It's a TGS ritual: when the clock strikes five, booth managers round up all of the lovely female 20-somethings that they paid to prettify their booths and line them up for a five-minute photo opportunity.

Show attendees oblige, whipping out their massive camera rigs, kneeling, zooming and snapping thousands of photographs in the fleeting moments before the booth managers lead the women away again.

Though we don't typically engage in such flights of fappery, we think it important to document this spectacle. (It makes us feel dirty to take these photos, but for you, readers, we subject ourselves to all manner of difficult game blog assignment.)

Click "continue" for more photos.

Above: 5 PM at the Hangame booth. One of the least impressive lineups for reasons that will soon become clear. Shown here to demonstrate how even some of the smaller booths participate in the event.

Above: Microsoft's impressive lineup included dozens of women, sorted by height. The tallest women (in the foreground) comprise approximately 10% of the total and are dressed in futuristic stewardess outfits. The middle of the line (approximately 80% of the total) includes women of surprisingly uniform height, indicating that Microsoft's booth managers actually measured height before making hiring decisions.

Here are the shortest of the MS booth hands. They're wearing a third type of outfit and lack the chains shown in the next photograph.

These chains are designed to jangle as the booth attendants march into and out of their line-up. The addition of this siren sound to the visual overload was designed to ruin those of us who forgot to lash ourselves to a sturdy mast or plug our ears with beeswax. All those boots clop-clopping, those butts badonka-donking and those chains ring-ringling made it look and sound as if Santa had come to Tokyo.

The ladies of Cykan's booth really need to get in touch with Peter Moore's tattoo artist. We can totally tell that those are fake. The tats, pervs, the tats.