Japan Gaming Guide

Sega showed off some of their new graphics technology at the recent CEDEC conference. Some impressive screens for Sonic World Adventure were displayed, in both pre-rendered and realtime versions.

This is the only shot involving his spiky blueness, but follow the link for plenty of screens showing off the lush Mediterranean style environments of the new game.

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In a bizarre reversal of fortune the Xbox 360 has managed to sell out in Japan. The console has been flying off the shelves in recent weeks, largely due to Tales of Vesperia. Microsoft have apologised to customers, and claim new consoles will be available from September.

[Read, via Xbox 360 Fanboy]

A couple of new titles hit the live arcade on Wednesday. Bionic Commando: Rearmed has a charismatic demo with in-game characters trying to pester you into buying the full version while your character stubbornly resists.

Fable 2: Pub Games looks pretty strong as well, and the idea of using your winnings in the full version of Fable 2 is certainly a good one. There are three games included – a nice original card game, a dice game with a roulette style board, and a slot machine type game. We enjoyed the card game, particularly in tournament mode, but didn’t really get to grips with the other two – perhaps their subtleties will be revealed with time.

We always have to bite our nails on Xbox Live Arcade Wednesday as the titles we’re hotly anticipating don’t always turn up in Japan. Our manicurist breathed a sigh of relief when Braid arrived as expected this week.

Braid is attracting a lot of attention – and deservedly so. It’s the kind of game that’s crammed full of invention and clever touches making it stand that little bit taller than the competition.

Despite the 1200 MS point price tag we highly recommend Braid to anyone with a few hours to spare this summer.

[Official Site]

Soul Calibur 4 is finally out in Japan today. Game Watch have got an absolute ton of screens as well as a few  manga scans.

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Bedroom coders got a shot in the arm recently when Microsoft announced plans to sell homebrew XNA games over Xbox live. XNA game studio has been freely available for some time now – users can create and distribute Xbox 360 games to other fledgling developers. The new service will see games listed for 200-800 Microsoft points, with the designer getting up to 70% of the revenue.

Hopefully we’ll see a lot of innovation on the service – at just 200 MS points we can see a simple fun title doing really well.

The service will launch next autumn in North America and will be rolled out globally in 2009.

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A Tales of Vesperia demo hit the Japanese marketplace a few days ago. I took it for a whirl, and it’s pretty good. The graphics are absolutely phenomenal. The animation looks like 2d animation done in 3d if that makes any sense.

It didn’t seem hugely innovative as far as the gameplay went. Click through dialogue was followed by a wander round a forest maze looking for chests and fighting generic creatures. The real time battles were pretty good, a tutorial might have helped – I mostly just ran around chopping things but suspect that cunning use of the shoulder buttons might have unleashed some more of the very cool special effects that my button mashing scratched the surface of.

Always hard to judge these things on a quick play, but the verdict so far is that this will be a pretty decent RPG that will appeal to genre fans, but probably won’t warrant 60 hours playtime from anyone else.

Click through for more screenshots.

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I just played through the Kung Fu Panda demo on Xbox live. The best way to describe it would be a very very easy, blood free Ninja Gaiden. A nice selection of moves are introduced during the demo, but you can get through all the fights very easily. Having said that a lot of the button combinations and moves are actually identical to Ninja Gaiden, so it might seem easier than it is to us veterans of that game. Most of the bad guys can be dispatched with a couple of button taps, the boss character needs a bit of the old block and attack technique. There are also a couple of bits where you roll through the level Sonic the Hedgehog style which are quite fun, but again very easy. The graphics are nice and the kids will probably love it, but everyone else will find it a bit too generic.

I tried the Penny Arcade demo on Xbox live arcade the other day. It was a nice surprise. The game is pretty funny – the writing is spot on. I actually found it funnier than the original Penny Arcade webcomic.

The game is a weird hybrid of RPG and graphic adventure. Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame was involved, apparently. The RPG stuff is quite well done, and you can chat with characters and select dialogue options.

Some of the reviews I’ve seen suggest they may be longevity problems with the full game, but the demo is definitely worth checking out if you like adventure games.

The reviews are coming in for Ninja Gaiden II. The consensus is that it’s good, but not as good as Ninja Gaiden Black on Xbox (which you can download on the marketplace).

Gamedaily: 9/10
GameSpy: 9/10
Game Informer 8.8/10
IGN 8.7/10
Eurogamer 7/10
1up 6.7/10

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