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TGS2006 impressions (ver.JR)
By admin | February 18, 2010
Tokyo Game Show 2006 is the first TGS to feature all three next generation machines, which should be the premise for a thoroughly exciting event. Unfortunately, there were no playable Wii kiosks on show, leaving me somewhat disappointed, but I hadn’t really expected a great deal on that front with Nintendo hosting their own events during November. Today would be all about the PS3 and Xbox360’s respective bids to captivate the difficult Japanese audience.
Before any gaming took part, the GameScience crew hit Kutaragi’s keynote speech. This hour long presentation started with a five minute video of third-party PS3 titles and ended with a three minute video of Afrika, PS3’s intriguing safari simulation. What happened between those videos can only be described as drab, uneventful and “what?”. Kutaragi spoke for around 50 minutes about PCs, online maps, finding the cure for Alzheimer’s disease, and how the network is not yet strong enough to support streaming of High Definition movies and games. Things were tied loosely to the PS3, but the only real PS3-related news we heard was the announcement of Sony’s plan to distribute some Mega Drive games online, for a few hundred yen each. Most noticeably, there were no concrete details announced for either their online plan, or the backwards compatibility of the console, however emulation was mentioned in passing for the latter.
Onto the exhibition floor to try out some games. First up was Resistance on the PlayStation 3. There were two rooms for this, one for the single player campaign and one for the multiplayer game. The demo was in rooms because of the “C” rating it is scheduled to receive from CERO - “C” means only people 15 years and above may play the game. I joined the queue for the multiplayer room and after a decent wait, and a ten minute tutorial movie, we got to play. There are two sides - human and alien. Alien have special abilities to run quickly and see through walls, while humans have the ability to crouch and see aliens on the map. These abilities can be used for a limited time by holding down the left trigger. The demo had plenty of weapons, and each weapon seems to have a couple of alternate attacks as well as the regular shot. It was a little too deep to fully understand during such a short demo, but it looks to have a lot of potential.
The multiplayer game we played involved capturing as many “pod bases” as possible to increase the team’s territory. There were a couple of problems with the ruleset that made it frustrating. First off, the pod bases take a long time to destroy, much too long for a game of this pacing. Second, even when you’ve taken a pod base, you still spawn from the same main base, so you have to trek all the way across the map to defend your pod base. The graphics were clean and well-defined, but the colour palette used is quite minimal and didn’t excite me too much. Framerate was largely stable and the game runs at a good speed, but for my first exposure to PS3, it was a little underwhelming.
One thing that was strongly apparent is the lack of vibration in the controller hurts FPS games pretty badly. You don’t notice you’re under fire as quickly with on-screen warnings as you do with vibration, but perhaps they can improve the on-screen reaction so that it’s more obvious. With the strong competition in this genre, I may give this title a miss. After that we spent some time walking around the PS3 booths together. A lot of the playable demos seemed to have some framerate issues, with games like Lair, Motorstorm and Sonic the Hedgehog looking a little bumpy in places. There was plenty of interest in the machine, though, and the news of the PS3 price cut gave things a slightly rosier tint.
Next up, we split and I headed off to the 360 booth to try out Blue Dragon. There was a 90 minute wait, but that wasn’t going to put me off. For some unknown reason, the demo machines for this were also kept in a walled-off room. Unlike Resistance, there isn’t a high CERO rating or anything. Perhaps it’s related to the problems that happened later on. The game plays like a cross between Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. The character design is, of course, not a million miles away from Dragon Quest, thanks to Toriyama’s design. Each of your four characters has a job, defined by their dragon, and you can switch between these jobs at any time through the menu. Each job also has a job level, similar to the DS remake of Final Fantasy III. Jobs included standard fare like Warrior, Monk, White Mage and Black Mage, as well as more obscure jobs like Assassin.
For the purpose of the demo, there were two save files - a field area, where you could run around freely, and an event area, where you could see the story develop. I chose the latter, which puts you up against a couple of regular enemies before a boss. Being overpowered made the boss a joke, but it allowed me to see the range of attacks available. In this aspect, everything was very DQ-like, with mages having similar magic to choose from, and attackers having multiple special attacks too. Turns are displayed in a similar way to Final Fantasy X, so you can see which of your characters will have a turn before the enemy attacks. While selecting commands, a camera follows your character’s face in the top left of the screen. It wasn’t clear in the demo whether this serves any purpose other than just looking cool. After dealing with the boss, some story is played out with cutscenes then there is a minigame involving a dogfight in a small rocket against an evil professor. It was here the game crashed, although the minigame seemed quite solid and easy to control. Other people seemed to have problems with this part too, but the people playing the field area were unaffected.
The game looks beautiful, and the claymation-like lighting seems natural for Toriyama’s designs. The controls also felt solid, and it appears the system has plenty of depth for RPG fans. I’ll be picking it up in December. Walking around the 360 booth revealed quite a surprising number of Japanese titles, including the beautiful looking Trusty Bell. I didn’t stop to play, but the shading effects used on the characters was really eye-catching, and this looks to be a another RPG to look forward to. There’s still no release date known, unfortunately, but I’ll be following the game’s progress. Lost Odyssey was apparently playable earlier in the day, but I couldn’t find any demo booth when I got to the 360 area.
Later in the afternoon, I headed over to Bandai Namco and gave Ridge Racer 7 a try. The screens were adorned with stickers saying 1080p and 60 frames per second. In terms of resolution, though, I couldn’t really see a big improvement over the 720p output of Ridge Racer 6. The game setup was a four player race, on one of the new tracks that has got some heavy rotation on websites in the past couple of week, the foresty area with a big Buddha-like statue.
Before the race, I chose my machine from a selection of cars divided into three drift types: standard, mild and dynamic. Nothing new here. The race then began and the handling is basically exactly the same as Ridge Racer 6. Turbo start was possible by keeping revs high as the countdown hit zero, drift handling is the same, and charging nitrous at higher speeds after using a nitrous (ultimate charge) is the same too. Unfortunately, due to my competitive spirit, I was in front the whole time and couldn’t test the new slipstream system, but it seemed to have quite a big effect when I was watching other people play it. The graphical effect for nitrous is severely toned down now, perhaps to make the difference between the two camera views less apparent, since external view doesn’t have any nitrous effect on-screen. The new track was quite lovely - there is a section going through a tunnel and the floor is wet and casts a nice reflection. It’s just a nicely designed course, really. There’s a lot of interesting environment, but I couldn’t really check it out while driving, it’s more for the spectators.
The customisation aspect of the game has been talked about a lot in the press, but that aspect was nowhere to be seen in the demo. I am a big fan of the Ridge Racer series, but after the recent release of Ridge Racers 2 on the PSP, where two thirds of the content was just recycled from Ridge Racers, I can’t help but feel that Namco may be doing the same thing with this, as we’ve only seen two new tracks. I’m going to be cautious about this game and listen to what people who try it out have to say. If there’s a substantial amount of new content, I’ll pick it up, of course.
Also at Bandai Namco’s stand was the PSP remake of Gunpey, Gunpey-R and its DS cousin, Connect the sounds: Gunpey Rebirth. I played the PSP version to check out some of the new music that Q Entertainment have selected for their new product. The setup of the game is quite similar to Lumines, with skins unlocking as you play through the game, each skin featuring a graphical flavour and new song. There are a number of other modes too, suited to different styles of play and different lengths of playtime.
One eye-catching mode was “Twin Skin mode”, where you can switch between different skins on the fly, like a DJ mixing two records. The Gunpey rules seemed the same as ever, and the music I heard was similar in range to Lumines. This should make a great portable title, and I’ll be picking it up when it comes out later this year. Sadly, Q Entertainment’s other PSP title, Lumines II, was nowhere to be found, and neither was the Xbox Live Arcade release of Lumines, Lumines Live! Hopefully they will both be released in a timely matter too.
That pretty much covers the games I played, though plenty of other titles caught my eye. Overall, the event was a little disappointing - Nintendo’s absence is felt quite strongly, considering the current DS domination of the Japanese industry and the recent unveiling of Wii information. The PlayStation 3 was finally playable, and a little underwhelming, if only because it doesn’t show a huge improvement over the 360 which was shown here last year. And Microsoft made a decent effort, but failed to make their most desirable games playable to the maximum number of people. Considering there are really only two or three games which can make or break their position in Japan, they should have really pulled the stops out a little more. Companies are also getting ridiculously stingy with their giveaways, perhaps a sign of the financial state the industry has been in recently. It’s a bit of a shame for TGS to bow out like this, but hopefully their will be a successor announced soon.
Topics: TGS |