Pushing Buttons: At the Tokyo Game Show, I saw that the Japanese gaming scene I grew up with is still alive and well.

tOkyo Game Show takes place at Makuhari Messe, a series of cavernous halls in a suburban complex about 45 minutes east of Tokyo’s city center, and since the calendar is late September, it’s always terribly hot or it pours rain. Either way, it’s very humid and there are thousands of people crammed together, creating what can only be described as a suboptimal sweat situation. However, I’ve always had a soft spot for TGS. I attended the first one in 2008, so the experience of playing in packed rooms and understanding very little about what’s happening has become powerfully nostalgic.

And I was surely not the only one who felt nostalgic in Tokyo last Friday, because the theaters were full of series and characters from 15 years ago. Silent Hill 2 was back in the konami stand, along with the gray-faced Solid Snake for the upcoming remake of Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater. Capcom It had two huge areas dedicated to Monster Hunter, a series that was incredibly popular in Japan during the 2000s and finally hit the world with Monster Hunter World in 2018. sony It also returned to the show in a big way for the first time in five years, showing off the PlayStation 5 Pro and its especially beautiful-looking PlayStation 30th Anniversary Special Edition. The Japanese-made Astro Bot was also everywhere at the show; I hope its sales have reflected how brilliant it is.

segaMeanwhile, it had ceded most of its space to two upcoming games: the Persona-like medieval fantasy RPG Metaphor: ReFantazio, and the beautiful and gloriously ridiculous Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, in which one of the infamous antagonists From the Yakuza series, Goro Majima, loses his memory and wanders around Hawaii on a pirate ship. There were other, newer games, too: the developers at Palworld had set up a huge booth decked out with Pokémon-like creatures and costumed mascots, making for an ostentatious display despite recent news that the company is being sued by Nintendo for alleged copyright infringement.

Namco Bandai He was there with Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, releasing next week, a beat-em-up that is sure to sell millions. And Infinity Nikki, an online dress-up adventure game from the Chinese developer paper gamesIt also had an elaborate presence with many decorations and hot air balloons. I’m delighted to report that after 10 minutes of dressing up Nikki and running around a fantasy city before jumping into a well to find a crowd of unhappy frogs, I still don’t know what this game is about.

The last time I was at TGS, about 10 years ago, most of the space was dedicated to smartphones. gacha gameswhile the big developers and publishers focused on consoles took a backseat. It was discouraging: when I was a child, Japan was The gaming industry and the weakened state of companies like Sega, Atlus, Konami, and even Nintendo for most of the 2010s were pretty sad. This year it looked and felt like the entire Japanese gaming industry was in good health.

xboxwhich has always been weak in Japan, also had an unexpectedly large presence: in a newscast late last week it announced that the venerable Starcraft and Starcraft 2 would be coming to its Game Pass subscription service for PC, and showed off several new games from Developers Japanese. Among them was Tanuki: Pon’s Summer, which was one of my personal favorites, made by DenkiWorks in Kyoto. you act lazy tanuki who has to get a job as a delivery boy to fix up his shrine in time for a major festival, riding around a quaint little Japanese town delivering packages to people with strange hobbies and performing sick tricks on his little BMX. It has tremendous personality and cartoonish appeal, and even in the space of a 20-minute demo there were fun nods to about 15 different games, from Tony Hawk to Animal Crossing.

That’s another thing I noticed at this year’s Tokyo Game Show: hundreds of indie games in the quietest rooms, all over the world, but many of them local, something you definitely didn’t find 10 years ago. One of them was called Rolling Macho: Tumbling to Earth by serial games. “There is no time to worry about why Macho is in space or why he is doing lateral turns,” it reads. its description on Steam. “All you need to understand is that he is in space and must return to Earth.” Isn’t that a video game premise we can all get behind?

I returned home feeling pleasantly confident that the types of Japanese games I grew up with are still alive and well, having played many that piqued my interest. The first of them, Metáfora: ReFantazio comes out in just over a week from zero study. There’s a demo available now, if a stylish medieval fantasy JRPG sounds like something that would improve your life.

what to play

I felt extremely uncomfortable playing History of the apartmenta short Sims-style life management game about a broke 20-something gaming journalist, created by Glasgow developer Sean Wenham, because it’s so… intimate.

Confined to a small apartment, you can shave, reorganize your few belongings, snoop around your roommate’s room, wash the dishes, stare despondently at the refrigerator, and, uh, take your protagonist to the bathroom, all in low-poly style. from a PlayStation 2 Game. The story goes off the rails pretty quickly, but this game is only £6 and a couple of hours long, so it’s worth a try anyway. Before it becomes a far-fetched thriller, it’s best as a darkly fascinating portrait of the mundanity of modern life.

Available in: personal computer
Estimated playing time: 1-2 hours, multiple games possible

what to read

• Ubisoft has been delayed Assassin’s Creed Shadows until February of next year. The game has been embroiled in a contrived culture war controversy for months, prompting a (in my opinion) misguided apology from its developers a few months ago for having “caused concern.” It’s hard to say whether this delay is a show of faith on Ubisoft’s part or damage control. The French publisher’s share price is at historic lows after its Star Wars game, Outlaws, sold worse than expected.

• The Simpsons: sold out has been a huge mobile gaming hit for 12 years, but will finally be removed from app stores in January. If you were once a player, you can complete a final farewell mission if you return to the game this month.

• After playing the new Yakuza game, Pirates in Hawaiiand spending most of my demo time playing a Mario Kart-style minigame, I came across this revealing breakdown of the series’ character tattoos and their symbolism. on Twitter. Meanwhile, the Amazon Prime Yakuza TV series comes out this month and has a new trailer.

What to click

Question Block

Reader Boy provides us with this week’s question:

“I have never been a PC gamer, but I want to have access to games that never or late reach consoles. So, I’m interested in a Steam Deck, but I’m worried I won’t be skilled enough to enjoy it. I’ve read about the need to adjust multiple settings to get a playable experience in all types of games. Given the non-negligible financial cost, is it Steam? Deck (a good choice) for plug-and-play people like me?

Valve Steam PlatformDesigned to be a laptop PC, it costs between £349 and £569 depending on whether you opt for an OLED or LED screen and how much storage you want, so it’s not an insignificant cost. It is, however, a lot easier to use than a PC. I’m like you, Guy, in that I’m allergic to the troubleshooting and settings manipulation that has always been a part of PC gaming.

I play a lot of games on my Steam Deck, from indie PC games like UFO 50 and Dredge to Elden Ring, and find it really good as a plug-and-play device. I ran into an annoying issue with Elden Ring that required a small amount of tinkering, but thanks to the blessed nerds at Reddit, I quickly fixed it. There will always be a small chance that a game will not run perfectly on the Deck, as is a portable PC, but most PC developers keep Deck gamers in mind these days and ship games with specific configuration profiles. And if you buy a game that doesn’t run perfectly on Deck and you don’t mind the tweaks, Steam offers no-questions-asked refunds within two weeks of purchasing a game if you’ve played it for less than two hours.

If you have a question for the ask block, or anything else to say about the newsletter, hit reply or email us at pushbuttons@theguardian.com.