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In 2008, Asami Sakurada (above, red beret) was unknown. She spent that September dressed as an Xbox Event companion at the Tokyo Game Show. Even in early 2010, she was doing booth companion work, appearing at AOU arcade show in the Konami booth. But by late 2010, she had a huge fan base, TV appearances, a record deal, and a hit song about, well, fucking. More »
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Dead Rising Wii was at TGS. Was almost the worst thing there. Truly awful. Yet at the same time, it was almost the best thing there, because this clip was playing at the demo booth. More »
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Interviews galore! Peter Molyneux sat down and gave Kotaku just about everything there is to know about Fable II, RE5 producer Jun Takeuchi says he likes the new and improved controls for the game, and Akinori Nishiyama, producer of Sonic Unleashed, talks about the possibility of 2D, HD Sonic games. More TGS interviews after the jump! More »
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Most games at TGS had one booth. Maybe two. Some more high-profile titles had 3-4 booths, some AAA titles like LittleBigPlanet had 10-12. Star Ocean 4, on the other hand, had around 25-30 machines running at the Microsoft stand, giving you a fair indication of how important this game is to the company, who are hoping it can be their next big, console-selling exclusive after Tales of Vesperia. So how's it shaping up? It's shaping up as a safe, safe game. Like most Japanese games on the showroom floor, if you stripped back the graphical improvements a new generation of hardware has brought, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were playing a PS2 game. You still wander a linear overworld, you still encounter enemies, you still engage in closed-off battles with your party, the action is still punctuated by text-based conversation. Basically, if you like Star Ocean – or JRPGs in general – you know what you're getting yourself into before you even drop the disc into your 360. What you won't be ready for will be this game's graphics. The in-game action looks crisp and clean, with a vibrant colour palette and bold character designs helping the game stand out on the 360 amongst the its Square Enix & Mistwalker competition. Cutscenes using the in-game engine look even better, with so few ragged edges around the player models that they trump many other game's rendered sequences. As for Star Ocean 4's rendered sequences…they're simply amazing. I didn't catch many on the showroom floor, but in an interview with the game's producer Yoshinori Yamagishi, they had a 50" LCD running the game's intro sequence. And I know, this was so rude, but I couldn't help but be continually distracted by it. If you're the type to grind through a JRPG for the fluff sequences, you won't find many better than those in this game. As for the mechanics of the game, new nuts & bolts, etc, sadly the demo ran for only 10 minutes or so, enough time to only get a few quick battles in and go for a run outside before the game shut down. Still, from what I saw, I didn't notice much new stuff. Combat did seem a little easier than previous games, with switching between characters being a lot faster, and there were a range of new charged attacks available for each character, and…that was about it. As with most JRPG titles this generation, it seemed a case of same old gameplay, shiny new graphics. Which may seem lazy to most (including myself), but hey, to Star Ocean fans, it's probably exactly what you're after. More »
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Tons and tons of news came out of this year's TGS over the weekend. From the announcement of Halo 3: Recon to Tekken 6: Bloodline Rebellion coming to Xbox 360, Kotaku covered it all, and at the expense of sleep, no less. It's all right here after the jump! So what do you, the commenter, think was the biggest piece of news to come out of Tokyo? More »
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TGS is over. *Sniff*. But with the Makuhari Messe now devoid of bright lights, scantily-clad ladies and the sweaty musk of tens of thousands of Japanese gamers, attention now turns towards the important stuff. Like what won "best in show". Or, as CESA (Japan's ESRB) call it, the "Future Awards", held as part of their Japan Game Awards 2008 festivities. Twelve games were recognised - most of them having been playable on the showroom floor - and every major Japanese gaming platform (ie everything bar the PC) is represented. More »
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Of all the days I had to play games at TGS, and of all games I had the chance to play, why the hell did I leave it until Sunday afternoon to play Castlevania Judgement? I mean, my last memory of TGS could have been of something good, like Macross Ace Frontier or, in Konami's case, another kick at Pro Evo 2009. Instead, I walked away from the show feeling bad. Bad for Castlevania fans, at least. There is just nothing right about this game. Nothing. As a Castlevania game, it's…well, as a fighter, it's not a Castlevania game at all. And as a fighter, it's one of the worst I've ever seen. It's as though Konami looked at 3D fighters, saw what worked, what didn't work, and just for shits and giggles, threw in everything that didn't work. So what, exactly, doesn't work? Like I said, everything. It's like a daisy-chain of failures. Let's kick things off with the arena. The arena doesn't work. It's too large. So instead of fighting for 90 seconds, you end up chasing each other around for 90 seconds. Which is bad enough, but then, the camera doesn't work. Because it's fixed, one player will often end up running at the camera, losing all sight of where it is they're going. But that's OK, because you lose sight of where you're going most of the time anyway, thanks to the woeful controls. The players are locked into only eight directional movements, and also move too quickly, meaning you lose all sense of timing and precision. Which are kinda important in a fighter. But that's OK, since most attacks – activated by furious waggling, no less – are so broad that you don't even need to be facing your opponent to get a shot in. You just need to waggle and get lucky. And when you do get lucky…boy. The game has special attacks. You charge them through regular combat. And when you set one off…you get a Final Fantasy-esque cutscene. All the ones we saw (I was playing 2P with Crecente) ran for over twenty seconds. Twenty. Seconds. Interrupting the middle of a fighting game. Oh, and they also take off around 1/3 of your damage, which for a fighter, is potentially game-breaking. Want to know the good parts? Couldn't see any. Sorry. It really was that bad. I'd say Konami have a job on their hands trying to get this one fixed in time for release, but with the game due out in the US next month, things aren't looking good. More »
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We close out our TGS booth tours with SNK’s. Thanks for stickin' around. It was both larger and more impressive than last year’s mild effort, thanks in most part to the presence of an row of eight playable King of Fighters XII arcade cabinets. Oh, and two 60” LCD’s showcasing that action, helping make it easily the most visually impressive game of the show. The rest of the stuff in their booth (ie anything not King of Fighters) was standard SNK fare: boobs, more boobs and mouse pads with boobs on them. More »
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[Gallery fixed, pics now up] The best thing about Level 5's booth wasn't a game. Wasn't even a game trailer. It was the box for the company's upcoming collaboration with animation house Studio Ghibli, Ninokuni. The entirety of the final retail package was on display, including glorious box art and ridiculously extravagant spell book (which you'll actually need to use whike playing). This can't be cheap, and might not even look like this when it hits the West, but that doesn't matter. For now, just enjoy the craftsmanship More »
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Level 5 are on the up. And nowhere was this more evidenced by their increased TGS presence, the company hosting an impressively large booth that housed demo pods, game art, the ROID game portal and a mega theatre that rivalled Square Enix’s in size, if not in stature. More »
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Taito has dragged Bub and Bob out to solve another Puzzle Bobble conundrum, one that can only be unraveled by launching bubbles from a cannon in the hopes of more match three puzzle gameplay. Space Puzzle Bobble doesn't bring too much to the Puzzle Bobble (aka Bust-A-Move) series, it just slaps it on the Nintendo DS, tossing in some outer space themes for good measure. We're okay with that. More »
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People are worried that Bionic Commando might be a bit too hard. I’m one of them. There’s a fear that, because the game’s swinging mechanic is both integral to the game and difficult to master at the same time, a lot of players may not take the time to learn the system and give up on the game. Is this a concern to the development team? No, not really. Making the mechanic hard was the whole point, says GRIN's Ulf Andersson: More »
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Oh, Konami. What a difference a year makes. Last year, they were the star of the show, Metal Gear Solid 4 winning over both critics and public alike. This year? They…well, let’s just say they probably wish they could re-release Metal Gear Solid 4 all over again, as without it, their lack of depth in other areas really showed. Pro Evo 2009 was great, as we’ve already discussed, but after that there was little else to see but the sad (still peddling MGS4 and Metal Gear Online? Really?) and the God-awful (Castlevania Judgement is a farce of a title). More »
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From Software had two console exclusives on its plate at TGS, Ninja Blade for the Xbox 360 and Demon's Souls for the PlayStation 3. Both are dark and moody hack and slash affairs, filled with demonic beasts to slay. But Demon's Souls is billed as an action role-playing game, seemingly a greater time investment than its "cinematic" action sibling. The poorly translated fact sheet describes the game with "Nothing but a player's decision and a tactics of using various weapons are important than anything that you really need to think to play." While that makes no sense, Demon's Souls is fairly easy to wrap one's brain around. More »
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Macross Ace Frontier is in a no-lose situation. The lucky thing. If it sucks as a Macross game, well, it’s a Macross game. They have a history of sucking. If it sucks as a PSP game, well, it’s a PSP game. They (mostly) have a history of sucking. What’s so surprising given both of those expectations, then, is the fact that having played the game at TGS, it’s not sucking. On either count. More »
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People came to this year's Tokyo Game Show. In droves. The event's organizers have released the final tallies, and they are: More »
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Those brushstroke heavy Street Fighter IV trailers are going to get turned into an anime that will fill in the gaps between Street Fighter II and its spiritual sequel Street Fighter IV. Producer Yoshinori Ono stated at TGS that the new animated feature will run between 50 and 60 minutes and hopes to tie the flick with the game's home console release. The company that churned out the original clips, Studio 4C, is working on the full-length version. The three minute trailer shown at TGS showed Cammy making her way through a wooded ares with some troops, Ryu discovering his dark side, Sakura and Chun-Li battling goons, and Ryu and Crimson Viper fighting. More »
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Otomedius, Konami's attempt to lure the masses back to Gradius-style sidescrolling shooting, was on hand at this week's Tokyo Game Show, coming home as Otomedius Gorgeous! for the Xbox 360. What Otomedius Gorgeous! brings to the table, a concept only briefly explored in titles like Parodius and Sexy Parodius, is boobs. Impossibly perky, voluminous cartoon boobs. Otomedius Gorgeous! is part of the cute-em-up sub-genre, full of missile launching penguins, deadly flying fish, super-deformed space ships and, most relevant to gamers' interests, the adorable anime girls who pilot each ship. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5062275&view=rss&microfeed=true If anything, we're now guilty of giving too much direction on justifying one's game. Rare's Neill Harrison took advantage of our goodwill, which is letting developers and producers prep ahead of time for Justify Your Game, resulting in carefully planned elevator pitches. For Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Harrison pretty much nails it following a minutes long mental practice. If it weren't for the last second awkwardness, this one would've been left on the cutting room floor. Thank the video gods for performance anxiety! More »
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By far the two biggest draws of TGS were the Square Enix and Capcom booths. But you know what, Square Enix doesn't count. Everyone was there for trailers. Capcom's booth, meanwhile, was chock-full of playable demos, from Resident Evil 5 to Street Fighter IV to probably the most popular demo on the showroom floor, Monster Hunter 3 on the Wii. Click below for a tour. More »
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Resistance: Retribution pleasantly surprised me at Tokyo Game Show when I finally had a chance to go hands on with the game. More »
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...and he comes from a long line of ninja. He's from a family of ninja. And this family has a special ability to kill monsters. More »
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The Tokyo Game Show is many things, and classy is generally one of them. The show's a safe, friendly, clean place to hang out for a few days. But sometimes - just sometimes - somebody has to take things one step too far. Example: this unfortunate incident, spotted on Sunday afternoon. Chun Li was having her leg hoisted (willingly, mind you), seemingly so she was in an authentic "kick" pose, but really so these two could get a better shot. Of. You know. Was odd enough as is, but what kicked things up a notch was when the poor girl's hips started getting sore. She was in pain, and had to shake it off. Do a few squats, stretch it out. But after a quick flex and a gritting of her teeth? She was right back into it. Come on, girl: cosplay rules explicitly state you gotta keep things a little classier. Which writer "turned green" playing Mirror's Edge at E3? More »
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Normally, we'd slave over a snappy headline to lure you in. Something with "boobs" or "first this or that" or "Haruhi" in the title. But this is Metal Gear Solid 4 cosplay. This is gender-bending Raiden cosplay. It's a hard sell. And you have to see it. Try as we might, our command of the English language is woefully inadequate in describing just how spectacular this particular outfit is in a simple headline. From the neck down, it's fairly banal at first blush. From the chin-up however, it's cosplay brilliance. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5062280&view=rss&microfeed=true The Tokyo Game Show has officially ended for us, but that doesn't mean it has to be over for you. We still have plenty of interviews, impressions and whatnots to post from the show. Let's kick things off with this video walkthrough of the two big halls during the show's tear down. That's right, we didn't just stay until the end of the show, we stayed AFTER!!! More »
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One of the fourteen "unannounced" titles that Sony had on display at this year's Tokyo Game Show was Minna de Spelunker, a modern day remake of the 1985 NES platformer Spelunker for the PlayStation Network. More »
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LocoRoco 2 is an awful lot like LocoRoco. Sure it has a German blob and swimming and a rhythm game, but all of that is just a few more cherries on what I've always felt was a wonderful sundae of a Playstation Portable game. More »
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Mike played Bionic Commando a few months back, at a Capcom press event. Said it looked great, but had a few problems. I played it for around 20 minutes today, going through a tutorial level and one regular stage from the game, and you know what? It looks great. But has a few problems. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5062269&view=rss&microfeed=true Jamzy is known for two things: Being Japan's number one Xbox 360 fanboy and his haircut. In this Justify, Jamzy doesn't defend his love of Microsoft's game console, but this zany, zany fanboy 'do. More »
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The Kid's Corner at TGS is a special place. Reserved for small kids and their parents, it's a place free from loud speaker setups, overpowering LED displays and scantily-clad young women. In place of those things comes ample room for napping parents, more pink DS games than you dare to imagine and the wholesale indoctrination of a new generation of Japanese gamers. More »
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We're sure the EA booth companions at Tokyo Game Show had great personalities. Lovely girls, the kind you could take home to mother. But those outfits! Unless they were designed by John Madden himself, the horrible pastiche of red, green, yellow, cyan and camouflage is inexcusable. It looked like Piet Mondrian had puked on a gaggle of aspiring Japanese models wearing potato sacks. This is not how a multi-billion dollar publisher should attempt to lure TGS attendees into playing Mirror's Edge. Tsk tsk. More »
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With something like a billion versions of Q Entertainment's Lumines published on various platforms, we won't fault you for having but a single grain of enthusiasm for the PlayStation 3 version. We dredged up enough on your behalf, waiting a full thirty seconds in line to go hands on with Lumines Supernova. Unfortunately, the things that make Supernova stand out from the Lumines pack were nowhere to be seen. More »
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As the clock struck 5pm on Sunday evening, the 2008 Tokyo Game Show drew to a close. But as the public streamed out of the place, booth companions kicked off their heels and PR types breathed a long, deep sigh of relief, the worker bees got to work. Why? Because a trade show never ends. Someone has to end it. Click below if you want to see how it's done. More »
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I know, a demo's already out, but I hadn't had a chance to download it, so one of the first games I ran for this TGS was pro Evo 2009. Why the running? Because I'm torn on the Pro Evo franchise. Once was a time football purists would buy Pro Evo for the simulation, and everyone else would buy FIFA because it had all the major league licenses. But the last few years? Konami have gotten sloppy. Current-gen Pro Evos looked like last-gen Pro Evos with the cracks painted over, while FIFA has come on strong with a new engine and improved gameplay. In fact, FIFA's come on so strong that many people have already declared it the winner in this year's tussle. Me, I'm going to give the old bird one last chance to impress before doing anything drastic. More »
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Home should not be shown at trade shows. Absolutely not. Not under any circumstances. Why? Because it is boring. Home is not a game. It's not even a user interface. It's a...thing. Once Sony get around to deciding what that actually is will probably be the time they decide to release it, but until then - and especially in the state it was in for my TGS demonstration - it should be kept as far from prying eyes (and hands) as possible. TGS is a games show. It's for games. Loud, exciting, playable things. But Home? So not a game. The build I was treated to yesterday went a little like this: I log on as "Ricky". Who was a girl, but hey, who am I to question someone else's naming conventions. Then I move around a bit. And I find, about three seconds into the experience, that I'm running around a near-perfect recreation of Sony's TGS booth. Great! I think. Yeah, I'm already at TGS, and can play all these demos, but wouldn't it be awesome if people at home could be doing this, and seeing the trailers I'm seeing, and playing the demos I'm playing? It would. But in this build? No way. Not a single demo pod was active. Not a single booth was running a trailer. The main Sony theater screen (the in-Home one) was showing a short, looped trailer, but it wasn't the same stuff I could see with my real eyes not 10 feet away. So if Home wasn't going to be a multimedia extravaganza for me on the day, what was it going to be? A chat room? Nope. There were eight other people in the room. All eight of them were Sony employees. None of them spoke English. That was the end of that. And if not a chat room, could I...well, what could I do, exactly? Could I explore Home? Nope. I wasn't allowed outside the virtual Sony booth, so the service's plazas and apartments were off limits. There were no games available to play. There was, literally, nothing to do. Oh, wait! There was one thing. Some booths allowed you to sit down at them. And a few even let you access the web page of the game you were looking at for more information. But that was it. It was, I think, one of the most empty and pointless titles on the showroom floor. Which isn't to say that Home is either empty or pointless. The final product, whenever it ships, could yet be the best thing to happen to the PS3. It could be a revolutionary new UI. it could be a great communications tool. It could be a games portal, it could be a media hub, it could be all of those things, it could be none of them. But until Sony sort that question out, they'd do well to keep the game off showroom floors, and away from members of the public who may walk away wondering why they'd just wasted 15 minutes wandering around an empty virtual PS3 booth when they could have been wandering around the real PS3 booth doing stuff. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5062313&view=rss&microfeed=true Every night as the 5 p.m. hour winds around and the show begins to wrap up, the speakers begin to pump out an orchestral version of Auld Lang Syne. Each booth gathers its companions to parade them around their booth for a final goodbye to the show's attendees. Some marches feature mascots, some feature bows, but all of them feature oodles of companions. More »
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Those Tecmo girls? Sure, they were easy on the eye, but flashing skin is so cheap. And cheap is something Konami are just not interested in. At least when it comes to booth companions. Instead, the company that wishes they could release Metal Gear Solid 4 every year kept things a little classier, opting for this classic number that sits somewhere between naughty nurse and 50's flight attendant. More »
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We're done counting the tens of thousands of votes you people cast in our "What The Hell Are These Guys Watching?" poll, and the results are in! So just what was it that had the Japanese crowd enthralled/confused? Was it Microsoft's star show-stopper, Star Ocean 4? Or perhaps the other Square Enix attention-grabber, Last Remnant? Or maybe, just maybe, it was the other other Square Enix 360 exclusive, Infinite Undiscovery? Nope. It was none of them. Believe it or not, the video presentation that was showing at the time was for Rare's Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. Really. And every other time I saw it shown, people stopped, turned, and watched, where for most other titles (Star Ocean 4's STUNNING cinematics aside) they'd just keep on walking. Guess it's not being marketed that heavily here, and looks, I don't know, different. Unique to Japanese eyes, maybe. Who knows! If you guessed wrong, chin up. There are more important things in life. If you guessed right, remember, internet bragging rights are yours for a day. More »
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Yesterday, I got the chance to sit down for tea and biscuits with Akinori Nishiyama, producer on Sega's upcoming Sonic reboot Sonic Unleashed. When you get a chance to ask someone high up at Sega why they, uh, don't make good Sonic games anymore, you don't pass that chance up. So I asked him, in light of the company's insistence on including 3D elements in Unleashed, whether Sega would be taking a leaf out of Capcom's book and putting out a 2D, HD Sonic remake (or even a new game) on XBLA or PSN? More »
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The press has abandoned Tokyo Game Show, but the public hasn't. The business days have been a dud and two-thirds of the press have fled on the choked public days, but John and Jane Q. Consumer schlepped through the pissing rain to check out all of TGS's wares. Attendance was up over last year, some 7,000 more than 2007's first day of public access. Can Tokyo Game Show 2008 beat last year's final tally? Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion. More »
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