First off, apologies for the lack of updates. Things have been pretty bizarre as of late and have only just started to somewhat calm down. In addition, there aren’t that many mecha games to talk about at the moment – though more as to why a bit later. However, we did manage to make it to this year’s Tokyo Game Show and briefly hang out with the nice people at HobbyLink.tv.
Anyway, the console side of things is in a bit of a transition. Most publishers thought, incorrectly, that consoles were dead and as such didn’t bother to develop many games for the newer consoles. Cue the release of them last year and their crazy high sales, publishers freaked and started developing new games for them. The problem is that most big games take at least 2 years to get off the ground. We are halfway through that, so this year’s show was a little barren. It’s also why there aren’t many mecha games on the horizon, yet! This means stuff like Armored Core is very likely being worked on but isn’t quite in a state to be shown to the public at large.
We took lots of pictures though and we also helped out the HobbyLink.tv people, with the video of that shown below (I am the chunky British guy, obviously). The pictures and some gameplay impressions are after the link.
[flash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyggM5C4xDo]
Gundam Breaker 2 (PlayStation 3 / PS Vita)
Very similar to the first Gundam Breaker but with a much more involved close combat system. We were able to juggle lots of enemies really easily and it was very satifying. The game engine looks a bit nicer too but really this is just more of the same. Not a bad thing but nothing amazing either.
Chikyuu Boueigun 4.1 (PlayStation 4)
This is a pseudo-port of the last PS3 game by Sandlot but now on PS4 with a really huge mecha (as seen above). The latter is very slow and sorta harks backs to the likes of Gigantic Drive. The problems from the last game are still present, as ants can still pick you up and fling you about, and the the framerate was pretty flaky. The latter was more down to the fact it was a demo, we hope so anyway.
Chikyuu Boueigun 2 (PS Vita)
This is a port of the classic PS2 game for the PS Vita and it played utterly brilliantly. It also has a new playable character too, which is nice. We’ll totally be pick this up in November as it means we can blow up London again.
Yeah, EDF for the PS4 looks really rough so far. At the very least they should be able to achieve a solid 60FPS with visuals like that. Let alone any with decent textures, texture filtering and AA.
It’s a demo though, not at all optimised.