A REVIEW OF THE TOKYO GAME SHOW, BECAUSE THERE'S NO CRICKET ON AND WE'VE ALREADY HAD A WANK TODAY WHICH MEANS THERE'S NOTHING ELSE TO DO

World exclusive: The Tokyo Game Show Wasn't Shit This Year...

...and it was ALL THANKS TO SEGA and Sega-related products. Plus the booth babes were all around 25 or over and the cosplayers were almost all overweight or a bit creepy, so good work all round.




PSO
Look! It's Phantasy Star Online... but it isn't rubbish! You can choose from fifty kind of hairstyles, tops, bottoms and shoes and use advanced morphing technology to define everything from the shape of your eyebrows to the angle of your ears. You can have a different weapon in either hand, and there are PROPER action movie style special moves instead of just hit-hit-hit like in a REAL action RPG. You have your own apartment that you can customise, just like in Animal Crossing. Best of all though, instead of a mag you have a little helper robot that can transform into a childlike miniature human, then you can feed it monofluids until it's too drunk to say no or cry for help any more!




SEAMAN 2
The Seaman stand was this big bush in some water. We watched it for quite a long time to see if Leonard Nimoy would come out and talk to us, but nothing happened. Maybe we weren't shouting "WAKE UP, FISHY!" loud enough; we presume that's what the worried-looking Sega employees were trying to tell us.




MAN
Aaaaaaaah, Sonic Bloke. It just wouldn't be the same without you giving gigantic thumbs-ups and hugging delighted children. You have done a man's job, sir; they are truly OUR CHILDREN now.




MIZUGUCHI'S NEW PSP PUZZLE/MUSIC THING
Puzzle + Music = ACE! We don't understand what it's supposed to be, is about, or even what you're supposed to call it or how you're supposed to write its name, but anything by The Miz is worth getting the horn over -- even if it is called Every Extend Extra and is based on an old PC freeware game. Oh, and we completed Lumines the other day.




DS STUFF
In the afternoon we fired up DS Pictochat. We were the only foreigner talking so we didn't really know what to say, though. Someone said something about SNK, so we drew him a picture of Iori from King of Fighters. Minutes later he rewarded us with this terrifyingly detailed drawing of a crab-faced man holding a dildo! It was AWESOME! This must be what having friends is like. After that everyone started talking about their Nintendogs and we kind of lost the thread of the conversation, but when people started writing two digit numbers lower than 23 it became clear that someone had asked how old everyone was (so we pretended to run out of batteries and left swiftly).




LOCO ROCO
We hate people that automatically like kooky Japanese stuff because it's kooky and Japanese. But sometimes things go so far beyond the kooky barrier they demand love, and rolling a yellow sphere down holes and bouncing it off flowers looks like fun. And at least your yellow sphere doesn’t have to do "drive-bys" and "gang bang" purple spheres.




PAPIER MACHE
Now THIS is what we're talking about. Climax's booth. No babes, no three storey plasma screen, just a dramatically detailed model of the first level in Landstalker which was used to design the game, with white PSPs set up on it to demo the new handheld version. Stick THAT in your Lego pipe and smoke it, Molyneux. It was surrounded by starry-eyed people in their late 20s - early 30s with crumpled, defeated expressions watching the rolling movie of Nigel walking around the first village to an orchestral rendering of the game's music. As it reached its most exciting crescendo the camera zoomed in as he jumped on the dog's head and let it carry him around. Remember doing that on the Megadrive? YOU DO, YOU BLOODY DO.




THE NINTENDO REVOLUTION VIDEO
Never before has the dividing line between how stupid a photo of something looks and how great it seems to be to play with been so pronounced. In photos it's RUBBISH! In video, demonstrated by giggling Japanese honeys bopping flies on the head, it's clearly the best thing ever and the invention that's going to save all of video games from getting buried in another hole in another desert.




CHROMEHOUNDS
It looks awesome, but we mainly like it because according to Sega's official press release you're supposed to write CHROMEHOUNDS using CAPITAL LETTERS. And we're really starting to get into robot porn at this kind of resolution. Look at its tubes and pipes! You can even see its access flap. Filthy robot bitch.




GOTHAM 3
Lovely. We can't stop looking for clues in the reflections.

AND...
There were a lot of other things there, but most of them only warrant small mentions, like Xbox 360 and PS3 (which look somewhat like Xbox and PS2, so no cause for concern there). We tried to get an ironic photo of chubby fanboys taking photos of a female cosplayer in a swimming costume who was actually chubbier than them, but a security guard thought we were a stalker and shouted at us. We tried to cheer ourselves up by being the only site with pictures of the Mushi King zone too, but they wouldn't let us in because we didn't have a child with us.

All in all, we give this year's TGS a score of Sega out of ten. It really does look like the games industry is stroking our hair and saying "Come back to us baby, we didn't mean to hit you, can it ever be the same as it was?" We're going with "Probably not." *

* And by "Probably not" we mean "Shadow The Hedgehog." **



** And by "Shadow The Hedgehog" we mean "Emphatically not."