It may interest you that RoboCup 2005, a robotics and artifical intelligence competition held in the name of designing life-size automatons capable of defeating a human soccer team by 2050, took place in Osaka this past week. Sponsored by nearly twenty major Japanese firms, the event pitted over three hundred teams from thirty-one countries in a dozen mechanized matches. Judging by a nonchalant reference to the robot team's opponents as champions of the "World Cup of Human Soccer" forty-five years hence, kicking balls into goals by other means has come quite a ways since Subbuteo.
And it may interest you that the HAL-5 mechanical exoskeleton, spied by uBlog last month, continues to impress and inspire those eager to supplement Japan's workforce with droids and bionic men.
All of that may interest you, but perhaps less so than the fetching Doraemon helicopter that can be had for fifty dollars. Priorities, priorities.