Tucked around the side of D3’s booth was one machine playing Bangai-O HD Missile Fury, due to its unfortunate placing it didn’t receive much attention but that at least meant we got to have a go. It’s worth saying up front that this was just plain raucous fun throughout and considering the series’ lineage there’s no doubt that this new game will be absolutely bloody amazing.

The TGS demo had 5 custom levels made just for the show. Each level progressed through difficulty until the final had you eventually face another mecha with similar EX attacks. This was the highlight of the demo for us but we’ll get to that later.

Bear in mind we’ve played the N64, DC and DS games to death and it’s clear from the controls alone the 360 game is going to be just great. The left stick controls movement, as you’d expect, but the right stick can now independently shoot. This is a similar setup to the N64 and DC versions, unsurprisingly it feels very natural. RT acts as dash, with RB as the weapon switch (the weapons also varied between levels). LT is the EX attack and this acts like it always has; time the release with a near hit and you let off a larger volley of shots. If there are multiple projectiles inbound your shot count increases.

In short, with the final boss, we managed to max out the shot number to 9999 by timing and judging the distance of the missiles he fired. To say that it was utterly epic doesn’t quite capture it really. You can also do the directional controls as well, in that you use the face buttons to initiate firing and then it will match the shots with your direction but we preferred the dual stick setup.

Visually it’s definitely in HD but some of the enlarged missiles you fire look a bit budget somehow but the levels themselves look amazing. Even with all the missiles on screen it all held together very well in terms of the framerate, which was pretty impressive.

Overall Bangai-O HD was a lot of fun and whilst the demo was clearly quite easy, as much of the older games were fiendishly hard by comparison, it was cool that the show got its own set of 5 custom levels with the backdrops being used to spell out “TGS” amongst other things. In short, this will be a day-one purchase for us and now that it has a wonderfully inclusive control setup it should hopefully sell bucketloads on XBLA.