You read correctly - Chinajoy 2011, bud, it's what E3 could have been if it had stood up for itself when all the sissies started complaining about the booth babes stealing the show a few years back. Granted, I've never been to E3. But Chinajoy is pretty much E3 + Evo + San Diego Comic Con and is reserved only for the coolest people in town. Naturally, I received an exclusive invite, and I was oh-so-pleased to attend.

See, China has got its shit together; it ain't about the games, technology, or creative innovation, it's about this:





Sure, you'll have some nerds dressed as wizards and jokers competing in Starcraft II or League of Legends -











- but that's all secondary to the booth babes. Honestly, I was hard-pressed to find representatives that weren't booth babes, besides those working for American developer Red 5 Studios, which is comprised of former Blizzard employees who worked on World of Warcraft and think they know something about launching a successful persistent world in Asia:





See, this is something that the games industry in the West doesn't get - there's a positive correlation between the positive previews of your cookie-cutter MMO and the number of girls that wear your logo and pose for pictures at Chinajoy:





Sure, you could argue that the Electronic Entertainment Expo couldn't possibly compete with a convention that brings together the industry's top talent and the world's best cosplayers:





But even so, everything else is so far behind Chinajoy, it's embarrassing. In every aspect. Electronic Arts get it. They had girls AND cars:





As any industry veteran knows, avoiding addressing the actual aspects of your project is what really counts, right? Good thing they stuck all the local indie studios and their unique ideas in an unreachable back corner.