The Jones Report: Tokyo Game Show 2008
Crispy Gamer enjoys Suntory time in Tokyo all this week.
10/9/2008 8:07 PM | 2 Comments | Page 2 of 2
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
The Japanese woman looked at her computer. "Next bus is in one hour. That will be 3,000 yen, please."
"Are you sure?" I asked. "Three thousand yen?"
She wrote a three followed by three zeroes down on a piece of scrap paper and handed it to me.
I opened my wallet. Inside were my three cash machine-fresh 1,000-yen bills, which I had assumed was a fortune. I thought,
Either my math is off, or I'm about to take the most amazing bus ride of my life.
In between the various halls of Makuhari Messe stand tall, concrete alleyways, where TGS attendees can go and smoke, engage in idle chitchat, or live out their Luke-and-Han-storm-the-Death-Star fantasies.
In the name of being an open-minded adventurer, a free spirited vagabond who's trying to live in the moment out here on the road (truthfully, like most gamers, I'm a homebody who always wishes I was home sucking down a twelver, petting my cats and playing the final build of
Mirror's Edge that arrived the day before I left), I decided that I was curious to find out what a 3,000-yen bus ride would be like. She handed over my bus ticket. Then I sat in the corner of the terminal, moving around decimal points in my head, until coming to the conclusion that 3,000 yen wasn't the small fortune I'd assumed it was. It turned out to be a mere $30.
I'm staying at the melodramatically named Dai-Ichi Seafort in Shinagawa. I ran into several colleagues on the convention floor today: Sterling McGarvey and Miguel Lopez from GameSpy; Tom Price from Team Xbox; the lovely, hirsute Brian Crecente from Kotaku; Billy Berghammer from CG; and Nintendo's Bill Trinnen (oddly enough, I ran into Bill in the Shin-Kiba Metro station as we were both changing to the Rinkai Line). One and all couldn't resist the temptation to make clever jokes at the Seafort's expense.
"Are you staying in a scurvy or non-scurvy room?"
"How often is the place attacked by the Kraken?"
"Do you get a complimentary peg leg with breakfast?"
Comedians, one and all.
No sign of the Kraken, Cap'n.
Things to look forward to from our Tokyo Game Show coverage: My very private, very intimate and very Barbara Walters-like interviews with Capcom's Ben Judd (producer on the upcoming
Bionic Commando and the recently released downloadable homage to the original,
Bionic Commando: Rearmed); Tsutomu Kouno (lead designer of
LocoRoco and the upcoming
LocoRoco 2), and finally, Q-Games founder Dylan Cuthbert, the illusive man/enigma behind those miserably difficult but incredibly addictive PixelJunk games.
Of course, I'll also have plenty of odds and ends and WTFs from the show floor, including -- get this -- a hula game for the Wii. Stay tuned.
Don't miss The Jones Report: Tokyo Game Show 2008, Part 2.
