And a good time was had by all.

Our thanks and congratulations go out to our intrepid Japan correspondent (who prefers to remain nameless), for he has escaped unscathed from Sony's PlayStation Festival 2000, and sent us many images of the event. If you've got the bandwidth, don't fail to check out our movie clips from the show as well.

Here's the entrance to the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba, which at this point was, surprisingly, not particularly crowded - certainly not to Tokyo Game Show proportions, anyway.

By the time things got going, however, the event obviously attracted plenty of people, although the crowds were small enough to remain focused on the many games on display. Above, you can see banners for T&E Soft's golf game and Namco's Tekken Tag Tournament.

Other companies proudly displayed many upcoming titles. The banner on the left proclaims Konami's Jikkyou Pro Baseball 7 and World Soccer 2000. In the middle, going left to right and top to bottom, ASCII's Katsuragi Shogi IV, Koei's Mahjong Taikai, Konami's Mahjong Yarouze!, and Yuki-enterprise's Morita Shogi. Yes, mahjong and Japanese chess - you know you want it. Oh, and there's another name you might be interested in, Sony's Gran Turismo 2000.

Though it's no longer a launch title, Tekken Tag Tournament is still drawing plenty of interest, and it looks like the demonstration version has progressed since TGS - if memory serves, Xiaoyu's alternate outfit wasn't available then. On the right there, it appears SCE has settled on a box design for their new console. The jury remains out on whether we like it or not. One thing is for certain, it is extremely blue.

We also managed to snag some images of a handful of PlayStation 2 titles - left to right, that's Capcom's Onimusha, SCE's Dark Cloud, Tecmo's Dead or Alive 2 (which certainly seems to have benefited from its leap to the PS2), From Software's Armored Core 2, and Extermination, a new title from Sony. We think that's somebody exploding, but we wouldn't swear to it.