We'll also be chatting about family-friendly music, the lessening glut of fall games and why porn stars should read Kotaku. Of course don't forget to listen to our week's taste of music too. Most importantly, we'll be taking calls from you. Now's your chance to ask a developer a question. Call now! Ask away.

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We'll also be listening to some fine music and taking live calls from you. Call now! Ask away about everything from Totilo's time spent with the Wii's autopilot to my play through of Uncharted 2. (I'm going through a second time now.)

To listen, head over to our BlogTalkRadio page. Unfortunately, you can only listen live on the BlogTalkRadio website.

Want to be heard on Kotaku Talk Radio? Call us on the air LIVE at (347) 857-3782!

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Sitting on a couch in a hotel suite opposite the Tokyo Game Show last month, Microsoft's Scott Austin, director of digital games at Live, ran me through a quick demonstration of the service on an Xbox 360 he had set up on the room's flat screen.

Austin said that Facebook, like Twitter and Last.FM (both services also coming to the Xbox 360 this year), are an important part of the New Xbox Experience. The console and its user interface is broken down into thrill pillars, he said: Web based services, interactive entertainment and social networking.

While he wasn't able to show me Last.FM or Twitter on the console, he was able to show off a build of Facebook running on the Xbox 360.

The interface would be very familiar to anyone who has used Facebook before. The console version allows you to read your friends' news feeds, comment, check out profiles and read and write messages.

Austin told me that videos and Facebook apps or games are not yet a part of the service that will be available on the 360, but that it was something Microsoft was "looking at."

One of the cooler aspects of the Facebook integration on the Xbox 360 is that your friend's list now shows you which of your Facebook friends aren't on your Xbox 360 friend's list. It also gives you the ability to add them, if you have the space.

Posting status updates from your Xbox 360 will mark the text with an Xbox symbol as well.

I asked Austin if there were any plans to overhaul the New Xbox Experience user-interface menu on the Xbox 360 in the near future. With the inclusion of things like Facebook, Twitter and Last.FM along with pages dedicated to a game's universe, it seems like a possibility.

"The new Xbox experience interface is what you are going to see for the foreseeable future," he said. "Its design allows us to contract and expand."

"At this moment we don't have a specific plan for a sequel in the Dark Cloud series," Level 5's Yoshiaki Kusuda told me at the Tokyo Game Show last week.

But there's always a glimmer of hope with these things, silver linings to, uh, dark clouds. Here you go: "There are many staff members, including myself at Level 5, who have worked on the Dark Cloud series," he told me through a translator. "There are some who decided to join Level 5 because they love the Dark Cloud series. So, if requests from users should increase in the future, we would seriously consider making it."

So if you liked the Sony-platform Dark Cloud RPG series and want more, then keep asking.

These questions popped into my head last week in Tokyo. Koichi Yamaguchi was the game producer in question: A nice Japanese producer with an apparently nice game.

His game is called Again. It's a crime, mystery-solving game on the DS. And it has a lot of non-gameplay story sequences in it, something that would foil him the night he tried to show it to me, Crecente and McWhertor during a party at the pirate-themed club in the New Otani Hotel.

I had never met Yamaguchi before we stood on the dance floor for his impromptu demo at this mixer for overseas media and the video game producers at Tecmo Koei.

On a cheat sheet handed to reporters entering Yamaguchi had listed his hobbies as "drinking beer and speaking English." One or both of those gave him the courage to approach me, Crecente and McWhertor to flip open his DS and show us his game, Again.

Yamaguchi didn't have to say much to get me interested in Again. By the time he told me that the game was developed by Cing, the makers of the solid DS adventure games Another Code and Hotel Dusk, I was adding it to my mental list of games to follow.

The amiable game producer, however, didn't want to just drop the name of the development studio and be done. He wanted to show us parts of the game. And that introduced the problem — the one making me wonder if we should blame nightclubs or game design for what happened next.

He started losing us. Each of us, in turn, got distracted. There was a crowd. People were saying hello. But there was also the issue of his game starting with lots of text. Speech balloon after speech balloon appeared. Each needed a tap of the screen to go away before another appeared.

What could normally have been story set-up was now just interference. I think it was Crecente who was getting pulled away the most by PR folks and who knows what else. Yamaguchi urged me and McWhertor to pay attention. He kept tapping, right past the dialogue. The subtext was that his game's text wasn't important. "Wait for the cool part," he said. More tapping. More flipping past intro stuff.

Yamaguchi would not have had much trouble if he was showing us action. If he had been able to jump to a chase scene or a boss battle or something else that dynamic, the quality of his game alone should have been able to determine whether we kept watching or suddenly remembered we just had to doublecheck the smell of the room next door. But his game may not even have chase scenes to show. It is a mystery game that mixes animation with short clips of real, filmed actors. It is an investigation game. It is a talking game. It is a game requiring focus.

But it's also a game that isn't really a game for its first few minutes. It's something you watch, something you tap through before the playing begins.

In a quieter setting when there's more time, the long non-interactive part of Again might not be a hindrance to catching a potential player's attention. But in a pirate-themed Nightclub? I felt bad for Yamaguchi, but I wondered if he had inadvertently exposed a flaw in his game's design. If so, then we'd have to deem so many games flawed, because so many of them start this way.

Eventually he got to the cool part. That part is the core aspect of Again: The DS, held book-style shows a place like, say, a room, in the game's present timeframe on the right screen and that same space in another timeframe, the past, on the left. The player compares the two, looks for clues, then manipulates the scene in the present. Noticing a difference might help reveal the whereabouts of a switch to a hidden door, for example.

The three of us had to leave Yamaguchi because we really did have a dinner to attend. He'd had only a few minutes to show us his game, enough to catch my interest but barely enough to show what it's like to actually play his game.

Blame the pirate-themed nightclub? Or blame the staple of game design that starts Again?

(If you'd like to see the game in action, check out this Japanese trailer.)

This two-sided document was handed to reporters who attended a Tecmo-Koei event in Tokyo last week. Video game producers from the recently-merged company mingled with press like us. At least, that was the goal. This sheet was designed to help break the ice and the language barrier.

And it might have been educational, too.

For the record, Tecmo's Kohei Shibata did do his zombie walk. It was passable.

Also, note the lack of info for Yosuke Hayashi, who Crecente and I last saw at E3 when he was talking about Tecmo's role in co-developing Metroid: Other M. I asked him how the game was going. He said, "Very, very good." I did not ask him about his likes or dislikes. Nor did I request a fun fact. Next time!

[PIC]

"Young Mia Fey," Motohide Eshiro was telling me through a translator without hesitation last week at the Capcom media suite of the Tokyo Game Show. "You've got to go with young Mia Fay."

The director of Ace Attorney Investigations declared that one of the more attractive attorneys in the game's series would be the video game lawyer he would want want to defend him, if he even got in trouble with the law.

Eshiro's colleague, Ace Attorney Investigations producer Takeshi Yamazaki, who sat beside him during out interview (and is pictured at left up top), was flustered.

"That's not fair!" he said through a translator. "How could you steal that example with me? I can't think of anyone i trust... All the other characters are a little shaky. you never know if they're going to go with the right answer or present the right thing. I'm not sure I could put my life in their hands."

That's the comedic truth of Ace Attorney Investigations and the series from which it has been spun-off, the Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney line of lawyer games released, in the U.S., all on the Nintendo DS. The games are about murders and the court cases that root out the wrongdoers. But they're played for jokes. And the attorneys never seem quite competent enough to win their cases except by luck and determination. Players go along for the ride, tapping through the text-heavy games to argue the cases and present key evidence.

Eshiro and Yamazaki assured me that their new game, which stars series favorite attorney Miles Edgeworth and moves the action from the courtroom to crime scenes, will be as funny as the previous games. It will also be as screwball, featuring such developer favorite supporting characters as Kay Faraday, the — Yamazaki's words — "spunky teenager who is always giving Edgeworth a hard time" and Interpol agent Shi-Long Lang who — Eshiro's words — is "a bit of a punk" and often strikes martial arts poses.

In Tokyo, the two developers showed me an example of a case, an Eshiro favorite set in a luxury jumbo jet. Edgeworth discovers a man murdered in an elevator. The twist in the new game is that players get a full view of the crime scene and can directly control Edgeworth, so they can move him through the murder location and piece together the evidence to solve the crimes.

The game gives Edgeworth access to forensic crime-solving tools, which got me wondering if it would tap into the camera functionality of the DSi. It does not, and Eshiro isn't sure that a photo-taking system would benefit the series. "It would feel kind of weird if you took a picture and it got brought into the game, because you have such an Anime style game," he said. "It's a very 2D sprite-oriented game. To suddenly have a 3D object in that world, it's kind of a strange disconnect in terms of the atmosphere."

The little bit I saw of the game looked like it would be true to the series' traditions: Lots of colorful characters, lots of talking, lots of jokes, lots of tapping around for clues and contradictions. With so many games released using this formula and with so many fans following them, I was struck that a console version of an Ace Attorney game has yet to be made.

It sounds like the team not only has no plans for a console Ace Attorney adventure, but doesn't think it would work. "The games have always been sort of a portable game," Eshiro said. "Even if we were to change the game and make it suitable for other systems, then perhaps the game would feel too far removed that people wouldn't think it is an Ace Attorney game anymore."

The developers said their focus for the series will remain "exclusively on the DS."

Yamazaki keeps getting ideas for cases, from what he sees on TV and what he reads in mangas. And he and his colleague seem to be having fun. So expect more Ace Attorney games, more weirdo characters you'd never want to have defend you in real life, and more games you can play on the go.

[Mia Fey pic via Giant Bomb]

Motion control, Microsoft Game Studios' corporate vice president Phil Spencer told Kotaku, will change what gamers expect from games.

"Much like with multiplayer, I think it will become the norm," Spencer said. "If you are a racing game without multiplayer the game just didn't sell.

"We think that motion control, we think voice recognition, should become a part of gaming as well."

But Spencer points out that it's important not to shoehorn every franchise into the new tech. Microsoft Game Studios and the Xbox 360 don't plan to bring every single experience to Project Natal, at least not initially.

"Hacked in or quick to market ideas are not what we're looking for," he said. "We want to make sure that those experiences are world class."

Spencer says he's been surprised by how quickly and how strongly the outside development community has reacted to Microsoft's E3 unveiling of the motion controls.

"In the three months that Natal has been out the amount of support we have been able to gain has been impressive," he said. Indeed, during the Tokyo Game Show Microsoft rounded up Konami's Hideo Kojima, Capcom's Keiji Inafune and Sega's Toshihiro Nagoshi to et on stage and chat about the potential they see in the hardware.

"When you are starting something new it is important to get some creative talent to innovate," Spenser said. "The quality of the experience is going to be what defines it."

When Microsoft first decided to work on Project Natal the company shipped out development kits to all of their internal studios as a way of incubating different ideas, Spencer said. The result was a lot of interest and some new games.

What about Bungie or an internally developed Halo game, I asked.

"We're not going to hack something into Halo to get it to support Natal," he said. "We want to make sure we can only offer rich experiences."

But given the richness, the breadth of Halo's universe, it wouldn't be surprising if something came to Natal from it.

"We have great people helping out to evolve Halo," he said.

The answer was interesting and, I believe, accidental.

"We'd love to have video capture in our game, but why work on something that the platform holder is already developing," said the developer, who I'm keeping anonymous to cover for his accidental slip-up.

The idea of a universal, platform-level video capture system for games seems like a good idea, and one that fits in nicely with the plans that Microsoft has for the Xbox 360.

When I had a chance to sit down with Microsoft's Scott Austin, director of digital games at Live, I asked him about the concept.

Microsoft, I noted, has made it a point to try and drive innovation on their consoles with software. They were the first gaming console to fully, successfully embrace online play when they introduced the Live service on their original Xbox. When the Xbox 360 hit, the software company unveiled Achievements, something that has approached becoming almost a norm among online gaming now.

Could the ability to capture and share videos from games be the next big software development for the Xbox 360?

"We are always thinking about ways that Live at the platform level can make games better," Austin said. "I'm not going to comment on video capture, but you can assume we are thinking about ways to make things more interactive.

"Interactivity used to mean things like multiplayer, now you see more cooperative things in games."

Austin points to the in-game leaderboards of Xbox Live title Shadow Complex and the meta game incorporated in Battlefield 1943 that had all players working to unlock a new map. (The same communal unlock was in the PS3 version of the game as well.)

Communal videos then, I pointed out, seem to be a step in the right direction. And I've heard rumblings of it coming to other top games, like Dead Rising 2.

Austin was coy in his reply.

"We want to have better quality and more immersive experiences," he said. "We are always looking to innovate.

"When innovation becomes table stakes we want to move forward. We want to make all entertainment services more rich with our live services."

So is that a yes or a no?

In Thexder you control a tiny little robot that can quickly transform into a jet and back again in the middle of battles.

Back in the 80s when the game came to the U.S. in the form of a PC game, I played the heck out of it on an old IBM PC and my TRS-80 Color Computer. It was a great, easy-in, easy-out title before pick-up and play gaming became a catchphrase.

Now, with the popularity of quick-hit portable gaming on the rise, a game like Thexder seems like a perfect fit.

Thexder NEO, already available in the Playstation Store for $10, includes a graphic overhaul, a new novice mode for those not used to the rigors of old-school side-scrolling shooters and six-player online races.

My short time with the game at TGS gave me a brief, nostalgic taste of the title's single-player mode. The game remains as fluid and fun as the original as you pilot your fighting robot around the tunnels and spaces of the game, flipping back and forth between jet and robot when necessary.

The controls are fairly simple, face buttons operate the temporary shield, lasers and allow you to transform and jump. And you move the robot and jet with the direction pad or thumbstick.

Not only does the game seem to feel just like the original, it's a perfect fit for the Playstation Portable platform, delivering short bursts of game play with little to no time wasted getting into the action.

I enjoyed the title so much at TGS that I picked it up yesterday when it hit the store. I'd recommend you do the same if you're a fan of this retro-genre.

In both the original and the Feelplus-developed sequel players run around in a world of light and dark, smashing through shoulder-to-shoulder waves of goblins and demons to rack up absurdly-high combo counts.

My time spent with the sequel on the Tokyo Game Show floor last week gave me a chance to check out both a routine battlefield encounter and a super boss battle.

The combat feels fairly unchanged in Ninety-Nine Nights II. Players use two attack buttons, a jump and a dash button to chain together attacks, slicing through crowds of enemies and clearing screens as they try to keep their combo meter flowing.

As with the original, the individual enemies offer little challenge, instead it's when these lesser characters amass to attack you as an army that a player has to be wary. While clearing a section of a battlefield can feel rewarding, over time doing the same sorts of combos over and over again to annihilate hundreds or thousands of enemies gets quite old.

This sequel also suffers from the invisible boundaries that plagued the original game. Often awaiting hordes of enemies will stand by patiently while you work to clear out their nearby brethren, not attacking until you walk across some sort of invisible trip line.

While N3 II seems to be promising a different look from its predecessor, I didn't notice much of a difference. The night settings did little to change the feel of the game and the plentiful interior settings were so large, so cavernous that they might have well been outdoor settings.

So far, it doesn't look like Ninety-Nine Nights II is trying very hard to improve on the formula copied for the original N3. For better or worse.

NOTE: The screenshot that originally appeared atop this post — which I've now moved to the bottom — was from the game's FMV intro. I've replaced it with an in-game screenshots. I apologize for the confusion.

The Wii isn't the most ideal platform for making the most beautiful graphics," Tsujimoto, producer of the Japanese hit and U.S.-bound Monster Hunter Tri, told me as we sat down for an interview in Capcom's media suite at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show. "You can can [make them] within the limitations, but you need a sense of design."

There would be no technical talk during my chat with Tsujimoto. No discussion of textures and shading. No mention of numbers except for the likely key stats that Tri was developed by a team of more than 100 people over the course of two and a half years.

Instead of talking tech, Tsujimoto wanted to talk about something more ephemeral: Design. He asked me to imagine a cluster of five trees that might appear in the game. Maybe the game can't render all five trees, so you're stuck with having to use four. How do you place them? That's the kind of thing focused on by his team. Their goal, from the start, he told me, was to develop the best looking game on Nintendo's system, focused on.

"We can't say how other companies work," he said. "But as we we talked about it, it's not enough to make a game that looks great technically.... It needs to have good design but good atmosphere."

Capcom's developers have rendered a lot of detailed visuals with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but Tsujimoto declined to question the power of Nintendo's system. "There will always be some limitations no matter which system you are working with," he said. "Oddly, we didn't have anything we were not able to do on the Wii.. even things we thought weren't going to happen somehow the programmers were able to make happen."

Tsujimoto credited "a lot of know-how" as the way his team pulled this off. Not specific enough for you?

"As you can tell, we are a very positive team." Yes, I could tell. From my own experience I can say that I was surprised at how good Monster Hunter Tri looked when I walked into Capcom's media suite and saw it running on flat-screen TVs. It doesn't look as good in screens — and it doesn't come close to the graphical fidelity of the best-looking games on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. But it does look very good. Capcom's marketing slogan for this game might not be far off.

Monster Hunter Tri, which features four-player online and off-line hunting of monsters and is part of one of Japan's most popular game series, ships for the Wii in the U.S. in 2010.

The following screenshot, which originally appeared at the top of this post, is from a pre-rendered video. It is not in-game graphics.

Level 5, the studio behind White Knight Chronicles, is an RPG juggernaut in Japan. They make the top-selling Dragon Quest games these days, are working with Studio Ghibli on a major adventure and have the Dark Cloud and Rogue Galaxy RPGs to their credit.

So if anyone would be able to explain the art of deciding how long an RPG is, I was sure it would be someone from Level 5.

"When we start developing an RPG we start from a story," Kusuda explained. "Then we divide the story into the parts where the player should play and the parts that would be just shown. Based on that, we create kind of a flow chart and then decide how many hours should be allocated to this part where players are supposed to be in the story, to make sure we keep a good balance.

Level 5's next RPG for the U.S., White Knight Chronicles, has an online-enabled quest system that auto-matches players interested in group missions. That affected how long this game would be.

"With White Knight Chronicles, we thought that many players would first complete the story mode and then spend more time online. So in terms of the story mode we decided it should be completed within 25 or 30 hours — it will be different from one player to another. And then, in terms of the online games, you could continue to do it forever."

As soon as Kusuda told me this, Sony's producer on the game, Kentaro Motomura, chimed in: "I have spent 1,500 hours online and I don't feel i have finished doing everything."

Shaken from my original line of questioning, I had to follow up. I asked Mr. Motomura if he did anything other than play the game?

"Evey moment I can spare and every break time I have, I play White Knight Chronicles," he told me.

Ask for one secret to be revealed and you get another. But at least now I have a little better sense of how RPG-makers figure out how long their games will be.

At least that's what I told executive producer Johnathan Knight during a chat in Tokyo last week.

While the multiplatform game seems to be shaping up (Knight told me the team is busy "polishing like crazy."), it's not doing much to impress itself as an innovative title. At least not yet.

I told Knight that if the game wants to stand apart from titles like God of War it needs to make better use of the circles of hell. Both the game and the poem it is based upon have Dante traveling down through hell from the first circle of hell, limbo, to the final, treachery.

So far, having played a bit in limbo and violence, the game seems to me to be using this rich settings as backdrops. Granted, the design of enemies, from the unbaptized babies in spider form to the lustful demons, are quite creative. But there is so much more potential in the setting.

Wouldn't it be neat, I theorized to Knight, if the game could somehow more subtly tap the themes of those nine circles through gameplay mechanic and not just art design. What if lust had you playing the game in a way that made you massage the controller in a sensuous rhythm. Or if in the fifth circle, the one devoted to wrath and sloth, gamers ping-ponged between furious button mashing and pregnant pauses?

While Knight declined to talk details, he did say there are some interesting mechanics that pop-up in the game, each tied to different circles.

He pointed this out after explaining why the team didn't create the game starting with the prologue and ending with the final confrontation in hell. Instead, he said, the jumped around while designing the game.

"We started with limbo, the second level of the game and the first ring of hell," Knight said. "I wanted to do the introduction last.

"That way when we go to make our first impressions we've already learned a lot."

Gluttony, in particular, was a level that the team didn't want to do early. It is, Knight said, different from the rest.

"I can't talk about details, but there is something unique in that level that is integral to that sin."

You will, he added, see something like that throughout the game.

"In Anger? Lust?" I asked.

"To varying degrees," he said. "The creative team really pushed things."

But before we get our chance one question remains: Which show had the best dress up?

Take your time, look through the pics of cosplay from Germany's Gamescom, Blizzcon, Penny Arcade Expo and the Tokyo Game Show and then cast your vote. Four will enter, one will leave.

Let's look at the official Tokyo Game Show trailer for the game, via GameTrailers.com...

OK. See how that video does a much better job showing off the dynamic fluids of PixelJunk Shooter? Regular screenshots would just make this game look like a co-op 2D shooter that has you rescuing little guys in jumpsuits. But this game is more than a Choplifter/Defender homage. It's a physics game using liquids and many clever gameplay tricks.

Let's put it this way: When Q-Games chief Dylan Cuthbert finished playing some co-op levels of the game with me at the Tokyo Game Show and referenced Yoshi's Island as a design model, it seemed neither hubristic nor inaccurate. What I've seen of Shooter shows a game full of good ideas, each confined to little more than a screen's worth of a discrete level.

The basic moves involve flying through the level in a ship that can't be destroyed by impact against cave walls. You shoot missiles at bad guys and to break rock. Holding down the missile button generates an auto-firing fusillade of missiles, but it also begins to overheat your ship. The goal of each level is to rescue the men in suits by snatching them with your grappling hook, but letting a bunch of them die triggers a game over. The guys can die due to your missile fire or by being accidentally dunked or doused in lava. Poison gas kills them too, though water is not a hassle. Your ship can blow up from overheating, which happens not just when you fire too many missiles but when you fly too close to lava, poison gas or into magnetic liquid. To cool off, you can spin your ship with a swivel of the control stick, dunk your ship in water or collect floating gems.

Those are the basics.

This is the cool stuff I discovered in Tokyo:

-The game's third of three worlds, following the previously seen volcanic and ice worlds, is an underground factory. In it is magnetic liquid that is drawn to your ship in a way that recalls, Cuthbert accurately referenced, the movement of the liquid creature in the 80s action movie, The Abyss.

-Two players going through a level in co-op can exert enough gravitational pull on magnetic liquid to make it stand as a tower of goo.

Wait. Maybe you should just watch the magnetic liquid in action. Here:

OK. Back to the cool stuff I don't need video to explain:

-Your ship in Shooter can don a "suit." Previously seen suits let you shoot streams of water or lava instead of missiles. Shooting water and lava creates rock (There's a particularly cool effect if players with the water and lava suits cross the streams). Spraying lava at gas, however, creates explosions. But spraying water at the magnetic liquid creates gas. You can imagine how a level might stack those elemental chains.

-Sometimes gas floods a level, forcing the player to race to save a survivor before the cloud gets him. Spinning into the cloud dissipates it a little.

-The magnetic liquid heats your ship on contact, but you can get a repulsor suit that lets you fly through the stuff, keeping it at bay around your ship.

-There's a spider boss, and he's fun to fight. Trust me! Three bosses in all.

-There's some sort of yin-yang suit that suddenly makes water heat you up and lava cool you off. I suggested it was an homage to Ikaruga.

-Overall the game will have about 75 "scenes" spread across about five levels per world. Each that I played involved either a tricky battle or a devious environmental puzzle. Watch the second video to see the kind of stuff that was charming me.

-The game's set for a December release, downlaodable to the PlayStation 3, at least in Japan. No U.S. date yet. Two player co-op is supported, which, Cuthbert told me, makes the enemies tougher.

It is a game that will be as fun as the motions needed to control it. If arm-swinging can't be your thing — if you want to play your games stoically — then stay away.

The build of the game in Tokyo required space (Just like the potentially sternum-cracking Gamescom one). I needed room to get into this game, room to try some new combination attacks. We were at a stage halfway into the game, set after the game would have — hopefully — introduced each move to the player one by one.

Risking having to learn and execute all the combos on the fly in Tokyo, this is what I was able to perform:

Swinging my arm with the required (and bundled) MotionPlus accessory caused my first-person hero to swing his sword. Small motions generate wimpy strikes. Big motions — the MotionPlus isn't fooled by waggling cheaters — causes big, heavy swings. But pinching the remote's A and B buttons combined with an abbreviated Frisbee-style hurls of the device emitted stunning knock-back blasts.

Holding Z with my left hand while doing a big remote swing caused a more dramatic slow-motion slash. That was good for cutting across a group of enemies. Tilting the analog stick, tapping A and swinging sent me into a charging attack. Another combo had me doing side-step slip that cut to a strike.

I've played the game at two press showcases and not seen much level variety in this game. All of the sequences I've witnessed have been in the same wild-west-with-ninjas town. And while the game looks good thanks to its cel-shaded and simple design, it is not the graphics but the gameplay that I expect to solely justify this game. I'm into that gameplay for now. The swings feel good. The shooting does too, though its controls are more standard and function as expected. I'd want to play a longer session to ensure the game's combat isn't tiring or repetitive. What I do sense, thankfully, is that the game's creative director Jason VandenBerghe is correct to say his team is avoiding waggle controls. The moves feel big and right, sweeping and effective.

One extra note about my favorite part of the demo in Tokyo: During a boss battle against a guy named Payne, the person playing the game got their hero knocked in the air. I'd never seen this effect before. In a first-person view, locked onto his enemy, my guy got lifted from his feet, rocketed several stories into the air. The closest thing I can describe it to is what it looks like if you swing back on a swing really high while looking down at the ground the whole time. That move that was being done to the player is a move that, after vanquishing Payne, the player will be able to do to enemies. As a bonus, Payne or the player will be able to leap into the sky to chase the enemy they knocked up there and beat them back to the ground. If that's the kind of dynamism the rest of the game contains, I will happily play more.

Groups of gamers were escorted into the area by booth companions and seated at small tables holding copies of the DS game. As a group made their way to a table, cherry blossoms fell from the ceiling onto and around a faux cherry blossom tree in a back corner. In another corner, over-sized, stuffed versions of the wolf-like Chibiterasu and the child Kuninushi, central characters in the game, overlooked the play sessions.

The demo session opened with a short introduction that explained the gameplay and controls and then moved Chibiterasu, with the child on his back, into an area made up of a chain of grass covered plateaus.

The top DS screen showed gameplay, while the bottom showed a map. I used the DS' direction pad to move around and the face buttons to interact with object and jump.

The biggest selling point of the game is the ability to use the DS stylus as the "celestial brush" found in both the Playstation 2 original and Wii port of Okami. In the DS game, players hold the left or right buttons on the portable to turn the bottom touchscreen into a canvas of sorts depicting where you are. You can then interact with some objects using the brush.

For instance, I was able to draw the missing pieces of a bridge using the stylus, slash rocks in half and, later, open a portal by restoring a portrait.

The game's use of the stylus and touchscreen make the DS a perfect platform for the game's drawing-heavy sequel. The graphics didn't pop as much as I would have liked, but the hand-drawn look makes up for some of the lack of texture.

I would have loved to spend more time with the game, though it appears it's headed down the right path so far.

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep is, according to the wonderfully pithy Square-Enix TGS press kit, a game that lets us "Turn back the pages of time and join three all-new characters in this earliest chapter of the Kingdom Hearts saga."

This new Kingdom Hearts is on the PSP, which could have introduced all sorts of control disappointments and limit what I had found most appealing about Kingdom Hearts 2: The series' looks.

Some background, so you can tell where I'm coming from: I had found the PS2 game to be gaming junk food, something with a lot of pop, color and flavor, but which lacked any substance I found fulfilling. The Steamboat Willy and other Disney-inspired levels looked great, as did the many extraordinary attacks I could execute in real-time with simple efforts on my controller. But I found nothing engaging in the game's controls and no magic in the level design. The game, for me, was a lot of tap-tap-tap-see-something-cool.

Birth By Sleep, which I walked away from Tokyo liking, turns out to offer a lot of tap-tap-tap-see-something-cool as well. The difference is that I now think that formula might be perfect for Sony's platform. The PSP has fewer buttons than a console controller does, so the simplistic inputs for the game don't bother me as much on the portable. And with the PSP powerful enough to show some lovely graphical flourishes, the feeling that Kingdom Hearts on the go might provide a sugary junk food experience suits me right.

Three levels of the game were available in Tokyo, each featuring a different character. I chose to play as the dark-haired warrior man Terra who would be fighting his way to Sleeping Beauty's castle, her Enchanted Dominion. We first fought in what I guess were the forest outskirts. Circle button was attack. X was jump. Square was dash.

Enemies were always popping up, encouraging a fast playing speed: Chop at this guy, dash to the next, chop at him, etc. Taps of the shoulder buttons locked onto enemies, ensuring that I could keep on offense and turn to the next target without wasting much time. Holding the shoulder buttons produced a targeting reticule and enabled some magical shooting.

The main things to manage in combat were the meter and move menu on the screen's lower left corner. You trigger these attacks with the triangle button. Filling the meter by successfully executing attacks produced a special status condition, like Fire Blazer or Fatal Mode. Tapping up and down on the d-pad flicked through possible power moves listed in that menu, offering a thick quiver of ways to assault. All menu attacks, once used, required recharging. And using them in the right combination altered both the status effects in the game and the nature of Terra's basic attack.

That all might sound a little overwhelming, but I think that's the idea: To provide a great deal of moves that can be stacked and executed without ever pausing the game, with the guarantee that the player won't have to repeat themselves that much and will know that what they're doing will always look cool. As I said before, it's like junk food. Maybe like munching a variety of jelly beans.

The approach to Sleeping Beauty's castle was fun in the gameplay sense, if not brilliant in its level design. I fought enemies on a long bridge, then in some castle rooms. I button-mashed against a big red Tinker-Toy-looking boss and got hit with a screen informing me the demo was over.

Our resident Kingdom Hearts fan, AJ Glasser, suggests that I play the first Kingdom Hearts to better appreciate what the series is all about. If, however, my opinion of it is going to be what it is today, then getting what Kingdom Hearts seems capable of delivering on the PSP is alright by me.

After sitting through a presentation of the upcoming title by Patrice Desilets and his beard, I was handed the controller for a chance to run around inside the game. I ended up not only surprising myself, but the developers during my short time with the game.

During his presentation at the Tokyo Game Show, Desilets walked us through a mission in the game. In Assassin's Creed II gamers take on the role of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a nobleman who becomes an assassin after the death of his father.

Ezio, the ancestor of Desmond Miles and descendant of the first game's Altair, is out for revenge in the cities of 15th century Italy, including Florence, Venice, Rome and the Tuscan countryside.

The game seems to feature much more subtlety than the original. You can, for instance, purchase different outfits from local merchants to disguise yourself. Because of the importance of clothing during the Renaissance, capes and dyes help you pull off different looks. You can also purchase weapons, armor and even pouches to hold more equipment.

The game allows you to assassinate or bribe witnesses to keep them from talking about you and increasing your notoriety in a city. And of course, there is now the ability to swim through the many canals of the game. You can also use small boats to navigate the canals.

Desilets pointed out that missions in Assassin's Creed II aren't as succinct as they were in the first game. This time around you may need to accomplish other tasks before getting to the target.

In the mission we saw, Ezio had to take out five archers and return to a contact before being given his assassination target.

During the mission, Ezio had to find some cover to help him get closer to his target. Instead of being limited to hanging out with a group of monks, like in the first game, Assassin's Creed II has several options for distraction and moving group cover.

You can hire a group of thieves, mercenaries or even courtesans to help you through missions. Each offer their own spin on distraction.

The thieves can follow you just about anywhere, including rooftops and will protect you if you're attacked. While the mercenaries can't follow you across the roofs of buildings, they are more armored and armed and will more actively attack enemies. They are, Desilets said referencing Mario Kart, the blue turtle shell of Assassin's Creed II. Finally, the courtesans are the least confrontational of the bunch.

The inspiration for the group of distracting women came from the movie Catch Me If You Can, Desilets said. In the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, con artist Frank Abagnale Jr. used pretty flight stewardesses to help distract security as he made his way through airports disguised as a pilot.

I was intrigued by the game's concept of hiring underlings to sort of hang-out with you, so when I got the chance to play one of the first things I did was find a group of mercenaries to hire.

They certainly made rampaging through Venice much easier. With the hired guards by my side, I came upon a group of enemies on a bridge. Not only can Ezio take down an enemy with his hidden dagger, he's also quite good at disarming foes. I used this ability to remove a halberd from a heavily armored guard and then bashed him to death with it.

While I worked on my guard, the mercenaries fanned out and took on the rest of the group on their own. By the time I was done with the fatal pummeling so were they.

Group in tow, I ran back across the tiny bridge and into a pack of pedestrians, attacking them in an attempt to attract more guards. It took a few minutes of rampaging before more guards showed up, which we quickly dispatched.

After making short work of the guards in the area, I decided to trot over to a merchant's stall to check out their good. The stall had a number of interesting weapons to purchase and some flashy clothing. I spent a few minutes looking through the merchant's selection before landing on a nicely constructed dueling sword.

Armed with a new sword, I walked away from the shop to discover my mercenaries in full battle... with pedestrians. They had, for some reason, decided that in my absence it was a good idea to start pillaging the town. People were running around while the mercenaries hewed into them with weapons. No guards seemed to be present.

I asked a nearby developer if he knew why they were attacking unarmed civilians. Had they, perhaps, picked up my bad habits?

"I've never seen that happen before," he said. "It might be a bug."

I think that's the kind of bug they need to keep in the game.