Entry tags:

berzerk at two a.m., taiwan on3

No One Gives A Shit About Gaming In Taiwan and There's a Perfectly Good Reason For That


The lines to get into the Taipei Stationery Show were incredibly long, and at first Cindy and I had the impression that we'd be standing outside of the Game Show for forty minutes. . . not unlike our trip to the 2005 Taipei Brassiere Show. However, this was not the case. We were able to get our tickets and walk through the front gate faster than I could screw the cap back on my half pint of Jim Beam and fumble it back into my pocket.





I don't know what I had in mind, walking in there. I thought I'd see some new games, I guess. And I did. Unfortunately, they were all in Chinese. Sony and Microsoft tried to make a showing. That didn't work. Local companies, Chinese companies, Korean companies, and this guy all stole their thunder.

I should hasten to add that there was also a World of Warcraft display. This included a giant World of Warcraft Tour Bus and a giant inflatable orc. The orc was
anatomically correct. Still all of these foreign companies made a weak showing. They weren't on their home turf and it showed.

All of the games moved too fast to take pictures. . . and I wasn't about to take any videos because I lack the space to hold them.

We wound up photographing women. Let's get to that.

And Nintendo didn't show up. Let's get that right out of the way. They didn't bother to show up for this thing. In retrospect, I can't say that I blame them, but I felt really let down when I first heard the news.

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Sony's Display


They had lots of girls wearing latex skirts. They had scooters and motorbikes, too. They even had girls in latex skirts grinding scooters and motorbikes. At one point, the burlier Sony reps placed a Playstation scooter on to top of another Playstation scooter and attempted to simulate a motorscooter sex act. Later on, assorted Sony girls started making out and touching each other. Apparently, not all of the chicks on Sony's payroll would engage in lesbian exhibitionism for the sake of their company. . . I think there were two. Anyway, they just kind of stood around and touched the front of their skirts. . . pretending to be "kind of" into it, I guess.

Yup, Sony was doing everything they possibly could to cover up the fact that they didn't have a single playable demo for the PS3. They had an ominous looking tabernacle devoted to the PS3. Cameras weren't allowed inside and there were no playable demos. As far as I know, there aren't even any finished games. Even so, the line was frightening. Enough to keep away. I don't even own a television set, anyway. . . much less an HDTV set.

I read recently that a Sony representative was telling a crowd of Taiwanese gamers that they weren't likely to release the PS3 in Taiwan until they could figure out a way to stay ahead of the bootleggers. So, it just might be that Taiwanese gamers will be importing their PS3's from Japan.

Sony wasn't showing anything off that hadn't been shown off before, anyway.

They had about 500 square feet of floorspace devoted to the PS2 and PSP, though. It seemed like they had a lot of fighting games on display. I'm not sure I saw one RPG.

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The Girls

I read somewhere that there were pole dancers. This wasn't true. There were no pole dancers, sadly. Just girls hugging a pole and forcing smiles. Most of the other girls were serving the same end. I believe it was Webzen that had put up the money to take about a thousand square feet and fill it with computers and couches. Those who wished to take a crack at playing one of Webzen's games could take a seat with one of the Webzen girls on a turquoise couch for ten or fifteen minutes. I had a bunch of pictures of this, and we'll get to why they're not here, later.

If I had to give one reason for there being so many models there, it would be that so many of the games looked the same. . . I mean, I wish I could say more on the subject. But that's just it. The Chinese (language) gaming market is pretty homogenous.

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Webzen

Webzen, the ambitious Taiwanese software company that rented out the extra thousand square feet for the turquoise, vinyl couches and the scantily-clad, teetotaling companions, seemed like the one to beat at the 2006 Taipei Game Show.

Their big draw is, I guess, an online RPG called Soul of the Ultimate Nation: Episode One. The "Ultimate Nation" bit makes me think these guys are cozy with Beijing, but I could be mistaken. We weren't able to play this game because the line to sit down and give it a try was almost as long, and slower moving, than the line to see PS3 demos you've been copping off of IGN for three months, now.

The ability to sample the game on an anachronistic piece of plastic furniture with a betelnut girl's hand on your knee seemed to be the only thing that distinguished this game from any of the other Chinese MMORPG's to be gawked at.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Webzen's got a sister-company cranking out CPU's that'll handle all their software. They had some of the cases on display. For some sick reason, comprehensible to only the Taiwanese, they opted for Xbox green.



Supposedly, the online gaming market in Taiwan holds a 40 percent to 50 percent share of the Chinese online game market . From what I saw, the online gaming marker--across the board--is driven by swords and sorcery and exposed navel-based RPG's. Some are first person, some are Diablo-style. I saw a few mech based ones, too. And one SWAT type game. Webzen had the booths. That's what distinguished them from everyone else.

Anyway, women and the the casual gamer market seem to be regarded as a new trend in Chinese gaming. So, we'll see where the booths are next year, and who's in them.

The Webzen girls just said "no" to drinking on the job.

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My Encounter With Microsoft

Now, while the Webzen girls weren't about cutting loose and pulling a slug of whiskey, the XBox360 girls were all about it. In point of fact, even the guys in the white shirts and ties wanted a hit. I wound up having to leave the convention and dash across the street to Taipei 101 to get a couple of fifths. The folks shilling for Microsoft couldn't get fucked up enough at this gig. The technicians were chewing betelnuts like contracting mouth cancer would win you a trip to Fiji. The sales representatives were hitting me up for speed. Two of the girls, the two from Japan, I think, were huffing rubber cement behind one of the kiosks. One guy I tried talking to, who seemed a bit disoriented and was prone to talking really fast, started laughing so hard that his nose began to bleed when I asked him if he thought the Xbox360 would be successful in Taiwan. He politely wiped the blood off the lower half of his face and threw the tissue into an Xbox case that had been converted into a wastebasket.

I'd worked up a pretty good drunk-on by the time the American representative showed up. His face was pretty flushed, his moves were slow and languid, and he reeked of hashish and baby oil. He told me his name was Arthur Penhallow and that he'd talk to me if I could score any whippets. I had to leave the show again. Picking up a box of whippets wasn't too hard. I almost forgot to pick up balloons. Luckily, the 7-11 in the basement of 101 had some.

When I got back, Arthur was ready go. He and Cindy were working their way through one of the corked bottles of Johnny Walker (the one with the green label). It was only then did I realize I hadn't picked up a cracker for the little metal cylinders full of "consciousness expanding" nitrous oxide. Fortunately, and as you might have expected, this Microsoft employee was ready to rock and roll. He had one of those old school, black, leather, doctor's bags. . . teeming with prescription drug bottles, loose pieces of Nicorette and--sure enough--a whippet cracker. After awhile he really opened up.

"Hudson. . . you're a pussy. You fucking twist an eighth of a fucking gram and sit down with your little. . . your little goody toe-shoes girlfriend and that stupid fucking sham shiba and you just sit there on the couch and. . . shit. . . you think you know what the Talking Heads are about. . . Listen. . . listen. . . The last time I watched "Stop Making Sense," I was wearing a crash helmet and a diaper. . . and the WOMEN were being paid two grand EACH to be there, alright. . ."



"Talking Heads. . ." I interjected. . . I couldn't follow that up, though. I'd looked down at my feet and saw the dozen spent cartridges we'd used to trick our brains into thinking we were drowning.

"Yeah, the Talking Heads. . ."

"No, the name of their band is Talking Heads, see. . ."

At this point, he vomited explosively and aroused the attention of the authorities, who had been tyeing us suspiciously ever since we'd started filling up balloons shaped like Hello Kitty's head with that liberating brainkill.

At that point, my camera was confiscated and I was escorted out of the exhibition hall.

Now, you might think I was out a camera and 6.00 USD. I never got the camera back, true, but I was able to slick my hair back with acid rain, remove my glasses and jacket, and get back in without anyone even noticing me.

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The Gamers

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No, I didn't get to see the holiest of holies, I never made it past the two-hundred bodied line leading into the tabernacle of the PS3. . . There were no playable demos. . . because, well, because Sony doesn't have their shit together and their subsidized programmers can't tell which end is up with this new console that's going to make games that look about as good as present day PC games. . . and I'm sure most people reading this have caught vidcaps from other sources, anyway.



And, really, talking to him was what made my 2006 Taipei Game Show experience worthwhile. It wasn't the naive, latex-clad, competent-in-English, Taiwan models aspiring to marry rich or land a job outside of Taiwan, it wasn't the countless online Chinese-language MMORPG's, it wasn't even the free jia-you bangs that Hi-Net was passing out. . . no, it wasn't even the Nestea van crashing through the front door of the lobby and rolling over a nest of fat kids staring at the Bat Girl's navel. . . Uh-uh. Talking to Microsoft's own Arthur Penhallow while we turned our talking heads into brain cell concentration camps that made my trip to the TWTC a truly eye-opening experience.

Because now, after having the opportunity to speak with those coordinating Microsoft's regional campaign in Asia, I now truly understand how it is that they believe they have a snowball's chance in Hell of making the thinnest of dimes off the entire Goddamned continent.

After we checked out the 2006 Taipei Bed Show (which also had plenty of cute chicks trying to get you interested in buying stuff), I came back home and sat down to some *real* gaming.