Sol Cresta - SPACE-COMBAT GAME

PlatinumGames and Hamster Corporation are prepping Sol Cresta, a belated sequel to Nichibutsu's Moon Cresta and Terra Cresta, a pair of hugely successful 80s arcade cabinets that put their parent company on the map. For a follow-up three decades out of time, Sol Cresta has attracted some incredible talent - including creative director Hideki Kamiya and Mr Ground Upper himself, Yuzo Koshiro. 

SDCC Nostalgia Boner 1 - Transformers: Devastation

Since Konami have flushed KojiPro down the toilet, Transformers: Devastation might be as close as we get to a Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance sequel. The same basic shape looks to be in place, Devastation's purple energon barriers suggesting another ruthlessly segmented opportunity to juggle nobodies into the sky.

PlatinumGames offer a better class of generic too. Aside from the previously noted car mobs, we get a flyover from the Air Warriors, an extra team of seekers that filled out the meagre Decepticon ranks in the first few episodes of the Sunbow cartoon. At 0;46 Wheeljack runs into some hulking tank transformers that look like a mash-up of Rumble and one of Prowl's Ultimate Autobots. There's even a brief glimpse of a Shockwave clone coloured like a vintage knock-off. In terms of fan pleasing it's not just literate, it's encyclopaedic. If the devs can somehow work Hooligan in there, they've got my Game of the Year, easy.

E3 2015 - PEPPY

Shigeru Miyamoto's ode to flying under torii gates returns with Star Fox Zero, a multi-level scrolling shooter co-developed by Platinum Games. Zero will be an episodic adventure with a structure based on Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Thunderbirds as well as a transformation gimmick on loan from the cancelled SNES Star Fox 2.

E3 2015 - GENERATION ONE

Platinum Games' take on Transformers is predictably perfect - a colour-popped, cel-shaded version of Generation One that looks like a cross between the beautiful Nelson Shin animated movie and Studio Ox's TV Magazine angles. This vid demonstrates a pretty bare game that looks more like a proof-of-concept than a full fleshed out game. Still, the Decepticon generics are wonderfully obscure, they all look like Runamuck with colour schemes borrowed from Whirl and the Stunticons.

E3 2014 Bayonetta 2 - SCHOOL RUN

Platinum Games serve up another exciting title on a console I do not own. Thanks guys! In the first Bayonetta, the titular character beat up the Heavenly host, Bayonetta 2 dumps her in hell to battle a series of bosses that could have sprung from the first Devil May Cry. I wonder if there's been a push to tone down the stripper pole sexuality of the original now that Nintendo are publishing? Bayonetta's new haircut and outfit are borderline respectable.

E3 2014 Scalebound - SON OF SPARDA

After E3 last year I'd basically written off ever getting an Xbox One. It wasn't just Microsoft's calamitous cable box conference, that was more like a final straw. I think it's fair to say that after a great couple of years Microsoft began to cost heavily on the 360's success. Every inch of your boot up screen was rapidly transformed into advertising space for Microsoft's business partners and there wasn't even an attempt to compete with PlayStation Plus' exclusive offers and freebie games.

When Sony revealed a cheaper, more powerful system my next-gen console buy became an easy decision. I can only surmise that in reaction to this an alarm went off somewhere in Bill Gates' house. "Oh no! We've lost Chris Ready! He buys a fairly reasonable amount of games. However can we get him back?" The window EXPLODES. A dark figure leaps into the room. Gates picks himself up, COUGHING. "Mr Gates?" Bill turns to face the intruder - it's rock star game developer Hideki Kamiya. He's smiling. "I have a plan."

E3 2013: The Wonderful 101

Hideki Kamiya continues to make it extremely difficult to outright discount the allure of a Wii U with The Wonderful 101, a kind of Viewtiful Joe sequel with added Pikmin DNA. The Wonderful 101 is exactly the sort of game I associate with Nintendo - bright, colourful, and possessed of a vague utilitarian agenda. Why be an individual when you can be an atom in a massive, alien punching fist? The multiplayer element demoed during the Nintendo Direct stream looked equally fantastic too, the screen heaving with disparate characters each pursuing their own isometric objective. It looked very much like the Power Stone 2 escalation we never got.

REVENGEANCE CALLS

Just in case people weren't excited enough for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Producer Hideo Kojima has cut together a 7 minute hysteria trailer to get us hyped.

JACK THE RIPPER

Platinum Games bounce back after the Anarchy Reigns Sega shit out with Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. This Raiden stand alone started out as Kojima Productions tech demo, in which users got to precision slash gigantic stationary fruit during slow motion super state sequences. Completely unable to tease a game out of the dicing concept, Koji Pro handed off the title to Platinum Games for a rescue. Not only have the studio delivered a title that looks like the spiritual successor to the wonderful Vanquish, they've managed to weave the precision slash mechanic into gameplay WHILST UPSIDE DOWN. Show offs.

PRESS START

WALL RUN

After this week's VGA reveal, here's Hideo Kojima and Kojima Pro staff openly discussing the circumstance that lead to the original incarnation of Metal Gear Rising getting shitcanned. Also of interest is Mr Kojima's brief outline for a possible Metal Gear Solid 5 - what were MGS3's Cobra Unit up to during the D-Day landings? A title focusing exclusively on this fictional World War II outfit is an incredibly exciting proposition. Formed in 1942 during the Battle of Stalingrad, and espionage active throughout the rest of the conflict, the multi-national Cobra Unit would be a great framework to interactively examine the shifting battle lines of the Second World War. Look out for more sneak peaks at Platinum Games hyper-caffeinated recalibration too.

VGA 2011: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

After more than a year of radio silence, we finally get a new look at the upcoming Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Looks like the rumours were true; this troubled title has been handed off to extreme action stalwarts Platinum Games. Ludicrous subtitle aside, Raiden's solo adventure seems to have finally graduated from a slice mechanic tech-demo to a hyper combat game in the vein of Platinum's Vanquish. Is it me or does Raiden sound more than a little like Willem Dafoe too? Although Revengeance appears to have zero in common with the usual Metal Gear tactical espionage, it does scratch an itch every series player has had since 1998 - we finally get to play as a cyborg ninja.

Ten Video Games 2010: Bayonetta

Platinum Games to the rescue! In just a year the studio has carved itself out a marketplace niche by being utterly focused on providing the kind of entertainment Capcom, and the wider Japanese games industry, are now either reluctant or unable to deliver. In Bayonetta, ex-Capcom staffer Hideki Kamiya has gifted players an onion-peel action title to rival his own masterwork Devil May Cry. The systems and armaments conceal a yawning depth that allows each and every weapon to be situation usable over the game's vast array of difficulty options. Levels are short, and battles are briefs whirls of constant movement. Bosses tower like stained glass skyscrapers, forcing your hirsute porno-witch to scramble all over their surface hunting vulnerabilities. Bayonetta is daft, totally engaging, and blessed with a fan's eye for detail.

Ten Video Games 2010: Vanquish

Coming off an abortive attempt to wring even an ounce of fun out of Fallout: New Vegas, Vanquish was a tonic. Shinji Mikami's latest is about relentless, agitated movement; whether that be a sprint towards your enemy for a full health clash, or a zippy retreat to let your shields recharge. You never sit still. Vanquish is a rock solid recalibration of populist cover mechanics polluted with boss rush gameplay and Japanese mech-suited heroism. Play is essentially just dealing with a series of partitioned, foe heavy arenas. Juggle rocket-man skill sets and on-fly weapon load-outs, whilst harassed by an endless charge of communist robots. Short, and designed specifically for Game+ super-play, Vanquish feels like a heyday Capcom title - Godhand with guns, or PNO3 with cigarettes and dick-man swagger.

I hear there's a 'smoke cigarette' button

Shinji Mikami tackles the West's kink for third-person sticky cover in a typically delirious fashion. Why plod wearily between hide points when you can blast around on your shins, propelled by a portable jet system? Similarly, why yawn a metric tonne of bullets at something gigantic, when you can simply leap onto its sternum and punch its head clean off? Vanquish will be answering these, and lots more difficult questions in October.

Mech-Man Mikami

Big reveal for Shinji Mikami's opening gambit for Platinum Games, Vanquish. Players look to be cast as a masculine run n' gun retreader, battle-suited and chasing Western audience thump tastes. The shill liberally quotes from Jon Favreau's Iron Man, as well as Neill Blomkamp's Halo shorts, just to keep things familiar. As a threat of sop, it's not quite as shameless as Tecmo's upcoming Gears of War facsimile Quantum Theory, but the idea of a gaming titan like Mikami beavering away at just another mech-man game has inspired yawns.

There's promise in the trail though - an aggravated right winger spends the entire duration vomiting revenge rhetoric over footage of towers falling. Can we expect a satirically minded interacter, offering a one-man power fantasy War on Terror? The battle suit itself looks like a consumer product, Apple-white with Xbox inflections. The anime blocked live action component also cues Super Sentai memories, reminding us that Japan also has a long standing fascination with armoured, beetle-men. There's even a faint whiff of Mikami's underappreciated shoot juggler PN03. Brass tacks: when has Mikami ever put a foot wrong?

Tina Faux

How do you sell an untested, potential franchise kicker starring a lethally hirsute, porno-secretary chic, gymtastic Witch? After scratching their heads long and hard, Sega's PR department decided to focus on a brassy glassy brand shove for Hideki Kamiya's Bayonetta. Nothing sells video games like doll head lick gurns! Sex shill aside, Bayonetta's got chops - was it ever in doubt? - the 360 incarnation managed a startling 40/40 score in a recent issue of vapid Japanese gaming periodical Famitsu (PS3 SKU trailed with 38/40, technical issues cited). Quite the coup for both Microsoft's system, and frame count action games in general. All signs point to pick-up minded, less fussified remix of Kamiya's earlier awesome simulator Devil May Cry. Time for a pre-order root!

MadWorld

Feedback is crucial. Since MadWorld is a score attack, it's imperative you know you're performing to standard. Enemies replenish infinitely, Boss encounters only available when a specific score is posted, so it's up to the production to inform. And inform it does. Cataclysm rends cause joy buzz burps to spew out the Wii Remote mini-speaker, unending blood thunders out of traumatised foes, and the constant chatter of the commentators gets ever more agitated and scatological. That's how you know you're achieving.

Even MadWorld's loading screens illuminate mechanic, simplistic anti-safety vignettes that warn the user that escalation is everything if they want to rack up crucial points. Lancing ornamental light fixtures through a dizzy opponents neck isn't cutting it, you need to trash-can him too, before lugging the skewered monstrosity over to some wall-mounted spikes for further indignity. Even then that's rated as Routine Violence by the in-game combo counter. You have to be inventive, aware of every use folded into your surroundings, and how best to exploit them. Can I smash that antique painting over their heads? What if I shake up this champagne bottle and drive it into their face? In this sense, MadWorld is reminiscent of Capcom's mostly overlooked 2005 gladiatorial gem Shadow of Rome. Like MadWorld, Shadow of Rome wasn't especially concerned with elimination by quantity, but rather quality. Your goal wasn't to satisfy a quota, it was to satisfy your audience. They wanted carnage. Methodically dispatch your foes, and they'd get bored and indifferent. Actively torture and humiliate everything you face and there would be standing ovations.

MadWorld is the first release from Platinum Games, an independent company made up of ex-Clover staff, with a Sega publishing deal. It is a bold opening statement, most immediately in terms of visual grammar. MadWorld isn't just black and white, it has a slightly yellowed brown wash over everything, presumably to better pattern itself after the low quality paper of the cult clash comics it venerates. Much has been made of the game's resemblance to Frank Miller's Sin City series, the stark monochrome hyper-violence with blood-red accents especially, there's more though. Player character Jack has the silhouette of Dark Horse stable-mate Hellboy; goggles instead of filed down hell-horns, and a mechanical motor-doom hand. Jack and the post-apocalyptic landscape he inhabits recalls Go Nagai's punishment parable Violence Jack, both heroes ultimately empty lug-men who crave hideous slaughter. Most especially though there's Takajo and Tetsuya's Riki-Oh, in which a psychotic blank-man of indeterminate origin lays waste to an avalanche of pulp archetypes. Ninjas. Reich Dictators. Robots. Oh my!

As a piece of reconstituted pop culture, MadWorld is immensely satisfying. As a game though, it falters occasionally: there's a massive shelf-bait difficulty spike in the middle portion that'll have players scratching their heads. Equally baffling is the decision to limit lives and remove continues. If you scrape through the challenge section but fluff the boss, you're dumped back at the map screen, progress ignored. Given MadWorld's brevity, it's a logical decision on the gamemaker's part to eke out some artificial length, but it's not much fun to have to repeat a lengthy score-rush only to face a titanic boss you still haven't worked out a strategy for. Motion lunges are also occasionally fuzzy, with appropriate hand-slashes sometimes deemed inadequate. They're the exception though, for the most part the Wii Remote swipes and jabs littered throughout Boss matches are wittily implemented, inspiring near hysterical exertion. It's a layer of immersive interactivity that simply does not exist on any other platform. Tapping a button to make your on-screen action figure in Resident Evil 5 outpace a monster simply isn't as satisfying as physically mimicking flailing arm pumps. When MadWorld was first revealed there was real skepticism that a satisfying third person action game could be achieved on the Wii. We needn't have worried.

Yes Please! Bayonetta!

Reasons to be cheerful: Hideki Kamiya's Bayonetta is angling for a worldwide Fall 2009 release. Kamiya previously piloted Disaster Favourites Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe and Resident Evil 2. He's a pretty big wheel at our cracker factory. Bayonetta promises a porno chic secretary, with guns for feet and shape-shift slime for clothes, engaged in a cataclysm fight with Heaven mob. Seriously. War with The Above is a bit of a recurring theme in Kamiya's work, Resident Evil 2 worked an urban judgment day angle; and Devil May Cry closed with a space-battle between snarky devil-hero Dante and a marbled Jeudo-Christian God the Father.

Anyway, here's a rather old Bayonetta trailer:



Kamiya's a dab hand at delivering initially impenetrable fight mechanics that reward system learning, rather than rote taps. Both Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe showcased mighty steep learning curves, players were punished if they weren't taking full advantage of the available skill set. Fingers crossed for more of the same.

UPDATES!

New trailer.

Hideki Kamiya blog post over at the Platinum Games website.

More Awesome Imminent! - PlatinumGames

After the premature demise of ex-Capcom computer-game czars Clover, the think-team (key players in Capcom's PlayStation era rebirth) of Shinji Mikami, Atsushi Inaba and Hideki Kamiya - rather than slink back to the parent company - did it all over again, and founded Seeds Inc. Hooray!

So who are this gentlemen of gaming you may ask? Let's find out!

Shinji Mikami, graduating from a string of licenced Disney games, Mr Mikami began work on a (then) next-gen scale up of NES film tie-in survival horror effort Sweet Home, from this rather drab beginning would spring the first in the Biohazard / Resident Evil series. DNA inherited from its 8-bit ancestor include the mansion setting, multiple endings and the hyper-tense load buffer Opening Door sequences between areas; brand spanking new genre defining additions include canted ultra oppressive camera angles, atmospheric pre-rendered backgrounds and a serious crush of George Romero body horror.



Installed as the resident producer of Capcom's survival horror wing, Mikami oversaw the avalanche of Biohazard sequels as well as the Jurassic Park flavoured Dino Crisis. Mikami returned to directing with the underplayed Gamecube commercial dud P.N.O3 (not a sequel), then bounced back wrestling / rescuing the floundering Biohazard 4 project away from Hiroshi Shibata and ghoslty hook men. The following year, Mikami's movie magic gaming went mondo mondo with the 80s post-apocalyptia/ Lucha smash-down God Hand - a thoroughly misunderstood, and misrepresented fix of fighting super duper fun. Inbetween, he found time to oversee Suda 51's mind-scape fuckfest Killer7. Mr Mikami is a gentleman I hold in the highest of regards.



Skinny's a little thin on the ground for the next two..

Atsushi Inaba served as producer for all of Clover Studio's output, and according to the Moby Games website was somehow involved in the Gyakuten Saiban / Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney(!) courtroom melodrama series on Nintendo DS - although they do not list in what capacity.

Games credit listings are in short supply. It really is a tremendous shame. Next!

Lastly is Hideki Kamiya, likely a strapping giant of a man. Mr Kamiya is the man most directly responsible for such pure-joy interact-crack as Devil May Cry, Biohazard 2, and Okami. In short:

Devil May Cry: Ditching the survival / puzzle structure of the first title, Kamiya decided to amp the action quota up into hysteria, and regressed the stagnant(ish) survival horror genre back to 2D action game maths. DMC is the true spiritual successor to the likes of the Castlevania action, and screen management Arcade scrolling 2D beat ‘em ups – both brands of play seemingly unable to translate into consistently entertaining 3D-gen entries.



Techno-flesh pursuit sequel Biohazard 2 saw the twin faux narratives of the first game splinter into a doomed love-affair explore 'em up, and dogged, harassed chase yarn. Featuring scale-shattering zombocalypse city-scapes, and a circus troupe of mutating / writhing post-humans, Biohazard 2 arguably even betters the original.

Okami is a Zelda-bothering, art-craft silk 'em up slice of love and change. You play as a artistic God-on-earth Wolf tasked with cleaning up anti-Shinto evilniks with a celestial paintbrush. Underperforming on PS2, it's headed to Wii soon. Buy it!

One nifty name change (Seeds Inc became PlatinumGames), and a four game distribution deal with Sega later, what have these generous gaming gigantatrons got lined up for us?

Well!

Hideki Kamiya expounds Devil May Cry theorem with Bayonetta - likely another super stylish maths fighter. Bayonetta is a Witch with Tango and Cash guns on feet (!) battling against a cadre of dickhole Angels. Bayonetta is expected to collide with Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sometime in the awesome future.



View the God-botherer bothering Official Sega Europe trailer here.

Next up is Wii exclusive west-sop (I mean that in a nice way) Madworld. Hyper-stylised Frank Miller lifts and debts to Western dev slash classic Manhunt abound. Already being talked up as a Cero Z (an 18 equivalent to Johnny UK) rated Japan non-release. You are cast as a chainsaw lugging muscle mountain Jack (shades of Go Nagai hopefully, the character has more than a hint of Italian cobble-bot RanXerox too), your job? Beat everyone to shit. Pulse-pounding, blood-boiling pose-down mayhem! Hooray! The 1980s never left us.



View the CAUTION ADVISED Official Sega Europe trailer here.

Nintendo DS sci-fi RPG Infinite Line hasn't been trailered as of writing, and Mikami's entry is yet to be revealed.

I am excited. Very very super excited. To the Max.