AOU show

i went, i saw, i was shocked

two signifcant things gave me a shock. First, the advancement in graphics in almost every game. NAOMI2 had the strongest impact with its VF4. Namco placed System 246 in their new game, Vmapire Night. A typical gun-shooting game, following the footsteps of House Of The Dead, but the gfx is more spectacular. It is possible to say that the devvelopers empasized more on texture mapping and rendering rahter than increasing polygons.
I also played Konami's MoCap Boxing. It has a 3D motion capturing system on the machine, meanign players have to move their body to control the character. And since this game is like a boxing game, the player has dodge the punches, so you have to actually dodge. For those of u who havent been working out, this is a good game to excercise, as exhausting as FinalHurlong. It also has a feature that shows how many calories u have burned. For attacking, u have to move the gloves whenever a hit mark appears on the opponents body. The gloves are like the one in Fist of Northstar Punching Machine. Oh, the gfx was awesome as well.
Sega came out with the excellent demo VF4, but thats all in the VF4 section, so pls refer to there. They also came out with a weird game, Wan Wan de Sanpo, a dog-walking game. The player chooses out of several different dogs, and have to walk them back to their owners. Whilst returning to the owner, there are several obstacles, i.e. dodging cars, running after cats, etc. The controllers are a leash and a conveyor belt in which the player walks or runs on.
SEGA also came out with a new race game, Club Kart Europe Edition. SInce its based on the Naomi2 board, it has superb gfx. But the biggest point is not the gfx, but the memory card system. a player can choose the colorings of the kart, from body to helmet. Then this data is save-able in a thin card that will be dipensed from the machine. It is also possible to save course records and so on. Hang on... memory card? Sega? hehehe

 

Thanks for the mini-report! Great to hear from someone who was at the show!/images/icons/smile.gif

-Chanchai