Tokyo. Game. Show. If I ask you a word to describe each of those three words, you would probably say, “amazing, fun and glamorous”. But put them together and you’ll be at a loss for words. The Tokyo Game Show 2017 is all that and more. And yes, it’s all about games, games, games as one would expect. But more than games, it’s the experience of being in the convention hall itself and being in ground zero for all the possible interaction the developers and promoters have in store for us mere mortals.
We’ll be talking about games in another write-up, so here we’ll focus on what makes TGS special and why, as a Filipino gamer, it’s one place worth experiencing.
The Booths: As big as it can get
One expects to be greeted by seats where one can play a demo version of upcoming games. But boy, the folks here in TGS take your booth experience to another level. Take the BioHazard booth (aka Resident Evil in our shores) for example. Instead of just offering a seat at their demo slots, they up the ante by letting you shoot virtual zombies from an airsoft version of the Eagle Six pistol made famous by the games’ protagonists. You’re given twenty seconds to empty a clip. My trigger-happy self only lasted half of that. I was already grinning from ear-to-ear. And that’s just one booth.
Other booths are just massive in scale and allocate a tremendous amount of space for demos. Capcom’s Monster Hunter World has a huge head of one of it’s monsters – almost the size of a car – jaw agape and with fingers clawing the air to reach you. And behind it, you have maybe around 30 seats with PS4 Pro units running the game.
The Sony Playstation booth was also a sight to behold. Besides the Gran Tourismo VR demos one can try in race car seats, you can also try various VR games that have yet to come out such as Bravo Team, Skyrim VR and Final Fantasy XV Monster of the Deep. Lines in the booths were well organized, with no shortage of manpower to ensure proper queuing. The letdown though is that you can’t pick a game that you’d want to try out – at least for the VR games.
The loot: You just don’t know what you’re gonna get
Any convention wouldn’t be complete without the loot. Having PRESS credentials was a plus, of course. The loot ranged from having free game codes to online games, to toys like fidget spinners with LED flashing words (in Japanese) to officially licensed loot from brands like Razer and Twitch. The best part is that it’s all about games so geeking out because of the loot comes naturally.
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The babes: Not the reason why we came to TGS.
I’ll just leave these here.
Can’t wait for Day 2.
Allan Abaca is an avid gamer through and through. Virtually, he is locked-in with his PS4 almost daily and has just introduced the awesomeness of gaming to his two sons.
Next in his sights is PC gaming. The platform which he nows considering going back to after a two decade hiatus.
Oh, and let's not forget the Nintendo Switch...
His psn id is hip2b2