In this week’s newsletter: Konami, cute RPGs, weird but wonderful indie games – everything I saw at Japan’s biggest gaming convention • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Tokyo Game Show takes place at the Makuhari Messe, a series of cavernous halls in a suburban complex about 45 minutes east of Tokyo city centre, and given its late September slot in the calendar, it is always either horribly hot or pouring with rain. Either way, it’s humid as heck, and there are many thousands of people crammed in, creating what can only be described as a suboptimal sweat situation. Nonetheless, I’ve always had a soft spot for TGS. I attended my first one in 2008, and so the experience of playing games in packed halls while understanding very little about what is happening has become powerfully nostalgic. And I surely wasn’t the only person feeling nostalgic in Tokyo last Friday, because the halls were filled with series and characters from 15 years ago. Silent Hill 2 was back on the Konami stand, along with Solid Snake’s grizzled face for the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater remake. Capcom had two huge areas given over to Monster Hunter, a series that was unbelievably popular in Japan throughout the 00s and finally broke through to the world with Monster Hunter World in 2018. Sony was also back at the show in a big way for the first time in five years, showing off the PlayStation 5 Pro, and its especially gorgeous-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. Continue reading...

From playing Super Mario on a giant control to spotting Pikmin hiding in corners, my visit to this delightful museum in Kyoto offered up experience over education • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Kyoto, 100 years before the release of the Game Boy. Long before it was a video game company, it made toys and hanafuda cards adorned with scenes from nature, used to play several different games popular in Japan. By 1969, Nintendo had expanded its business to include western-style playing cards, and the company built a plant to manufacture them in southern Kyoto. Until 2016, the Uji Ogura Plant was a card factory and as a repairs centre for the company’s consoles. It has been turned into a Nintendo Museum, opening on 2 October, where the gaming giant’s entire history will be on display. Nintendo flew me to Kyoto to see the museum. Along with the Super Nintendo World theme park, at Universal Studios in Osaka, it will be a major draw for video game tourists in Japan. It’s laid out across two floors: upstairs, there is a gallery of Nintendo products, from playing cards through to the Nintendo Switch. Downstairs are the interactive exhibits, where you can play snatches of Nintendo games on comically gigantic controllers that require two people to operate and immerse yourself for a not-entirely-generous seven minutes in a NES, SNES or N64 game in the retro area. Or you can step into a re-creation of a 1960s Japanese home and whack ping-pong balls with a bat (the Ultra Machine batting toy was developed by Gunpei Yokoi, the inventor of the Game Boy, and released in 1967). Continue reading...