Saturday I was out in Tokyo watching sumo, courtesy of my buddy Ian who arranged the whole trip. Yesterday, I went to the Tokyo Game Show. You can all be jealous now.

The sumo matches were pretty damn good; the yokozuna (highest rank) was upset in the last match by one of his major rivals in a finish that had all the judges deliberating after the bout. Before that, there were several high-profile matches that were intereresting (an uninteresting match being one in which one of the wrestlers falls or gets pushed out within 3 seconds). Overall, it was a great day for sumo.

Yesterday’s TGS was interesting, but in a different way. George, Mark, Ian, and I arrived at the convention center around noon, giving us just a couple hours to wander around the hall. It was so poorly signed that it took us 15 minutes just to find the SINGLE entrance to the place– you know some money had to change hands to make the single entrance thing happen. Hand your ticket over and you’re dumped right into the middle of a big-screen thumping-music beautiful-model marathon. There were quite a few playable demos, but they all required 45 minute waits so mostly we just wandered and watched. In front of most booths were people holding signs saying “photographs prohibited” (probably because they had sold exclusive rights to promo materials to some big publication like Gamespot or IGN) although I’m of the opinion that not letting your customers expand the hype is rather shortsighted. So Ian took photos of the show girls instead. Oh, and all the cosplayers as well… I’m still waiting on those; I think he’s hoarding them.

Sega definitely had the best booth; minimal waiting time, about 20 playable systems showing their major draw (Virtua Fighter 5) and 4 or 5 systems each with some of their other games. There was a slew of fighting robot games, of course, most of which still appeared to be in alpha. A few shooters looked interesting: one of Konami’s shooters, whose name I can’t remember, had some sort of augmented human/mech theme going on. The new “Secret of Mana” series game caught my eye as well, with several playable demo machines running, and the number of people lined up to see Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy theater was insane. Metal Gear Solid 4′s trailer was incredible… but trailers don’t impress me nearly as much as watching someone actually play the game– does it chop up, or is it smooth? Do the controls work well? A pre-canned demo looks nice, but it’s usually quite misleading.

Wii showings were sparse, but a little game called Elebits caught my eye, along with the new Monkey Ball game. For those of you not familiar with Nintendo’s new system, the controller is motion and tilt sensitive. For Elebits, the controller is used to grab objects on the screen and throw them around while searching for things. In Monkey Ball, which plays something like those rolling marble games, I saw the controller being used to tilt the playing field, and jolt the field up to make the ball jump over obstacles; in a baseball minigame, the controller was swung like a baseball bat to hit homeruns.

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