General gaming

General gaming

TGS: Now I Have My Own PS Vita

Posted: 16 Sep 2011 06:50 AM PDT

Like just about every member of the western gaming press at Tokyo Game Show this week, I was supposed to have had a really interesting opportunity to check out a bunch of PS Vita games at a private Sony event last night. What actually happened was that we all gave up about six hours of our day in exchange for a few minutes of hands-on time with a game or two; I played Sound Shapes for about five minutes, and poor Scooter didn't even get to touch a Vita.

But them's the breaks, right? Like the dedicated little soldiers of the enthusiast press that we are, most of us lined up for Vita demos on the show floor as soon as TGS opened for day two this morning. For our trouble, a man came by and handed out these:

TGS: Nippon Ichi has More Games on the Way

Posted: 15 Sep 2011 11:23 PM PDT

Nippon Ichi's U.S. arm hosted its annual Tokyo Game Show soiree today, which was fortunately a much more modest affair than last year's manic combination press conference and live radio drama. (The company president didn't come out in a Prinny costume, for starters.) The upcoming NISA line-up shouldn't surprise anyone who's even vaguely familiar with the company's history, but they are branching out just a tiny bit with the localization of Acquire's online, multi-platform Gladiator Vs. (which is being called Clan of Champions in the U.S.).

Besides the Acquire action game, NISA is business as usual. The company has two portable Disgaea ports in the works: A heavily modified rendition of the original game for Android platforms, and Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention for PS Vita. The former is due by the end of 2011, while the second is targeted for the first half of 2012 and will be one of the first major RPGs for Sony's new platform. It's hard to get a read on Disgaea for Android based on the description offered at the press conference; representative Jack Niida says players will begin with a single character and gain new party members and weapons through downloads and slogging through the Item World. The mobile version of Disgaea 3 sounds similar to the PSP versions of the first two games, with new characters and content added along with a host of scheduled downloadable content. Disappointingly, the Vita port won't be making use of Disgaea 4's high-resolution sprites, though a cursory glance at the Japanese version of the game on display at Sony's booth indicates that the older sprites won't look too bad on the Vita's compact screen.

TGS: Ni No Kuni is Still Totally Beautiful, Still Totally Simple

Posted: 15 Sep 2011 10:45 PM PDT

I got my first hands-on experience with Level-5's much-hyped PlayStation 3 RPG Ni No Kuni at last year's Tokyo Game Show; from what I saw of it this morning, not too much has changed. This year's demo of the game (due out at long last in a few months) is even more beautiful than it was last year -- and with good reason, as it's been developed in close association with acclaimed animation studio Ghibli -- but the game itself didn't hold too many surprises.

As before, it's still a very simple RPG, clearly aimed at a mass audience rather than hardcore role-playing fans; but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Imagine if Dragon Quest or Pokémon had been developed for high-definition systems and you're on the right track. Since those series seem content to stick to the world of low-resolution visuals, Ni No Kuni is picking up the slack.

TGS: 7th Dragon 2020 Looks Like Another Great RPG Americans Will Never Play

Posted: 15 Sep 2011 10:30 PM PDT

The fact that ImageEpoch/Sega collaboration 7th Dragon never came to the U.S. remains one of the most frustration localization failures in recent history. 7th Dragon was a DS game with an impressive pedigree, boasting Phantasy Star's Reiko Kodama and Etrian Odyssey director Kazuya Niinou as its key personnel. The final result felt like a great Dragon Quest game reworked with the elborate underpinnings (and relentless challenge) of Etrian Odyssey, and its excellent music and colorful visuals lent it an instant appeal that undercut the game's mercilessness. Despite some interest from American publishers, it was ultimately left to languish overseas; and so ends our sad tale.

In Japan, however, the story goes on, and the game will be seeing a PSP sequel in a few months. Entitled 7th Dragon 2020, ImageEpoch's next chapter of the franchise shifts its setting from a fantasy world to near-future Tokyo. A cliché, sure, but based on the game's lengthy TGS teaser trailer, it looks like a modernized take on a quality role-playing concept.

TGS: Namco Shows (Very Little of) Ridge Racer Vita

Posted: 15 Sep 2011 10:27 PM PDT

If it's a new Sony system, it only seems appropriate to have a new Ridge Racer. So while Namco's not ready to reveal much about it, they brought a brief demo of the Vita version to Tokyo Game Show in a one-track looping demo, with the main notable feature being a nitro boost on the shoulder buttons.

Personally, I've been interested in the game because of its unusual development team Cellius, which was founded as a joint project between Sony and Namco to create "entertainment" products using game consoles. It sounds vague, but according to vice president Hideo Teramoto, that's the idea -- the team doesn't want to restrict itself to any one thing, so they like having a broad mission statement. (Former PlayStation head Ken Kutaragi also played a key role in Cellius' formation, often stopping by the studio before he stepped down from Sony.)

TGS: Namco Details the Multiple Teams Making Soul Calibur V

Posted: 15 Sep 2011 10:12 PM PDT

At a pre-TGS press conference earlier this week, Namco revealed that its internal Soul Calibur development team is getting some external help to create Soul Calibur 5. On its own, this is nothing unusual -- outsourcing is common in game industry development, whether via individuals or other teams -- but it's rare to see a publisher get up on stage and announce such a thing. Capcom, for instance, only admitted Dimps' involvement in Street Fighter 4 after the media found out on their own.

So following the presentation, I sat down with SC5 producer Hisaharu Tago, and asked him to clarify the relationships that each company has on the game. CyberConnect2 -- best known for Naruto fighting games and also currently working on Asura's Wrath -- he said, is "basically doing all the cut-scenes and the story mode." Creative Intelligence Arts -- also known as CIA -- then, along with Forcewick Sound Design, is "basically doing all the music" for the stages, cut-scenes, and characters in the game.

TGS: Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor Won't Let You Slap Women

Posted: 15 Sep 2011 09:21 PM PDT

While Capcom's TGS demo of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor featured 90-percent of the same content as the Gamescom demonstration, I still decided to attend for two reasons: to see it for myself (I had a bit of a hard time believing Tina's writeup -- especially the part about slapping your crewmembers), and if there are female characters in the game, if you can apply said motion gesture (yes, I will ask this question on behalf of closet misogynists who play video games).

As noted earlier, the actual content of the demo is nigh-identical to what Tina Sanchez saw back at Gamescom: the player, as lieutenant Powers, manages a crew of four (the player's role as pilot, plus the engineer, the navigator, and the gunner) inside a Vertical Tank (VT). In Steel Battalion's version of the future (where America has been conquered, and hence the 2082 version of the flag only contains seven stars), bipedal tanks serve as the major backbone of the armed forces. So I see the same mission of a beach-assault on New York City (which, due to factors such as troop transport boats and camera angles, looks like a purposeful homage to the opening for Saving Private Ryan) with one critical difference.

Lumines: Electronic Symphony Will Probably Hook You With Block-Music Hijinks Again

Posted: 15 Sep 2011 09:17 PM PDT

While every portable system's launch lineup invariably includes a puzzle game, there is a far cry between something like Tetris for the Game Boy and Bust-A-Move Universe for the 3DS. Well, Lumines for the PSP easily weighed more towards the Tetris-side on the Scale of Puzzle Games For A Portable's Launch, and by virtue of being a snazzier, prettier sequel with some new tweaks, it's probably already safe to say that Lumines: Electronic Symphony will be a repeat performer for the PlayStation Vita's launch.

The overall objective of clearing out blocks of color with a music-driven line remains the same. It's just that everything else has been built anew for this installment; actual graphical tricks like lighting and "3Dness" (most evident from moving the blocks around, as they tilt slightly enough when moving so as to present the illusion of depth, even though I'm not wearing any 3D glasses or anything) just pop out while playing.

TGS: We Finally Play Some of Battlefield 3's Single-player Campaign

Posted: 15 Sep 2011 09:09 PM PDT

It took a flight across the Pacific Ocean for me to finally get some hands-on with the single-player campaign for Battlefield 3. To recap: GDC showed off the technically impressive series of gameplay videos from the campaign. E3 let us play multiplayer (the traditional Conquest mode in a map taking place in the Paris metro), while Gamescom focused on other multiplayer-centric activities such as scale (64-player team deathmatch) and the co-op mode. TGS is the trade show where I can play a portion of Operation Guillotine.

It's a short portion-- taking not much more than 15 minutes to get through (just as it looks like I'm about to drive around, the playable demo ends). Alas, a side effect of being a playable demo during an open-to-the-public tradeshow like TGS; it'd be a bit unreasonable to have players go through an hour-plus mission with a crazy long line behind them. But it still displays DICE's penchant for in-your-face (and scarily accurate, from my layman's perspective) audio, the detailed (though a bit jaggy on the PS3 that I play on) visuals, and satisfying (in terms of feedback and feel) combat.

TGS: Beyond the Labyrinth is Beautiful But Puts the "Crawl" in "Dungeon-Crawler."

Posted: 15 Sep 2011 08:40 PM PDT

I've been curious to learn more about Konami's first 3DS RPG, Beyond the Labyrinth, ever since learning that it would be a collaboration with tri-Ace. I'm generally not too enthusiastic about tri-Ace's work, but Labyrinth marks a wildly different sort of game for the developer; where they're best known for hyperactive RPGs that incorporate real-time action into wild melees, this is a first-person dungeon-crawler. That suggests a work that resides at the opposite end of the genre spectrum from something like Star Ocean.

And, sure enough, Beyond the Labyrinth is incredibly slow-paced. The first-person RPG has had a modest resurgence in Japan in the wake of Etrian Odyssey's success, but Labyrinth feels decidedly old-school compared to the Etrian's series relatively snappy pace. Your party moves at a sluggish pace, with each step from one grid space to the next taking several seconds to complete. On the plus side, you can move at diagonal angles, but that's just as pokey.

Posted by Shri Krishna

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