Welcome To Last Week: TGS 2006

I've decided to spare you all from the video blogs for now, primarily because it's difficult to be articulate after a steady diet of convenience store food and not much sleep over the past week. It's Sunday evening, and TGS 2006 is over. Tomorrow we pack up and head back to San Francisco. We are all exhausted to the point of acting completely crazy. Fake (or are they!?!?!) threats of violence abound. There's talk of going out for dinner later, something I'm definitely all for, at least once I finish writing up the last handful of stories I've got (Tank Beat, I'm looking at you).

Tokyo Game Show is an endlessly interesting show, and hopefully we've shown you more of that this year with all the bits that the video team put together for our live broadcasts. But in terms of a gaming event, it's a show that's been on the decline for some time now. That's not me saying "oh, everything was better before," but the size of the show seems to keep dropping, and the way game publishers are getting information out there continues to change. The same shifts that led to E3 being declared "dead" are taking a bit of the excitement out of TGS, too. This year's show didn't really have too much in the way of big games that you've never seen in a significant way before. Devil May Cry 4 could have been close, but Capcom started talking more and more about the game in the days leading up to the show, so things like the new main character were already known going in.

But maybe the days of shocking surprises are behind us for a reason. When you make big announcements at TGS, you compete with everything else, and it's difficult to rise above the noise of, say, the new MGS trailer. And E3's big announcements are usually dominated by the console manufacturers. So we've started to see more company-specific events that take place away from the loud trade shows. And that way every company gets its time to shine. Look at Microsoft. Rather than make any significant worldwide announcements here at TGS, the company is instead making everyone to fly from Tokyo to Barcelona to hear what it has to say to the rest of the world at X06. In many ways, that's smart, because it let games like Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon rightfully get a shot at the spotlight in a region that cares very much about that style of game and the man behind them. Of course, ask anyone that's making the glory run by attending TGS and X06 back-to-back and they'll probably have some other choice words to describe the timing of the two events.

But enough talk about "the business" or whatever. The games still matter the most, and here's what mattered to me in Japan this year.

- Ridge Racer 7: It's close to finished and it looks really amazing in some spots. While it's not the best example of innovation or anything like that, it looks like a good early example of what 1080p can do for you.

- Xbox Live Arcade: I'm a huge fan of what Microsoft's been doing with Xbox Live Arcade, and getting to see the next batch of games, like Contra, Yie Ar Kung Fu, Rush'N Attack, New Rally-X, and others was great. I can't wait to start earning achievement points for those games. In fact, I think I unlocked a couple in Super Contra while I was playing it at the show.

- Virtua Fighter 5: I didn't brave the lines to play the PS3 version, but VF5 is all over arcades, and I've gotten in a few matches over the week. It looks great (both in the arcades and on the PS3), and I really wish I had more time to play it against Japanese competition. There's something weirdly fulfilling about winning Virtua Fighter matches in its home country. Makes me feel like Ivan Drago in Rocky IV or something, breaking the hometown's hopes and dreams. But then some Akira player shows up and gives me the business end of his fists and feet, sending me packing. Yeah, I'm not that great at it.

- Rhythm Tengoku: This GBA game wasn't at TGS because it's already in stores. It's sort of like WarioWare, but it's all rhythm-based. It's been in my DS regularly since I purchased it at the beginning of the week, and it's great fun.

- The Bit Generations Series: More GBA games. Seriously, it's 2006, what the hell am I doing playing GBA games? These clever, retro-styled games are a real treat. Nintendo should pack all seven onto one cart and sell it in the US. Not a great value individually, but Dotstream and Orbital are really great.

- Crackdown: I liked Crackdown at E3, and it continues to be a game that I'm looking forward to on the 360. Yeah, it's easy to look at it and write it off as Yet Another GTA Rip-Off, but that's the attitude that could have prevented us from playing a game as good as Saint's Row, so... yeah. Also, Riot Act is a much better name for it. Crackdown reminds me of a dumb C64 game called L.A. Crackdown.

- The Crowd: Despite my feeling that TGS might not be quite as relevant to the rest of the world as it used to be, this show was packed full of people. Sony, Konami, and Capcom were all very close to each other, and walking in the area that separates the three booths was insane once the public started getting in on day 2. Hello to the guy that recognized me in the middle of that insane crowd.

In fact, hello to the handful of people that recognized me and stopped to say hi during the show. I enjoy this job quite a lot, and it's always great to hear that there are people around the world (Hello to South America!) who are having just as much fun watching it as we have making it. Hopefully I won't look totally dead-eyed and dead-tired in the photos you took. And finally, hello to Chika, the friendly waitress that's going to lead to a violent four-way battle between myself, Matt, Vinny, and Phil. She's all mine, you chumps! I'm going to return to Japan next year and take her away from all this! Honest!