The first day of show was full of awesomeness.  There was plenty to be had and a general conglomeration of video games, excitement, and tiny Japanese booth babes.   What I forgot to share with you regarding our arrival was the spectacular display of airline efficiency.  My bag did not make it to Japan.  Supposedly it will be delivered tonight, Friday the 21st, but as you may know it is already the evening of the 21st here and I am still waiting.  What this means is that for the show I had my jeans I wore on the plane and a button down shirt I borrowed from Mike over at DPAD.   Needless to say this was irritating.  However, we were able to pull off the first day without many hitches. 

We arrived at the show about 9:45 AM, acquired our press badges and prepped for the chaos that is the show floor.  Now, we made the poor assumption that companies who do tremendous business in North America would have just as many English speaking staff present as Japanese speaking staff.  The reality of the situation is that most things were in Japanese, 1 in 40 people of any staff spoke English if at all, and the kind Japanese staff knew only a few words such as “Press Kit”, “ok”, and “play.”

Despite all this, every Japanese person we encountered, meaning everyone, was incredibly patient in helping us and try to understand what we needed or why we were taking pictures and filming where we shouldn’t be.  That’s right; your executive editor here almost had his ass tossed out a few times for filming demonstrations of Call of Duty 4, Guitar Hero 3 and Japanese booth babes showing off new mobile gaming platforms.   One major difference between the Tokyo Game Show and the American gaming conventions was the extremely strict rules on cameras and camcorders.  We had staff breathing down our necks every 5 minutes inside the booths.  Luckily, with a little broken Japanese and broken English, we were able to squirm away and sneak some additional shots.  In some situations, we were able to obtain an additional badge per booth to allow us to freely film and shoot pictures.    We weren’t expecting such tight control on this.

Anyway, I will get to the goods you are most interested in.   I won’t lie to you; the majority of the day was spent on console games, though many of these games will be released on the PC as well.  I had a chance to play Call of Duty 4 on the PS3.  Of course I would much have preferred the PC version, but the game is no less intense and really fun.  I can’t wait for this game to come out for not just its graphics, but that solid Call of Duty gameplay we have come to love.   Mike and I played Metal Gear Solid Online and I managed a few kills, but I found the sensitivity on the “look” joystick was set way too high and I could barely get anyone in my sights.  The game itself is really fun with some real nice gameplay.  More on MGS Online over at DPAD.  I smoked Mike in Guitar Hero 3…  He runs a console site?  So sad.  The poor guy had no idea I was a rockstar.

Anyway, I regret to inform you that the PC presence is unfortunately lacking in Japan. While there were titles around that will be release on PC, all demonstration for the most part was on consoles.  The Japanese gaming culture is heavily based on consoles so this doesn’t come as a huge surprise.   Another major thing about Japan is mobile and portable gaming.  A significant amount of time is spent on trains in this country and mobile cell phone gaming is big business as the commuters use these games to pass the time during these long train rides.  I am going to try and hunt down some PC stuff if I can, meanwhile, DPAD has some great content on all the console games coming out.  Sayonara!