Tokyo Game Show 2010

Team Ico has (finally) released a new trailer for their epic adventure title The Last Guardian, and boy, was it worth the wait. There are so many fantastic details in the video; I highly recommend watching it multiple times (if only to marvel at how damn affecting the relationship is between the little boy and his towering bird-dog creature is even though the trailer is less than two minutes long). If you aren’t misty eyed a little by the end of the trailer, perhaps this piece of info will do the trick: The Last Guardian is scheduled for release Holiday…2011.

Microsoft Game Studios vice-president Phil Spencer asked the crowd at his Tokyo Game Show keynote today to forgive him while he, well, gloated a little bit. According to Spencer, Halo: Reach had generated $200 million in sales after just one day on store shelves. The game also surpassed Halo 3’s record for most simultaneous Xbox Live users online at one time.

Some other nuggets from Spencer’s presentation:

• The Xbox 360 has been the top-selling console in North America for three months running. It is also supposedly the No. 1 console in Europe, although Spencer offered no numbers to back up that claim. (He says it is based on Microsoft’s “sell-through data.”)

•  Five of the top six best-selling games in Xbox Live Arcade history were made by Japanese developers. They are, in no particular order, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Street Fighter 2, Super Street Fighter 2 HD Turbo Remix, Bomberman Live, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. So apparently, XBLA customers like to buy games they’ve already played on other consoles.

• Japanese games for the Xbox 360 have accounted for $2.1 billion in sales to date (conversion rate: 10.5 Halo: Reach launch days). That’s more than double the $1 billion in Japanese games sold over the lifespan of the original Xbox.

Although Kinect was the overwhelming focus of Microsoft’s keynote shindig at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, the company did announce two upcoming XBLA titles that you can play with an old-fashioned buttons-’n’-analog sticks gamepad. (Remember those?) Both of them promise to give a global audience to games whose appeal has been felt mostly among Japanese players until now.

The first XBLA exclusive announced was Fire Pro-Wrestling, an Xbox 360 refresh of the classic series by the same name. The FPW games, popular in Japan since the 1990s, have seen occasional release in the States over the past decade, but they have never quite taken hold. A teaser trailer promised that players would be able to experiment with a variety of over-the-top wrestling styles, and the characters will be represented by users’ Xbox 360 Avatars.

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Among the slew of Kinect announcements at Microsoft’s TGS keynote today was Haunt, a new horror game to be released on Xbox Live Arcade. The title is being produced by NanaOn-Sha, the studio that broke ground on the rhythm-game genre with PaRappa the Rapper in 1996 and is also responsible for Vib-Ripple and Major Minor’s Majestic March.

Nobody would be surprised if, like most of NanaOn-Sha’s past work, this game centers around music. If that’s the case, though, there was little evidence of it at Microsoft’s press conference, which offered no details aside from a teaser trailer. That short bit of footage takes us down a hallway in a haunted house from a first-person perspective. Thunder, lightning, screams, spooky paintings—all the hoary staples of Halloween stories are on display. The characters and scenery are rendered in a cartoonish style. Think Pixar with a touch of Tim Burton.

Haunt is slated for release in 2011, exclusively for Kinect.

Microsoft announced Sega’s Rise of the Nightmare at TGS Thursday, showing the thriller to the public for the first time. Microsoft Japan executive Takashi Sensui mostly let the trailer speak for itself. The trailer wasn’t doing much talking, either. But it was doing a lot of screaming. The teaser shows a rapid series of arcane symbols and ghostly apparitions, with occasional scenes (maybe from the game?) of torture. One man prepares to meet his doom in a sort of open-air iron maiden. Another flails in an electric chair.

Rise of the Nightmare was the second horror game announced for Kinect today—after NanaOn-Sha’s XBLA title Haunt—but it looks like Nightmare will be a far grittier game. It’s “tense and thrilling,” according to Sensui, and it’s slated for release in 2011, exclusively for Kinect.

Game director Yukio Futatsugi, creator of Panzer Dragoon, who left Microsoft in 2007 to found his own studio, Groundling, appeared at Microsoft’s keynote today to unveil Project Draco. It’s a new title from Groundling for the Xbox 360’s Kinect motion-control system. There were few details on offer, but the game appears to center around flying—specifically, hopping on the back of a huge, winged dragon and taking it for a ride. A brief teaser trailer showed two men grabbing the reins of two dragons as they flew through a mountain pass.

“After I heard about Kinect, what excited me most was that we could use our body,” Futatsugi said. “What I wanted to do most is to fly. Not with a joystick, but with Kinect—you can ride a gigantic creature. You can have balance and reins, and you can point at the enemy and attack.”

Project Draco is slated for release in 2011 on Xbox Live Arcade, exclusively for Kinect.

At its TGS keynote Thursday, Microsoft announced Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, a Kinect-enhanced sequel to a cult title for the original Xbox, Steel Battalion. The previous game was most famous for its huge, ornate controller that simulated the cockpit of the game’s “Vertical Tanks.” The “new interpretation” for Kinect will be developed by From Software of Demon’s Souls fame and published by Capcom.

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EA looked for inspiration in the complexity and beauty of the natural world in deciding what their first IP on the Nintendo 3DS would be, which explains why they announced My Garden for Nintendo's upcoming, eye-popping handheld. The game lets you plant, grow, and nurture your own garden where you can collect hundreds of different flowers.

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Tecmo Koei announced last night during Tokyo Game Show 2010 that Ninja Gaiden 3 is currently in the works. The game will be the first of the series to be developed since the highly publicized departure of Ninja Gaiden creator Tomonobu Itagaki.

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At a TGS showcase in Tokyo last night, Capcom announced Dead Rising 2: Case West, standalone DLC tied to the upcoming Dead Rising 2. An epilogue to the main game, Case West will see the return of Dead Rising hero Frank West, who will work alongside Chuck Greene as Greene seeks out evidence to clear his tarnished names—oh, and also kills hundreds upon hundreds of shambling zombies.

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When is a game not a game? Apparently, when it’s Asura’s Wrath—or not. That’s the kind of circular talk that attendees of Capcom’s pre-TGS event last night had to deal with as the company revealed this new game to the press for the first time. “What we’re bringing to this game is a brand-new style that will actually have you question whether you’re playing the game—while you’re playing it,” said the game’s director, Seiji Shimoda. And did he care to elaborate?

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“This may be the most surprising news of the evening,” Capcom R&D head Keiji Inafune said last night. And then he unveiled DMC: Devil May Cry, a reboot of the iconic hack-and-slash series. Inafune might have oversold it: A Devil May Cry sequel is not exactly a shock that’s going to turn the industry on its head.

Still, there were some unexpected twists in the details revealed at Capcom’s pre-TGS event. The first surprise was that yes, this is a reboot. That might be a wise decision given that the series that was starting to get a little gray around the ears—not to mention overshadowed by the God of War games that have built on some of Devil May Cry’s design cues.

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EA Bright Light began as EA UK back in 1995, but then adopted their new name in 2007 as they began focusing on younger audiences. Create was announced early last month, and at the Tokyo Game Show, producer Emily Newton Dunn took us inside the title that asks "What if?" It's a game all about user-created content, and bears more than a passing resemblance to Sony's LittleBigPlanet ... minus the Sackboys.

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We've been waiting a long time to see what American McGee has been cooking as a followup to American McGee's Alice, and in the video below, we get a taste. Waste no time; enjoy the Alice: Madness Returns trailer, fresh from TGS 2010:

The Tokyo Game Show is on, people. The annual gathering of gamers in the Far East is going down this week, beginning Thursday, and the G4 crew has boots on the ground and a mission to bring you the finest content from the show.

"What kind of content?" you're probably asking.  Well try this on:

New Games:

• The Last Guardian
  
• Bulletstorm
  
• Alice: Madness Returns
  
• Gran Turismo 5
  
• Ace Combat Assault Horizon
  
• Child of Eden
• Many, many more...

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