Japan's game creators on E3, motion controllers

[KnackChap]

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3175025

 

Are these two guys, pretending to be an elephant for the sake of their Project Natal overlord, the future of home video games? At least three people think so -- Grasshopper Manufacture head Goichi Suda, Level-5 boss Akihiro Hino, and Q Entertainment's Tetsuya Mizuguchi. All three creators weighed in on last month's blockbuster E3 conference in this week's issue of Famitsu magazine, and everyone agreed that this show was all about the big ideas of the future -- chief among them, motion control.

 

"Hardware-wise, it was all about Project Natal," Suda said. "It's hard to really understand it unless you use it, and it remains to be seen what you can do with it, but I think it'll be a huge device. We developed No More Heroes with the Wii remote in mind, but now I want to think about games with Natal in mind. I have to ask myself, as a game designer, what new games can be done with this, what can be an interesting experience and challenge, and I'm looking forward to that."

 

Mizuguchi, a designer whose games have a noticeably "futuristic" aspect to them, enthusiastically agreed. "With new technology announcements like Natal and the [PS3] Motion Controller, it's like I have a feel for the new generation, or that the door to the future has been opened," he said. "It's a wholly different impression of the future than we had before. It's not a shift from 2D to 3D or in the number of polygons, but it's games trying to open up an entirely new door. I thought it would take longer, but it's happening faster than I expected."

 

The three game creators had some surprising picks for the games that most impressed them on the show floor. For Suda, it was all about Splinter Cell: Conviction. "The playable demo began with the hero in a bathroom, but seeing tutorial text and other stuff projected on the walls was a surprise," he said. " The game takes the emotional situations you experience in movies and lets you really control and feel them in a game environment. Things that used to be handled in movie form aren't anymore; we're beginning to see perfect synchronization between movies and video games."

 

Level-5 head Hino, meanwhile, picked another Ubi game: Assassin's Creed 2. "The visual quality was so impressive that I doubted it was even a game," he espoused. "Final Fantasy XIII is the same way, and I get the impression that this is going to be the standard for games from here on in. I also felt like things are going to be even tougher for me now, because I need to have at least this much quality in my own work or else my efforts won't be recognized."

For music game pioneer Mizuguchi, meanwhile, the choice was obvious. "My first impression of The Beatles: Rock Band was 'It's finally come to this!'" he said. "We created Lumines with an eye for the US market, but most publishers thought there was no market for music games. That was only five years ago!" Mizuguchi had equally kind words for Alex Rigopulos, head of Rock Band developer Harmonix: "He deserves a lot of respect for the effort he took to make The Beatles: Rock Band a reality. He's one of the people opening doors for us."

 

Overall, Suda summed up E3 as "the first E3 in a while where we've really gotten an idea of what the future will be like... Video games aren't approaching Hollywood anymore; they've completely fused with it now. It's all shifting in a new direction." Mizuguchi agreed: "I'm really excited about all the possibilities, but when I try to get it all together in my mind, I feel like I'm lost in this vast universe, so I'm trying to keep it to the areas I'm best at. Even with that, I've got all sorts of ideas, which makes me really happy."