The Tokyo Games Show doesn't officially start until Thursday, when the doors open for two days for the business audience before the show floor is overrun on Saturday and Sunday with regular consumers. So to pass the time before the Game Mission companies arrive, I headed to Akihabara, the mecca of gaming and electronics in Tokyo - if not the world.

First stop was Akihabara Electric Town, an eight-storey jumble of otaku (geek) electronics and culture, stuffed to the gills with (occasionally pornographic) anime and unusual objects (inflatable fish for £1, for example), cos-play accoutrements and micro processors. People of all ages and both genders pawed through the collectables and ephemera that, literally, towered over consumers, lost in the latest gadgetry. Portable video players are the big things here, and anything Gundam related; if you want gaming materials, you'll have to settle for the non-playable references (figurines, t-shirts, highly-decorative official manga reproductions) rather than the interactive real thing.

A wander outside, through the back streets and alleys, very quickly corrected this; entire stores are dedicated to single game franchises - many of which I was unfamiliar with due to the abundance of content that never makes it off this big island. There were plenty of phenomenal deals around for old school gamers; I saw a pile of SNESs in a basket on the street for sale for 1900 Yen each, and an equally enormous bucket of cartridges next to it for support. I also saw several TGS attendees clutching their spoils with looks of frantic glee, having arrived and consumed their fantasies.

Inspired by the hours spent wandering through the back streets in Shenmue, the Dreamcast's epic RPG, I went into a Pachinko arcade to play the Japanese version of the fruit machine, but the virtual money I'd earned in that game was no match for the real thing. No English translations for the kanji instructions left me up the creek without a paddle, and I escaped instead to Taito's multi-storey Game Station, where the entertainment on offer was more of the arcade variety.

Each floor had a genre: pick-up machines for casuals looking for game-themed (and not) soft toys, bishi-bashi style frantic twitch games, bemani rhythm action games - including a full-size version of Beatmania, the DJ simulation which was released in the UK on the PlayStation in 2000 with a mini turntable, but tanked - multiplayer first person shooters (including a version of Half Life in a bank of machines, not unlike racing games), quizzes, and two floors of the latest beat-em-ups. If you want to part with your money and have substantial time, this is the Trocadero, but well-organised and with a whiff of the professional.

I didn't manage to make it to any of the infamous Maid Cafes, but stopped instead for sushi before buying a keychain that looks like a pod of edamame, and heading back to Central Tokyo. The hustle and bustle of Akihabara is phenomenal, and a must-see for any otaku when visiting the city.

For an excellent write up on this part of town, see Boing Boing's coverage here.