The Jones Report: Tokyo Game Show 2008
Fourteen hours in coach.
That's how long it takes to fly from New York City to Japan.
By the time the wheels of the 747 mercifully touched down at Narita International in Tokyo yesterday afternoon, the plane was practically depleted of food and clouds of B.O. wafted up and down the aisles. The bathrooms were demolished; toilets were clogged; trash bins overflowed; worst of all, there was absolutely no T.P. whatsoever. Two small men at the back of the plane argued loudly and nearly came to blows over how far was considered too far when it came to reclining your seat. A bucktoothed Chinese woman seated next to me merrily clipped her nails, the trimmings ricocheting around the cabin like shrapnel.
Put your face very close to the screen, hold a dirty sock under your nose, and squint as hard as you can. Voil?, you're at TGS.
It was like some kind of airborne version of "Lord of the Flies." The sole reminder that we were actually properly civilized people was the fact that we all had our own tiny little touch-screen televisions that were showing us the "Sex and the City" movie (take Steve back, Miranda!) or maybe, once that was over, a two-year-old episode of "The Office."
Fortunately, I had a fully charged DS and a copy of Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood to keep me busy. I'm not the biggest BioWare fan; I'm even less of a Sonic fan. Yet somehow I wound up clocking 10 hours with the game on the flight. Of course, I hold all forms of entertainment to a different, far lower standard in the sky. For example, I'd never go out of my way to watch the "Sex and the City" movie on the ground. But at 40,000 feet? Sure, what the hell. Same goes for games. We'll have to see how Sonic Chronicles holds up now that I've got two feet on the ground again.
A gratis shampoo/conditioner sampler bag? Guess I can check Aunt Carla off the Christmas list this year...
After landing in Narita, I located the SoftBank kiosk to pick up my rental cell phone. I handed over my credit card to the kiosk attendant, then filled out the necessary paperwork. When the man returned my credit card, he carefully placed a tiny red gift bag on the counter near my hand. "This is a special gift for anyone who uses a MasterCard," he explained in halting yet perfect English.
I peered inside the bag. "It's shampoo and conditioner," the man said. He seemed a little embarrassed by this part of the transaction. "Very high quality," he assured me.
I looked at it. He was right. Shampoo and conditioner. "This is wonderful," I said sarcastically.
"Ah yes, so very wonderful, isn't it?" the man said, starting to laugh. I laughed too. And the two of us stood there having a good, long laugh over the tiny gift bag of shampoo samples that apparently he is required to dole out to anyone who rents a phone using a MasterCard.
This Norton AntiVirus giant stands guard outside the Makuhari Messe. Feed him three pieces of spyware, and he'll let you pass.
I went to a cash machine to take out some yen. I can never remember the yen-to-dollar exchange rate. Being jetlagged on the far side of the International Date Line (it's actually a day ahead here as I type this) certainly wasn't helping my math skills. I took out 3,000 yen -- a massive amount, I was certain -- then dragged my carry-ons to the nearby bus ticket counter. "I need to get to Shinagawa, to Tennozu-Isle," I explained.
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.
