To the pounding strains of Shibuya-kei blasted out by DJ-san in a plush Pac-Man helmet the strangest crew I've seen in weeks writhes as though electrocuted: girls dressed as colorful samurai, boys dressed as leather-clad special versions of virtual female idols, a man wearing a vinyl horse mask surrounded by ladies looking like Little Red Riding Hood, a woman with a PVC skintight dress showing more of her breasts than it isn't.
I am in the front row of benches, witness to this bizarre trainwreck-meets-entertainment spectacle, an event dubbed the "Cosplay Dance Night." The katakana does not seem to do full justice to this Saturday evening event, being held on the second to last day of Tokyo Game Show 2010. Directly in front of me another woman who is not on stage for some reason mimes the dance the other people are doing. It reminds me of shameful days playing Dance Dance Revolution, when I would see other people practicing the songs by doing the moves without being on the pad. We are attending because we believe it will be easier to see all the cosplayers here than it was to see them as we smashed through the sea of bodies between halls earlier. Wrong.
An hour or so before it starts, as I enter through the back thanks to my godsend of a horde-dodging media credentials pass, a coordinator tells me they "aren't really sure how it's going to go." I begin to hindsightedly recognize this as a warning sign a few minutes into the 340-decibel shrieking of an endless trailer for the new Hatsune Miku game on PSP, forced to watch it as we are, an audience held hostage, expecting Cosplay Dance Night but getting an extended commercial for Vocaloid, the most popular thing in Japan that even though I know what it is I still have no idea what the hell it is. When they comb the crowd for cosplayers to bring up on stage and cherry-pick only those dressed as Vocaloid characters, I figure Something Is Up with this thing.
Later, when three costume-contest winners are announced and take the stage (an American, a German, and a young girl from Taiwan), the overtly derpy announcer finds himself in a strange place: conversing in seemingly intentional, obtuse, and long-winded Japanese to a trio of women who can barely understand him. The loudspeakers play pre-recorded canned applause in response to his stupid jokes and announcements, evidence that perhaps the organizers were more prepared than I thought.
Eventually the crowd catches on and just stops reacting altogether, preferring to let the laugh-track do the heavy lifting, wondering when they will see the cosplay, and when there will be some sort of entertainment for us to witness. When the hosts ask the German girl to name her favorite cosplayer of the show from the picture board of 100, she does so, and the hosts call for that person but they aren't here. So they ask for second place and she agonizes and picks someone else. And they aren't here either. And then they ask her for third place, and the announcer says something confusing and points the microphone at her, and she says in English, half-muttered half-exasperated, "what am I doing here?" We wonder the same thing. Announcer fellow comments that there sure are a lot of foreigners here this year.
I am one of them, drowning in the perspiration of lonely men with expensive cameras and wide-angle lenses, dashing past me like sortied jets to assume position in their semi-circle and snap away shots of thighs and smiles like exotic insects, the "no photos please" signs ineffective against the sheer numbers of them. They are everywhere, ready and striking: between halls, in the outdoor area where the ornamented are posing for shots. In the convention halls proper, where slightly less dressed-up women beckon people to the booth and attempt to grab attention. And bizarrely, even in corners of booths where semi-modestly dressed cuties handout pamphlets, we can notice the most peculiar appearances of telephoto-lens-guy, from eleven inches out, looking up from navel level, a furrowed brow, as though he is peering at God's perky creations, into the sun, from behind protective shades. I wonder for a moment if even the private sector is at risk. Could one beautiful showgoer be fair game? The camera otaku scurry past, soldiers ducking fire until they can get to their foxholes, taking aim at those most salacious parts. Where the hell are the video games, and how do I play them?
This hub and bub is simultaneously the background noise and soundtrack of TGS, a bizarre, overblown event that, despite the massive booths and signs and lights, surely must have at some point in the past been more about playing games than it seems to be now.
Capcom's Keiji Inafune tossed his apparently unhangable neck to the hangman this week, saying that "I look around TGS and everyone's making awful games," and I think if by awful he meant "not very exciting to play" he wasn't too far from the truth. The problem with this sudden sense of a Japanese inferiority complex is that despite their obviously warped thinking, nobody actually wants Japanese developers to make "western style" games—that's what the westerners are for. Where are our Katamari Damacys, our Monster Ranchers, our Ore no Ryoris, our Parappa the Rappers, our Bushido Blades, our Slap Happy Rhythm Busters, our Ape Escapes? Where are our Space Channel 5s, Jet Set Radios, Chu Chu Rockets? Where is the creativity that defined Japanese gaming? The question should not be "does the Japanese consumer need to start accepting western games," but "what the hell happened?"
A non-comprehensive list of games I think would have been fun and good to demo on a show floor and which I would have rabidly liked to play, due to their simple graphics, fast and addictive gameplay, and lack of cinematics, games which do not actually seem to exist in the modern reality of the game production and demonstration environment: anything from the aforementioned list, Pac-Man, virtually any frantic space-shooter, games that inspire us to coin new genre terms, split-screen cooperative or competitive games, something built on a simple concept not attached to a franchise in a desperate attempt to get it to stand out on PSN or XBLA, games not requiring motion-detection cameras, another Uniracers, anything resembling classic arcade gaming, games requiring one or less buttons, platformers for home consoles not made by Nintendo, pinball games, Pepsiman 2, Square-Enix games not stuffed to the hilt with bizarre titles and overwrought cinematics, something without guns and cover, games which are built around an immediately fun and innovative concept.
A non-comprehensive list of games I actually played by manipulating a controller, along with the briefest of thoughts allowed by demo sessions of ten minutes or less, allowing virtually no insight into what the games will actually play like upon release, and providing only the most trivial amounts of fun sandwiched between multi-minute intros and outros, impressions and opinions guaranteed to be honest and personal:
El Shaddai - This confusingly-named PS3 and 360 pseudo-God of War incorporates a battle system which enjoyably only uses a button or two to attack and jump, allows you to steal the weapons of enemies, and throws miniature platforming sections at you accompanied by pretty stained-glass and ethereal-looking backgrounds. The downside is that it gets pretty boring to hit on nearly identical enemies with one button, it's no fun to steal weapons from them when they all have the same weapon and stealing another of the same weapon doesn't do anything, and the platforming sections are devoid of enemies and virtually challenge-free. You have done everything in this game before, in other games. Also I guess it's about the bible or something? The music was pretty good, which I should know because they were piping the same song through their booth speakers for eight hours a day.
Marvel vs. Capcom 3 - In this game, pick the character with guns or lasers, and push all the buttons to win or lose, I don't know, and I've played a lot of fighting games. The graphics are excellent. Amaterasu and Viewtiful Joe are in the game, which is pretty cool, except you never really get to see them when half the screen is exploding cause your enemy pressed all the buttons. The game feels a lot like the manic Tatsunoko vs. Capcom at times. Did you ever play Marvel vs. Capcom 2? You might like this one. This game was one of the better PS3/360 games at TGS because you could actually play it without sitting through the three-minute history of Wolverine's mask and how it fell into the hands of the patron saints of who cares.
Ni no Kuni - To play this neat-looking Studio Ghibli game inside one of the coolest-looking booths at Tokyo Game Show, you had to run out onto the floor the moment the doors opened and line up for fifteen minutes, only to realize you had to choose either the DS or PS3 version to demo. I picked the PS3 version because the trailer looked beautiful, discovered a beautiful-indeed but relatively average-seeming yet adorable RPG battle system, and fought four samey battles. It looks a hell of a lot like Dragon Quest VIII, probably because it's being developed by Level-5, which is alright with me. There was no menu accessible and no information about character growth or any of that RPG stuff anywhere. Then after about seven minutes the demo ended and I was shown to the exit of the booth. They gave me a little tote-bag, and then I looped around to go through again for the DS version and discovered the wait time for the seven minute demo had increased to 120 minutes. Then I didn't come back.
Dreadnaught Pirates - In what was one of the more enjoyable demos of the day, I got to use the PlayStation Move with its futurey ray-gun attachment to sample a revolutionary new kind of gameplay enabled by this interesting device. In this game, which is something I am going to call an "on-rails light-gun shooter," you use no-reload-required laser beams to shoot skeletons. It was pretty awesome, but not anywhere near as awesome as the original Time Crisis, which was released in 1995 and which has still inexplicably not been announced for this thing just like Point Blank.
Okamiden - Okamiden is like the game Okami, which was notable for its beautiful art style, Zelda-like structure, traditional Japanese music, interesting locales, ink-brush painting gameplay mechanics, and interminable length. Okamiden is pretty cute, and it is also on the DS where the graphics and music and art are necessarily worse and the mechanics more tired. In the demo they had you running around some cave looking for supplies, which was not fun in any way. I used the paint brush to cut things, but it takes like two or three seconds for the painting overlay to pop up once you press L, which is really annoying. But this game might be pretty good, which we will know once we can play more than ten disjointed minutes of it.
Quantum Theory - Japanese Gears of War, but with the option to play as a fast girl with a sword, which is awesome. But even the little pick-up overlays for switching weapons are like exactly the same as Gears of War! This game is not Vanquish, which uses a lot more buttons than this game but is also sort of like Gears of War. Unlike Gears of War, Quantum Theory is coming out for PlayStation 3, so that is nice. And I got to talk to the localization guy and he was really nice too. I also got to play this game on a huge stage with a hundred-foot LED display behind me showing hundreds of confused showgoers what it looks like when a terrible player plays this game. So maybe this game isn't so terrible, if you like Gears of War, but not enough to play Gears of War instead of this game, which you should play if you like Gears of War. This game was pretty fun, I guess. My 360's disc drive gets read errors all the time. Gears of War
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - This new HD 3D PS3 360 Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is going to be really great for you if you always wished that instead of playing Castlevania you were playing Devil May Cry. If that is you, boy are you in for a treat! Don't worry, the Devil May Cry series isn't turning into Castlevania or something like that. Lords of Shadow looks really good graphics-wise, which is excellent. Also you get to swing this blade around that is like five times longer than you, and in the demo you impale a werewolf on a telephone pole. I liked this game, because it was called Castlevania, and it was pretty and there was action, and because your dude is a total vampire-huntin' bad-ass. But it is pretty unlike any other game that has been titled Castlevania. Which is good, but also confusing.
Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2: Rerearmed - The biggest change to this game from the XBLA original, they will tell you, is that now you can jump. But that's not true at all actually, since we were always trying to jump in the original game anyway and just getting really pissed off that we couldn't. The biggest changes are that you don't seem to be able to shoot your hook straight out in front of you to deflect bullets, and also you sometimes can scan the environment with your little green box thing to get hints like "shoot the barrel" and "BC TUT #025 ERR." I had tons of fun in this game using the grapple arm to grab enemies and throw them into other stuff, and also using my bionic arm to punch enemies really hard and watch them bounce off walls. They should make a game based on just doing those kinds of things, though I am sure this one is going to be really fun anyway. Also Bionic Commando has a really gnarly orange 'stache now.
On the final two days of the conference, open to the public on Saturday and Sunday, merely navigating the floor and attempting to perform basic actions became a kind of game of its own, though not much of a fun one. To be granted the privilege of paying Square-Enix 2200 yen for a stuffed moogle from the upcoming Final Fantasy XIV, I waited for approximately thirty minutes in a snaking sea of humanity and then was marched through some glass kiosks with an order form, which I presented at the end in exchange for my goods, too weary to dare entering another stupid line for a good hour or so.
As I progress through the show I try and stop myself, to gain perspective. The fact is that I've been to several E3s and a couple game shows in Japan now, and maybe I'm just tired of it all. Tired of waiting in huge lines for minutes with a game. Tired of useless pamphlets, pumped up displays, shallow demos and expensive lobby food at a convention center. Maybe it's just me, maybe the magic is gone. But I look around and see a lot of other people that don't seem particularly overjoyed to be there either.
With thirty minutes to go in the two-hour block of Cosplay Dance Night, the announcers beg and plead for the twelve or so prize-winning cosplayers to, you know, get up and dance. They tell us all, okay, everyone stand up! Now here's some music and let's dance! Positive attitudes all but sapped by advertisement and product placement and lack of substance, huge concrete floor all but empty, the cosplayers, seemingly unaware that they are expected, uninformed, to be the entertainment, slink away. Reporters and media here to cover the event and not be the event begin to peel off. I imagine, as I walk away and still see a massive crowd huddled around the dying gasps of the arcade fighting tournament, where people are playing fun games, the cosplay announcers saying "please let's have a party, oh please, let's make it what we all want it to be," but no amount of hope can change it.
As a spectacle, TGS succeeds—it is the massive, loud, bright and shiny "gamer's dream" that every one of us has had since we saw those images in old issues of Nintendo Power or Gamefan or EGM or whatever the hell we used to read. But like the Cosplay Dance Night, when you strip out the ridiculous presentation, the annoying announcers, the advertisements, the trailers, the dance music, and the two-tone benches, what counts is what's underneath. In one case it's the costumes, and in the other case it's the games.
Tokyo Game Show it is, but with the minor caveats that it's in Chiba, and the whole game-playing thing doesn't really go on how you'd hope. At least not from this side of the controller.
I am in the front row of benches, witness to this bizarre trainwreck-meets-entertainment spectacle, an event dubbed the "Cosplay Dance Night." The katakana does not seem to do full justice to this Saturday evening event, being held on the second to last day of Tokyo Game Show 2010. Directly in front of me another woman who is not on stage for some reason mimes the dance the other people are doing. It reminds me of shameful days playing Dance Dance Revolution, when I would see other people practicing the songs by doing the moves without being on the pad. We are attending because we believe it will be easier to see all the cosplayers here than it was to see them as we smashed through the sea of bodies between halls earlier. Wrong.
An hour or so before it starts, as I enter through the back thanks to my godsend of a horde-dodging media credentials pass, a coordinator tells me they "aren't really sure how it's going to go." I begin to hindsightedly recognize this as a warning sign a few minutes into the 340-decibel shrieking of an endless trailer for the new Hatsune Miku game on PSP, forced to watch it as we are, an audience held hostage, expecting Cosplay Dance Night but getting an extended commercial for Vocaloid, the most popular thing in Japan that even though I know what it is I still have no idea what the hell it is. When they comb the crowd for cosplayers to bring up on stage and cherry-pick only those dressed as Vocaloid characters, I figure Something Is Up with this thing.
Later, when three costume-contest winners are announced and take the stage (an American, a German, and a young girl from Taiwan), the overtly derpy announcer finds himself in a strange place: conversing in seemingly intentional, obtuse, and long-winded Japanese to a trio of women who can barely understand him. The loudspeakers play pre-recorded canned applause in response to his stupid jokes and announcements, evidence that perhaps the organizers were more prepared than I thought.
Eventually the crowd catches on and just stops reacting altogether, preferring to let the laugh-track do the heavy lifting, wondering when they will see the cosplay, and when there will be some sort of entertainment for us to witness. When the hosts ask the German girl to name her favorite cosplayer of the show from the picture board of 100, she does so, and the hosts call for that person but they aren't here. So they ask for second place and she agonizes and picks someone else. And they aren't here either. And then they ask her for third place, and the announcer says something confusing and points the microphone at her, and she says in English, half-muttered half-exasperated, "what am I doing here?" We wonder the same thing. Announcer fellow comments that there sure are a lot of foreigners here this year.
I am one of them, drowning in the perspiration of lonely men with expensive cameras and wide-angle lenses, dashing past me like sortied jets to assume position in their semi-circle and snap away shots of thighs and smiles like exotic insects, the "no photos please" signs ineffective against the sheer numbers of them. They are everywhere, ready and striking: between halls, in the outdoor area where the ornamented are posing for shots. In the convention halls proper, where slightly less dressed-up women beckon people to the booth and attempt to grab attention. And bizarrely, even in corners of booths where semi-modestly dressed cuties handout pamphlets, we can notice the most peculiar appearances of telephoto-lens-guy, from eleven inches out, looking up from navel level, a furrowed brow, as though he is peering at God's perky creations, into the sun, from behind protective shades. I wonder for a moment if even the private sector is at risk. Could one beautiful showgoer be fair game? The camera otaku scurry past, soldiers ducking fire until they can get to their foxholes, taking aim at those most salacious parts. Where the hell are the video games, and how do I play them?
This hub and bub is simultaneously the background noise and soundtrack of TGS, a bizarre, overblown event that, despite the massive booths and signs and lights, surely must have at some point in the past been more about playing games than it seems to be now.
Capcom's Keiji Inafune tossed his apparently unhangable neck to the hangman this week, saying that "I look around TGS and everyone's making awful games," and I think if by awful he meant "not very exciting to play" he wasn't too far from the truth. The problem with this sudden sense of a Japanese inferiority complex is that despite their obviously warped thinking, nobody actually wants Japanese developers to make "western style" games—that's what the westerners are for. Where are our Katamari Damacys, our Monster Ranchers, our Ore no Ryoris, our Parappa the Rappers, our Bushido Blades, our Slap Happy Rhythm Busters, our Ape Escapes? Where are our Space Channel 5s, Jet Set Radios, Chu Chu Rockets? Where is the creativity that defined Japanese gaming? The question should not be "does the Japanese consumer need to start accepting western games," but "what the hell happened?"
A non-comprehensive list of games I think would have been fun and good to demo on a show floor and which I would have rabidly liked to play, due to their simple graphics, fast and addictive gameplay, and lack of cinematics, games which do not actually seem to exist in the modern reality of the game production and demonstration environment: anything from the aforementioned list, Pac-Man, virtually any frantic space-shooter, games that inspire us to coin new genre terms, split-screen cooperative or competitive games, something built on a simple concept not attached to a franchise in a desperate attempt to get it to stand out on PSN or XBLA, games not requiring motion-detection cameras, another Uniracers, anything resembling classic arcade gaming, games requiring one or less buttons, platformers for home consoles not made by Nintendo, pinball games, Pepsiman 2, Square-Enix games not stuffed to the hilt with bizarre titles and overwrought cinematics, something without guns and cover, games which are built around an immediately fun and innovative concept.
A non-comprehensive list of games I actually played by manipulating a controller, along with the briefest of thoughts allowed by demo sessions of ten minutes or less, allowing virtually no insight into what the games will actually play like upon release, and providing only the most trivial amounts of fun sandwiched between multi-minute intros and outros, impressions and opinions guaranteed to be honest and personal:
El Shaddai - This confusingly-named PS3 and 360 pseudo-God of War incorporates a battle system which enjoyably only uses a button or two to attack and jump, allows you to steal the weapons of enemies, and throws miniature platforming sections at you accompanied by pretty stained-glass and ethereal-looking backgrounds. The downside is that it gets pretty boring to hit on nearly identical enemies with one button, it's no fun to steal weapons from them when they all have the same weapon and stealing another of the same weapon doesn't do anything, and the platforming sections are devoid of enemies and virtually challenge-free. You have done everything in this game before, in other games. Also I guess it's about the bible or something? The music was pretty good, which I should know because they were piping the same song through their booth speakers for eight hours a day.
Marvel vs. Capcom 3 - In this game, pick the character with guns or lasers, and push all the buttons to win or lose, I don't know, and I've played a lot of fighting games. The graphics are excellent. Amaterasu and Viewtiful Joe are in the game, which is pretty cool, except you never really get to see them when half the screen is exploding cause your enemy pressed all the buttons. The game feels a lot like the manic Tatsunoko vs. Capcom at times. Did you ever play Marvel vs. Capcom 2? You might like this one. This game was one of the better PS3/360 games at TGS because you could actually play it without sitting through the three-minute history of Wolverine's mask and how it fell into the hands of the patron saints of who cares.
Ni no Kuni - To play this neat-looking Studio Ghibli game inside one of the coolest-looking booths at Tokyo Game Show, you had to run out onto the floor the moment the doors opened and line up for fifteen minutes, only to realize you had to choose either the DS or PS3 version to demo. I picked the PS3 version because the trailer looked beautiful, discovered a beautiful-indeed but relatively average-seeming yet adorable RPG battle system, and fought four samey battles. It looks a hell of a lot like Dragon Quest VIII, probably because it's being developed by Level-5, which is alright with me. There was no menu accessible and no information about character growth or any of that RPG stuff anywhere. Then after about seven minutes the demo ended and I was shown to the exit of the booth. They gave me a little tote-bag, and then I looped around to go through again for the DS version and discovered the wait time for the seven minute demo had increased to 120 minutes. Then I didn't come back.
Dreadnaught Pirates - In what was one of the more enjoyable demos of the day, I got to use the PlayStation Move with its futurey ray-gun attachment to sample a revolutionary new kind of gameplay enabled by this interesting device. In this game, which is something I am going to call an "on-rails light-gun shooter," you use no-reload-required laser beams to shoot skeletons. It was pretty awesome, but not anywhere near as awesome as the original Time Crisis, which was released in 1995 and which has still inexplicably not been announced for this thing just like Point Blank.
Okamiden - Okamiden is like the game Okami, which was notable for its beautiful art style, Zelda-like structure, traditional Japanese music, interesting locales, ink-brush painting gameplay mechanics, and interminable length. Okamiden is pretty cute, and it is also on the DS where the graphics and music and art are necessarily worse and the mechanics more tired. In the demo they had you running around some cave looking for supplies, which was not fun in any way. I used the paint brush to cut things, but it takes like two or three seconds for the painting overlay to pop up once you press L, which is really annoying. But this game might be pretty good, which we will know once we can play more than ten disjointed minutes of it.
Quantum Theory - Japanese Gears of War, but with the option to play as a fast girl with a sword, which is awesome. But even the little pick-up overlays for switching weapons are like exactly the same as Gears of War! This game is not Vanquish, which uses a lot more buttons than this game but is also sort of like Gears of War. Unlike Gears of War, Quantum Theory is coming out for PlayStation 3, so that is nice. And I got to talk to the localization guy and he was really nice too. I also got to play this game on a huge stage with a hundred-foot LED display behind me showing hundreds of confused showgoers what it looks like when a terrible player plays this game. So maybe this game isn't so terrible, if you like Gears of War, but not enough to play Gears of War instead of this game, which you should play if you like Gears of War. This game was pretty fun, I guess. My 360's disc drive gets read errors all the time. Gears of War
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - This new HD 3D PS3 360 Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is going to be really great for you if you always wished that instead of playing Castlevania you were playing Devil May Cry. If that is you, boy are you in for a treat! Don't worry, the Devil May Cry series isn't turning into Castlevania or something like that. Lords of Shadow looks really good graphics-wise, which is excellent. Also you get to swing this blade around that is like five times longer than you, and in the demo you impale a werewolf on a telephone pole. I liked this game, because it was called Castlevania, and it was pretty and there was action, and because your dude is a total vampire-huntin' bad-ass. But it is pretty unlike any other game that has been titled Castlevania. Which is good, but also confusing.
Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2: Rerearmed - The biggest change to this game from the XBLA original, they will tell you, is that now you can jump. But that's not true at all actually, since we were always trying to jump in the original game anyway and just getting really pissed off that we couldn't. The biggest changes are that you don't seem to be able to shoot your hook straight out in front of you to deflect bullets, and also you sometimes can scan the environment with your little green box thing to get hints like "shoot the barrel" and "BC TUT #025 ERR." I had tons of fun in this game using the grapple arm to grab enemies and throw them into other stuff, and also using my bionic arm to punch enemies really hard and watch them bounce off walls. They should make a game based on just doing those kinds of things, though I am sure this one is going to be really fun anyway. Also Bionic Commando has a really gnarly orange 'stache now.
On the final two days of the conference, open to the public on Saturday and Sunday, merely navigating the floor and attempting to perform basic actions became a kind of game of its own, though not much of a fun one. To be granted the privilege of paying Square-Enix 2200 yen for a stuffed moogle from the upcoming Final Fantasy XIV, I waited for approximately thirty minutes in a snaking sea of humanity and then was marched through some glass kiosks with an order form, which I presented at the end in exchange for my goods, too weary to dare entering another stupid line for a good hour or so.
As I progress through the show I try and stop myself, to gain perspective. The fact is that I've been to several E3s and a couple game shows in Japan now, and maybe I'm just tired of it all. Tired of waiting in huge lines for minutes with a game. Tired of useless pamphlets, pumped up displays, shallow demos and expensive lobby food at a convention center. Maybe it's just me, maybe the magic is gone. But I look around and see a lot of other people that don't seem particularly overjoyed to be there either.
With thirty minutes to go in the two-hour block of Cosplay Dance Night, the announcers beg and plead for the twelve or so prize-winning cosplayers to, you know, get up and dance. They tell us all, okay, everyone stand up! Now here's some music and let's dance! Positive attitudes all but sapped by advertisement and product placement and lack of substance, huge concrete floor all but empty, the cosplayers, seemingly unaware that they are expected, uninformed, to be the entertainment, slink away. Reporters and media here to cover the event and not be the event begin to peel off. I imagine, as I walk away and still see a massive crowd huddled around the dying gasps of the arcade fighting tournament, where people are playing fun games, the cosplay announcers saying "please let's have a party, oh please, let's make it what we all want it to be," but no amount of hope can change it.
As a spectacle, TGS succeeds—it is the massive, loud, bright and shiny "gamer's dream" that every one of us has had since we saw those images in old issues of Nintendo Power or Gamefan or EGM or whatever the hell we used to read. But like the Cosplay Dance Night, when you strip out the ridiculous presentation, the annoying announcers, the advertisements, the trailers, the dance music, and the two-tone benches, what counts is what's underneath. In one case it's the costumes, and in the other case it's the games.
Tokyo Game Show it is, but with the minor caveats that it's in Chiba, and the whole game-playing thing doesn't really go on how you'd hope. At least not from this side of the controller.