Japan's Xbox Lounge to close
It's a limited-time thing.
Any of you Xbox 360 fans planning a pilgrimage to Tokyo to check out the Xbox Lounge might want to get those plane tickets booked quickly - it turns out that the Lounge is only a temporary mission and will actually close for good on January 15th.
According to Game Watch (spotted by Kotaku), the store will be open throughout the New Year's holidays, but will then shut up shop pretty quickly when it's done its job promoting the Xbox 360, which launches in Japan on December 10th.
The lounge, in case you haven't paid much attention to it, is a cube-like building full of demo pods, enormous televisions and swanky sofas - as well as coffee-making facilities and various snacks. Sounds like our lounge, except without the "enormous", "swanky" or "various" bits - we're all about the "flea-bitten" and "savoury".
The goal of the Lounge is to help showcase the Xbox 360 to the Japanese, obviously, who even after Microsoft's big push in the region seem to be reacting slowly to it - if the response at the TGS keynotes and on the show floor was anything to go by anyway.
Oh, and we know none of you really are planning to fly to Japan to see it. Because that would be silly.