Tokyo Gameshow 2008

Last Saturday I went to Tokyo Gameshow. When James first told me that it was on I got really excited because I thought it was something like Takeshi’s Castle, but in Tokyo. I imagined myself being on Japanese TV and being able to show it to people back home. “The biggest gameshow in the world”, wow, I was so excited. Dissapointingly I soon discovered it wasn’t that kind of gameshow, but rather, it was a computer game-show. Still it was great however.

The gameshow was in Chiba. You already know where Chiba is from before, we went to Chiba to airsoft. Accompanying us to the gameshow were, James, Ivett, David, and James’s friend Clayton. Clayton is another American-Chinese. He works in Japan.

After getting to Chiba, we took a bus to the place.

We had to wait in an enormous queue:

But eventually made it around to the entrance:

We went inside. There are lots of booth-girls around; women who stand around handing out game flyers. They pose for photos too. Here is a picture of some otaku taking photos of some booth girls:

I also took some photos of booth girls, here is the slideshow:

It was almost lunchtime so we went for lunch. I had this meal:

Japanese curry is so plain its ridiculous. If you goto a Japanese curry shop, it will sell 16 different types of curry but they are all the same flavor: curry powder flavor. They only differ in what is added, and that will be something very plain, like a piece of chicken, or a shrimp. OK the meal above wasn’t too bad, but it was expensive for Japan.

Next we just walked around the arenas and looked at stuff. I’ll just put the photos for this in a slideshow:

I walked past this exhibit:

and saw the motorcycle smash directly into a cliff and explode. I started laughing loudly and then I realized that there was a little child riding the bike on the floor, controlling the game bike. The parents looked at me and must have thought I was a right bastard.

We were walking through into another arena and suddenly came across tons of cosplay people. This really put Harajuku to shame. Here is the slideshow:

One notable occurance was this overweight woman:

I realized that this crazy Otaku had been taking like a billion photos of her. Seriously he was there just reeling off hundreds and hundreds of shots. So much so that he was sweating, so I had to grab a photo:

unfortunately the ruddy flash went off didn’t it and everyone noticed, especially overweight:

So my covert operations had been rumbled. Overweight told me I wasn’t allowed to take photos now, but that I had to wait my turn. She was saying “he is now.. but you next.. you next?” almost demandingly… I just said “err yeah” and then ran away, dreading the prospect of having a personal photo session with her.

Personally I think Overweight and Sweat boy should have gotten it together. Actually I feel a bit sorry for Sweat boy now. Poor guy, he’s just trying to get some love off of Overweight.

Yvette was jealous of all the attention the cosplay girls were getting, ahem did I say girls.. I meant people.. of course it was because of their costumes we were phototgraphing them.. anyway, I took a photo of Yvette to make her feel more involved:

Next, I saw one of my favorite games: “Katamary Damacy”. In this game you have to “roll up” objects in the environment like a snowball and so keeps on growing, allowing you to roll up bigger things. It is somehow cathartic in the cleansing sense. I got really exicted and wanted to pose with the lead character of the game, ridiculous I know.

“Prince” the games lead character, then started posing with people:

Finally I leaped into the characters arms:

Prince is a bit of a dumb name, but in the game he is actually a prince, if you can call it a he, I don’t know.

After this we went home. At the train station we encountered this:

I thought it would be funny to go inside the cage, so I did:

The train station bore a funny sign:

Finally, when we entered the platform area, I noticed this:

See! I’m not the only one who breaks these.

One final thing. Since we are on the topic of computer games. There exists game in Japan called “Battle Raper”. I’m not joking, that wouldn’t be something I would joke about. Here is the video:

Un-fucking-believable.

How I came across this game: I was looking for stuff about the stabbing in Akihabara that happened a while back and found it mentioned in someones blog, the guy was going on about Battle Raper too, because apparantly there was a big advert for it in Akihabara.