TGS: Booth Round-Up - Konami's Solid Performance

Author: by Simon Carless, Tokyo

The last of the major Tokyo Game Show-exhibiting firms to be covered on Gamasutra, but certainly not the least, Konami's booth was headlined by developments in the Metal Gear Solid series, both portable and current-gen. However, probably the most discussed Konami production Metal Gear Solid 4, whose trailer was manipulated in real-time by Kojima during press interviews to show that it was running in real-time on the PlayStation 3, was actually showing at Sony's theater area throughout the show. Nonetheless, Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence for PlayStation 2, shown at the Konami booth, was attracting a lot of attention for its largest change, online multiplayer modes, as well as a host of extra tweaks and mini-modes. In addition, Shinta Nojiri's Metal Gear Ac!d 2 for PSP was at the booth in force, showing its extremely bizarre peripheral pack-in, 3D glasses that strap onto the front of your PlayStation Portable and allow three-dimensional viewing of scenes - nobody can accuse Konami's signature franchise of not wanting to do things differently. Some of the other major series showcased included Winning Eleven/Pro Evolution Soccer, which was showing both of the just-released iterations for the PlayStation Portable and PS2, Rumble Roses XX for Xbox 360, the update of the female-centric wrestling game which was not playable on the show floor, the soon-to-be-released Castlevania: Curse Of Darkness for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, which had a modicum of fans checking it out, but the customary worries over 3D Castlevania titles, and portable and even PlayStation 3-trailed updates for Konami's signature cartoon baseball franchise in Japan. Venturing a little further into the depths of the Konami stand, new titles in the Beatmania, Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania series are promised for Japanese PlayStation 2 consumers, mech game S.L.A.I made an appearance, a super-deformed version of Crash Bandicoot was jumping around happily in a PS2 title, as Konami have picked up the latest in the Vivendi-published Crash series for Japanese release. Finally, in one of the stand's surprises, Genki's Ikusagami packed literally hundreds of enemies onscreen at once on the PlayStation 2, as the demo had the player scything spider foes out of the way on an open plain. Perhaps not quite so impressive as Ninety-Nine Nights, but running on current-gen hardware, Ikusagami is, if nothing else, a corking PS2 technical demo, even late in the hardware's lifecycle. Overall, Konami's TGS stand was actually one of the most diverse of all the Japanese publishers, showing competitive titles in multiple genres, from sports through action to rhythm - and, of course, Metal Gear, with MGS4 being the game with by far the greatest buzz at TGS, despite there being no playable version available.