but come TGS they turn into bloodthirsty animals that’ll rip your eyes out in order to get ahead of the line. I imagine that if they ever make a proper prequel to The Last Of Us, it’ll feature predominantly footage taken at the Tokyo Game Show.

With that said  the public days are also tremendous fun, much more so than the frankly rather stuffy business days. Despite their cut-throat attitudes, everyone is generally just excited to be at the show and the companies that are displaying their games are obviously happy with the huge number of people seeing their wares.

Now, I cannot overstate the awesomeness that is a press pass on public day. Myself and a friend, who had acquired one though some dark nefarious means, skipped merrily into the show through a side door, avoiding the death-march that was happening at the public entrance at the other end. We headed straight for the Sony booth and within 5 minutes were hands on with Project Morpheus. I’ll be talking more about Morpheus and VR in general later this week, but for now let’s just say I was very impressed with what I saw.

Next up we managed to blag our way, without appointment, into Sony’s VIP area where I was able to try out Bloodbourne, The Evil Within and Resident Evil: Revelations 2 from the comfort of a white leather sofa, with my own young lady personally attending to my needs. Buoyed up by our success as sweet talkers we trotted off to the Destiny area where we had been reliably informed that free T-shirts were being handed out and were promptly told to bugger off and join the now considerably long line. Oh well, luck has it’s limits I guess, though we were made notably happier later in the day when another friend txt to say he was standing in a 3 hour line for Morpheus. Ha!

I was also able to lay my sweaty palms on The Order: 1886, Battlefield: Hardline, a couple of Japan only Vita games and a smattering of indie titles like the fantastic Lurking, as well as seeing some screenings of some pretty amazing looking titles. More on these tomorrow.

Now, being the Tokyo GAME Show there is obviously a lot of emphasis on gaming. But there is another aspect to the TGS that deserves a special mention here. As you are walking around you will suddenly come across a scrum of photographers, clambering and fighting for position in a hail of flashes. Opposite them will be one or more ‘Booth Babes’ in various states of undress. The girls, wearing the outfit of their sponsor companies, pose for the cameras and smile at the panting, baying mob before them. Indeed, the Booth Babes somewhat steal the show in Tokyo, since I didn’t see such interest generated by any of the actual games on show.

I heard that the Booth Babes were to be toned down somewhat, but from what I saw today, I can only imagine what it used to be like. At one stand, half naked girls invited eager gamers to try out Onechanbara by poking their heads through the nipples of a huge pair of breasts. You just couldn’t make it up! Ever the consummate professional, I took these pictures to illustrate the point for our loving Z1G fans. Strictly for the fans you understand…

Female exploitation aside, as I head back home I can’t help but feel quite content with the current state of gaming. I’ve seen some fantastic titles and some extremely promising tech over the last few days. There has been a lot noise made about how mobile gaming is the harbinger of doom for traditional console and PC gaming. I’ve said it before and after this weekend I’ll say it again. That notion is complete rubbish and the sooner people get over it and move on the better. Yes, mobile gaming is big business and yes, some people will end up spending more time playing on their iPhone than on a PS4. But don’t for one moment try to convince anyone that somebody who plays Destiny, Battlefield or Assassins Creed in glorious HD on a 32″ plasma is going to suddenly wake up tomorrow and say, “fuck it, I’m sticking with Candy Crush from here on out.” Grow up.

So, Tokyo Game Show draws to a close for another year. We, the gamers, have a truly great time ahead of us, with some games heading our way which are gonna knock your socks off, or make you shit your pants. Maybe both at the same time! Either way, it’s going to be a hell of a ride.

Stay with Zero1Gaming this week as I go in deep with the slew of games that were on show this past weekend.

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