TGS '07: Level 5's DS demos draw throng

TOKYO--Of all the booths on the floor of the 2007 Tokyo Game Show, Level 5's setup was one of the most oddly organized, and also one of the most popular, on hand. The company featured a circular-shaped booth, but none of the games the company was showing off were playable.

Instead, the outside of the booth featured a truly massive line of game fans looking to get into the central stage, where the company was showing off games like Inazuma Eleven (Lighting Eleven), a soccer role-playing game for the Nintendo DS, and Layton Kyouju to Akuma no Hako (Professor Layton and Pandora's Box), a puzzle-solving adventure game, also for the Nintendo DS. Pandora's Box is actually the second game in the Professor Layton series, while the first, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, is set for release here in the US in December.

Part of the reason for the massive lines at Level 5 was because the publisher was handing out DS cartridges filled with demos of the games on hand. As you can expect any time free stuff is handed out at a convention, line waits on the media days alone were more than an hour, and far longer once the show opened to the public.