Kyle Orland asked me if there were any other giant inflatable creatures at the Tokyo Game Show besides the giant chocobo I mentioned earlier. Yes, in fact, there was a giant Slime. He hovered over the Dragon Quest VI booth, smiling down on us with his trademark brand of low-I.Q. contentedness.

I wondered why there was such excitement over Dragon Quest VI, but once I walked over to the Slime's domain, I learned that Square Enix is remaking the 1995 game for the DS, much as they did with DQ4 and DQ5. (Dragon Quest III will soon see yet another re-release, as well, on Japanese mobile phones.) This was one of the longest lines on the show floor during the industry/media days, probably because it was one of the few snippets of "new" work on display. That made me sad because the Dragon Quest games are great, but damn if Japanese developers aren't, as Jones pointed out, putting a lot of resources into making the same game over and over again.

But back to the Slime. I like the Slime a lot. It's a classic character design, cute without pouring it on too thick. I have a pretty big collection of Slime stuff, and it keeps growing because Square Enix keeps pumping it out. The simple shape lends itself to merchandising, and I am a sucker for it. If Square Enix is leaning too hard on its aging series, I have to admit I'm part of the problem.

At Makuhari, I got a vinyl Slime tower for display on my desk, a Metal Slime paperweight, and a Slime business-card holder, the last of which I displayed proudly to all colleagues. Jones took this picture of me at the Square Enix swag kiosk and kept showing it to me throughout the week: "Look how happy you are there!"

I guess I am pretty happy. Hey, even self-respecting game critics get to enjoy a little shopping spree now and then.

The gallery below is a tribute not so much to the babes, but to the type of skeevy dude who thinks nothing of asking a stranger if he can photograph her boobs, enacting his own little Maxim shoot right there on the show floor. I realize that's what the booth babes are there for, but damn. Lecherous photogs, Crispy Gamer salutes you!

This guy in the white Mercedes-Benz jacket was like a machine. I think his bag is full of spare cameras because he tends to wear them down from furious overuse.

Here's a twofer:

And another!

Writers have a built-in bias when we go to events like the Tokyo Game Show: We want them to matter. I flew halfway around the world and upended my life for two weeks so that I could attend this show. When Jones and I walked into the Makuhari Messe convention center yesterday for the first day of TGS, you better believe we wanted to be wowed. We even made the header picture up top in the expectation that we'd need to show everyone how blown away we were by the super-amazing festivities!

The reality was more like this:

Though it's painful to admit given the trouble it takes us get here, TGS 2009 doesn't matter. This show feels hollow. Makuhari Messe is like a giant hangar, half full, and even among the sparse offerings, there is plenty of overlap. The Microsoft, Sony, and third-party publisher booths feature many of the same games, so it seems like there's another Lost Planet 2 display around every corner. Same for Modern Warfare 2, Final Fantasy XIII, Tekken 6, and a bunch of others. If your game isn't featured in at least 70 booths at TGS, you're nobody!

Yes, there's not much news left in 2009 for companies to announce here. I won't pretend that's such a huge disaster. It's not like anything meaningful usually takes place at trade shows—most of the usual "news" consists of corporations announcing things they will probably make in the next year or so. Not exactly Woodward and Bernstein stuff, but we post it as ZOMG BREAKING MUST-READ!!!, and you wait months for anything to actually happen, and then when it does finally happen, you realize you have spent months in rabid anticipation for a new Zelda game that's pretty much the same as the old Zelda games, and perhaps you cry a little. And then the cycle begins again. Hey, it's a sickness we all share.

But while their ability to generate news may be overrated, the good trade shows usually have a spirit of community and celebration. TGS has a little of the former—we've had some fun nights out with developers, fellow journalists, and other how-do-you-dos—but the show is no party. It feels like the video game industry is going through the motions because they scheduled TGS 2009 a long time ago, and it was too late to bag the whole thing. Meanwhile, everybody's looking at their watch and saying, "Is it 2010 yet?" (Or perhaps more accurately, "Is this recession over yet?")

There is a huge chocobo here, though. Wow!

That expression of delight is pretty genuine.

Can you spot the gamer in this picture, taken at yesterday's thrilling Yomiuri Giants baseball game?

No? Here's a closer shot.

There he is! Nothing like some quality time with the DS when your family has shelled out for a bunch of seats at the Tokyo Dome. I love you, Mom and Dad! Just not as much as Professor Layton! By the way, the Giants were playing to clinch the pennant in this game, so it ought to have been pretty exciting (and it was—the Giants won).

I remember when my dad took me to my first Red Sox game and I finally got to World 8-1 in Super Mario Land.

In some of the more completist comics stores here, you can get fan-made manga that features characters from venerable game series. I discovered this corner of fan culture on my first trip to Tokyo when I was browsing for Final Fantasy stuff at a comic/pop-culture store in Shibuya called Mandarake. I flipped through the fan manga shelves marked "FF" and found three surprises.

1. The art is often very good, much better than I expected from amateurs.

2. Many of the comics featured the Final Fantasy characters having sex.

3. A lot of the aforementioned sex is gay sex.

I don't know why I was so shocked by items 2 and 3. (I guess because I was a dumb, horny virgin.) After all, the most famous benefit of creating fan fiction is that you get to make the characters have sex, and if you're going to stray from the officially sanctioned script, you might as well do it with gusto. I'm also guessing that the straight stuff sells more quickly, so my occasional sample is probably skewed in favor of the less commercially popular man-on-man action. (I have no idea to what degree that theory is correct, though—homoerotic manga isn't exactly a rarity, and there is definitely a thriving market for it.)

There's probably a slew of much crappier fan-manga online, but I've never bothered to explore that subculture on the web. I like the print editions better because it's amazing that these amateurs go to the trouble of having their work printed up with a full-color cover and distributed around the country. There's no way this is makes money. It has to be a labor of love—they needed their vision of Jecht getting it on with Tidus executed in print.

Another strange thing is that over time, the fan-manga community seems to settle into a consensus of which male-male pairing from each game is the hottest. For instance, the aforementioned Jecht-Tidus coupling outnumbers other Final Fantasy X duos by a wide margin. Something about this May-December romance hits a nerve with the amateur artists. The jury is still out on Final Fantasy XII—there's a little more variety in this game's fan adaptations—but Basch and Balthier seem to be the frontrunners. Here is a picture of them kissing.

I'd provide more pictures, but the kissing is about as far as I can go without causing our sponsors, the good people of Geritol, to withdraw their support. The comics can get pretty graphic. There's nothing, though, that approaches the level of garden-variety hentai manga, where naked torsos and bodily ephemera splash across the page with hedonistic abandon. The heterosexual game manga are generally more restrained than hentai, and the gay stuff is of a piece with the rest of the homoerotic yaoi genre, which typically does not emphasize graphic sex as much as hentai. (N.B.: Yaoi is usually intended more for female audiences than gay male readers.)

Lest you think this is a Final Fantasy thing, I'll point out that there are a ton of different games featured on the Mandarake fan-manga shelves. RPGs and fighting games are well represented, and adventure games—a genre that means something a little different in Japan—are also popular. Jones asked me if I had found any Mario manga porn, a good question. I've never checked for it.

As Jones mentioned, we are staying in Shinjuku, the city's classic entertainment and nightlife district. Shinjuku has lost some of its luster over the decades. It used to be that when a movie shot on location in Tokyo, the establishing shot would always be the same: a wide shot of Shinjuku's Yasukuni-dori street, stacked with neon signs, full of Japanese characters blazing with illegible mystique.

In a modern film, though, you'll usually find Tokyo represented by the more youthful Shibuya, where the Starbucks and Tower Records and Parco department stores flop over each other in an architectural pig-pile. Contrast that against the staid parallel lines that make up the standard old Yasukuni-dori shot and Shinjuku seems to age by the comparison, like a playboy past his prime.

I'm not saying Shinjuku is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it is a place where, the other day, Jones and I were accosted by a man in a cheap suit pointing us to a nearby gentleman's club. "You want sekkusu?" he said (in Japanese). Jones waved him off and then asked me what was going on. "He was offering you 'sex-u,'" I said, parroting the Japanese pronunciation. "Strippers, maybe." It was 10:00 in the morning. Shinjuku = classy.

I lived in Japan for a while, and I've visited a number of times besides. Travel in a foreign country is always intimidating, but Japan has a special ability to induce neurosis because its foreignness is mixed with tantalizing familiarity. There is so much appropriation of Western culture and language with so little regard for its original meaning. English words, American brand names, well-known characters, etc., are peppered throughout the scenery, but they're all fragments—"WEB!" "HOKKAIDO GET!"

And that wears on you. Japan seems like it should be an easy destination for an American because it's so Westernized, and English is pervasive. In many ways, it is indeed easy. There is also a pernicious feeling of unease, though, because you're inundated with seemingly straightforward images and language that don't mean what you think they do. It's more disorienting to misunderstand than to not understand at all.

The guy asking us if we wanted "sex" is the crudest example of this (and, admittedly, maybe not the best one, but stick with me). If he had spoken words I didn't comprehend, that would have been the end of it; we'd move on. But you process your native language instinctively. He said "sex," and that meant something to me. I had to override the involuntary mental reaction of assigning a ready meaning to that word. Same with the ad on the subway that says "GOOD LIFE FOR LUCK!" I know all those words, yet they just do not come together in a sensible way for me. That doesn't stop the brain from trying anyway. It's uncomfortable. Not only is there the usual issue in foreign travel of dealing with what you don't know; but it also feels like what you do know—your psychic foundation—is melting away.

On a recent trip to Japan, one of my travel companions became so overwhelmed by the feeling of isolation here that she demanded to be flown home immediately, at great expense (and she went, too). I've never been that panicked, but I have felt, many times, a wave of desperation wash over me—a sudden feeling that you're lost and alone. Jones and I both felt it a couple nights ago, walking through Shinjuku looking for a place to eat, careening between the foreign, the misleadingly familiar, and the flat-out strange. A sign: "TOKYO NEW PARTY CLUB: Produced by Matsuo Shinagawa." Ronald McDonald, but not at McDonald's, for some reason. Two show dogs (literally, big fluffy show dogs) holding court outside the entrance to a restaurant. Mickey Mouse, everywhere, for some reason. Plus sekkusu! Everyone grabbing our arms and won't you please sample the sekkusu!

Each funny little oddity is harmless on its own, but when they come so relentlessly, you unconsciously cast about for something to ground yourself. We ended up taking refuge in a quiet place where the waiters didn't speak a lick of English. (I do speak OK Japanese.) We couldn't read the menus, and that was a relief. It was preferable to the noise of broken symbols rattling around our heads, trying to mean something.

Part Two has something to do with games, I swear!

Swag Tester! Where the hell has it been? Well, I'm busy. And lazy. They call me "Blazy" around the office. Not because I'm busy and lazy (that's just a coincidence) but rather because I am a huge fan of Blaze from "American Gladiators." The original one, not the one that was on NBC the last couple years -- forget that noise. Wait, what were we talking about?

Right! Swag Tester! Commenter beanzfury won the last prize package, a copy of King of Fighters XII and a Kyo figure. I'm sure that beanzfury is clearing a place on the mantle as we speak. This time, we're offering one lucky commenter a pair of Modern Warfare 2 pens.

"Just pens?" you're saying, ungratefully. "That's it?" you're adding, unnecessarily. Well, yes, but there's a twist. These pens light up. In the picture above, you can see one pen lit and the other unlit. Trust me, when you get both of them in your hand, one of two things happen. Either you pretend to be that guy who brings planes in at the airport, or you have a sudden urge for a lightsaber war. Evan Moore demonstrates both phenomena below.

To win the pens -- oh, what the heck, I'll throw in a Crispy Gamer hat, too. We ordered 10,000 of these things, and after handing them out to everyone in the New York office, we've got about 9,986 left. So we can spare one of these bright orange ballcaps, one of which is modeled here by Crispy CEO Chris Heldman (along with his watch, for some reason):

So, to win the pens AND a hat, leave a comment below with your answer to the question, "What is your favorite in-game gadget?" 'Cause the pens remind me of the flashlight from Shadow Complex. (Also, sometimes it is hard to think of a question that has something to do with the giveaway, OK? So BACK OFF!!!) Rules: There are no wrong answers; winner is picked at random from eligible commenters; only U.S. residents can win; you can't win two Swag Testers in a row. Whew. So anyway, good luck!

Congratulations to commenters Confessor, piccolo13, and w1ndst0rm. They all won novel DS styluses simply by commenting on the last Swag Tester. If you want to be like them -- witty, urbane, doyens of the comment-thread chattering class -- I will make it simple for you. I have placed a small box at the bottom of this page. If you type words in this box and click the orange button, other people will see your words. After you have put your words in the box and clicked the button, you will have a chance to win…

1. A copy of King of Fighters XII for the Xbox 360. OK, yes, I didn't like this game so much. But maybe you will, which would be super, because then you'll be especially happy to get it for free. Happier than I was, at least. (Don't worry, your game will be a fresh, shrink-wrapped copy, not my disc, which is too saturated with tears and anger for the Xbox to even recognize it anymore.)

2. A lifelike figure of KOF 12 character Kyo Kusanagi. When my KOF 12 package arrived from the publisher, the poor FedEx envelope looked ready to burst from the seams. I figured either KOF 12 was a 40-disc epic, or there was something extra in there. The bonus was a box enticingly labeled "POLYRESIN FIGURE: KYO." Wow, polyresin! That is a word that means something, I assume!

Kyo was rushed to the Swag Tester Swag Testing Facilities For Testing Of Swag. (I know the name seems redundant. I'm SORRY, all right? The sign maker was having a two-letters-for-the-price-of-one deal, and maybe I went a little overboard.)

Swag Tester verdict: A good figure, I figure. <-- Get it?

To enter, add a comment below with your answer to the question, "What is the most impressive special move you've ever pulled off in a game?" Could be a fighting-game move, could be something else. As always, this is a free-form exercise. You can go all e. e. cummings on us, and your entry will still count.

A new rule: You can't win twice in a row. Spread the wealth. The old rules: Winner chosen at random from eligible commenters, U.S. residents only. Good luck!

Fellow adventurers, it has been a long, hot slog through the StarTropics. Let's not mince words; it was more difficult than we thought. The mosquitos, the ghosts, the traps, the belligerent women on the lighthouse islands. But the month is almost out. Let's make one last push this week to make it as far as you can.

Then share your experiences in the forum, whether you made it to the end or not. I, for one, am committed to finishing this game come hell or highwater. You may not be there by my side at the end, that's fine. We can all share a drink at the tavern when it's over.

And then we will move on. Perhaps to a less daunting challenge. If you have a suggestion for the next Adventurers Club destination, please share it in the comments.

Old business, new business. That's the routine here at the Swag Tester labs. Old business: Congratulations to commenter scrimshaw for winning the Battlestations: Pacific package from last time. Enjoy your heavy-duty lighter and regular-duty bombshell babe calendar! New business: Styluses! Or is it styli? Things to play your DS with, in any case.

This week three (3) commenters will bring home goodies courtesy of Swag Tester. Two people will win a Zelda: Spirit Tracks stylus in the shape of a quill. These things are tough to photograph (my best attempt is above), but they are really cool in person. Once again I was seriously tempted to keep the swag for myself. 

But wait, there is so much more. OK, not so much more. There's one thing more. Managing editor Elise Vogel saw me gathering up styluses for the giveaway and donated a pair of stylus "chopsticks" that we got as a promo item for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. As they say in China, gee whiz that's a lotta styluses!

Evan Narcisse helped me put the feather stylus through its paces. Oh man, maybe I will save one of these for myself. Nay, I … I mustn't. Just watch the damn video while I sob quietly over here in the corner.

Swag Tester verdict: Forsooth, it is a delight!

OK, some new rules this week, friends. Apparently we had to send a prize to Khartoum or some such, and it put us way over budget, and we had to fire our fancy caterers, and instead of duck canapés we now have to eat Skittles for lunch. And everybody is mad at me. So the contest is open to U.S. residents only. Boo, hiss, I know.

That said, if you are stateside, comment in the thread below with your answer to the question, "Who is your favorite fine, feathered friend in all of gaming?" That could mean birds, but it doesn't have to. My pick would be Yuna from the Final Fantasy X games because she is a stone-cold fox. She has a feather on her earring, so it counts. IT COUNTS, PEOPLE!

There are no wrong answers, and three winners will be picked at random. The first two commenters chosen will get a Spirit Tracks styluses, and the third will get the GTA: Chinatown chopstick dealies. Good luck!