ADK Anime World

I was actually intending to post about the Liverpool Hope University sim, which I mentioned yesterday. However, when I got there I was rather disappointed with what was on offer. It is clearly very much a 'work in progress' and not really in a fit state to receive visitors. Or at least, not the sort of visitor who is likely to offer a critique of the place in his/her blog. Furthermore, some not so innocent soul appears to have infected the place with not one but two (or maybe more) of those sim-busting particle-spawning things - that no doubt have some wacky technical name.

Cutting to the chase, I gave up on that and went back to peruse the map. Being a sucker for initials, my attention was grabbed by the relatively close ADK sim, so I popped in for a lookabout. This turns out to be a(nother) Japanese sim. It belongs to ADK (Asatsu DK), and from the little I can glean, has been open since around November, 2007. You can get a good description at Katana Extreme. Now, ADK is not a big name in our household - although oddly enough, AFK, is. But a bit of internet rummaging reveals that ADK is Japan's third-largest full service advertising agency and the tenth largest marketing organisation in the world. Wikipedia tells us: "It owns a variety of interests and companies, including the production studio NAS, the animation studio Eiken, the publishing house Nihon Bungeisha Publishing, the film and print processing enterprise Taiyo Seihan, the production studios Sun Artist Studio, Supervision Inc., television commercial production house Prime Pictures, and creative services company Tokyo Ad Party. ADK is also involved in producing and providing its services to numerous anime series..."

The sim is broadly divided into 3 areas: the Business Center; the NAS open air movie theatre and the Haunted House (or "mansion of demon-man Bem"). The movie theatre seems to be showing Dragonaut, but there is no streaming video. The mansion contains a ghost train, which takes you for a spooky ride, at the end of which you can grab some freebie character avatars and a t-shirt. There's also a photo studio where you can have your picture taken with the stars of the show.

Here's my piccies of my jaunt: