Kentia Hall is the infamous vault one can find behind and between the normal passageways at E3. From descriptions by various E3 attendees over the years, I have gathered that Kentia is mostly regarded as a sad little den of all the rejected, low-budget, low-class, low-brow, high-hopes, little games-that-could.
When I arrived in Tokyo yesterday, Eckhardt was babbling even before the stewardess that was carrying me piggyback lowered me to the linoleum in front of Customs.
“They have a Kentia! A Kentia Hall!” Brownish spittle machinegunned from his flapping maw. I knew what this meant: that Nick Chester son-of-a-whore could keep his precious scoops. We had something better. We had quirky. We had indie. We had Hall 7.
The first thing one notices upon entering 7 is that it’s delicious. The entire cavern is steeped in airborne grease, which makes navigating the mostly art-college booths into something of a hungry venture. No matter, we were armed with green tea and lingering nausea from reading FatGoon.com (better than hoodia by far). No appetite, no problem.
Just a few steps in, we ran across what appeared to be the booth of a design college called TCA. On display were several games, one looping demo video, and the exquisite figurine you see below.
Sally Spider is from a project called the Diverting History of Mechanical Fellows. It appears to be a steampunk fighting game based on the art book of the same name, by Keisuke Kishi, starring stunningly designed robots. The video’s star was most certainly Sally, and her shining teeth and gilded legs made me want nothing more than a duplicate of this figurine. Crushingly, they were not for sale, nor was the illustrated book in the same exhibit. Sigh.
