Yesterday I went down to Makuhari Messe to check out the last day of the Tokyo Game Show 2005. The big events this year were the XBox 360 as it ramps to launch in a couple of months, and a preview of the PS3, due out in about 6 months.
Overall, I think the Xbox outflanked Sony on the home console side. It was obvious that Sony had virtually no games ready to preview and relied heavily on CG rendered movies, especially for Metal Gear Solid 4, which ran to nearly 10 minutes, but which featured virtually no in game footage, though Sony claimed the movie used the game engine.
Despite it’s revelation of the Revolution controller on Friday (Press Day), Nintendo didn’t really have a presence, leaving Sony a clear run on the handhelds, which they took, offering ‘shared versions’ of some upcoming games, providing you had the 2.0 firmware in, and if you didn’t you could download that there and then too. I’m still yet to be impressed with a lot of PSP titles – many are badly shoe-horned PS2 titles, and often don’t take account or advantage of the mobile form factor. However, Metal Gear Acid 2 looked interesting, as did Puposaru Academy 2. DS owners can at least look forward to ‘Akachan wa doko kara kuru no?’ (literally, ‘where do babies come from?’. To be honest, It looked more like a variant of the dating games which are getting more and more popular.
Of course, the booth girls were there, and provided a good distraction to their legions of fans, whilst others tried to squeeze past to actually check the games out. Of course there were the amateur cosplay people there too, as usual holding court between the two halls, and as usual they ranked from amazingly authentic to wacky, to just downright odd (the girl in the junior high school swimsuit – I’m talking to you).
Anyway, I’ll stick a full review up on Brightblack.net at some point. Needless to say, it’s always worth going and all the more so as it’s only 1000yen if you get a ticket before hand, so it’s quite a cheap day out.
