Rising Star Blog

I popped to Tokyo at the weekend. How the other half lives!

Out here in the countryside you can go for weeks without spotting a videogame; in Tokyo every other commuter seemed to be playing with their PSP. If life was more like a videogame (Pokemon Snap, for example), I'd have taken a photo of the three teenage girls I spotted, all kitted out in the latest fashions and sitting in a row on a bench in Shinagawa, each with a different-coloured PSP.

It looked like a lifestyle advert - for Monster Hunter, which was just about the only game that I saw anybody playing on their PSP all weekend. But unfortunately life isn't like a videogame and I'd probably get arrested and sent home for being a pervert.

While I was in Tokyo, I actually decided to find out if a couple of western releases had made it over to Japan, but Modern Warfare 2 and Dragon Age were both conspicuous by their absence (and an absence of hype; I wonder how Japan responds to Modern Warfare 2 when it comes out next month).

But browsing for Dragon Age at least gave me an excuse to survey the PC game shelves in some of the big electrical stores. They seemed every bit as niche as the PC game shelves back home: there wasn't much on the shelves and what there was seemed to consist of either bargain-bin branded finnicky-looking strategy games, or some sort of massively multiplayer online game, like Final Fantasy XI or Ragnarok Online.

You can see for yourself here, though both of those are only a rough approximation of the real thing, in which the narrow shelves threaten to buckle under the sheer multitude of naval warfare simulations.

So, naval simulations aside, it turns out Japan's not that different after all.

Please login first to write a comment for this blog or click here to create an account.