Other Japanese developers supporting Natal

Namco Bandai weren’t in the panel at TGS 2009, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t at TGS to support Project Natal.

We already saw one Namco Bandai game for the Project Natal demonstrated live for many people to try: Beautiful Katamari.

But Namco Bandai are better known for their fighting games: Tekken, SoulBlade/SoulEdge/SoulCalibur, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja, Dragon Ball Z, etc.
They’ve also produced a few baseball games over the years, and many, many other kinds of games.

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Yozo Sakagami
General Manager, Planning Unit 2
Planning Division, Contents Production Group
NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc.

“You don’t need anything but your hands. Like in Science Fiction films, where people control holographic interfaces by their hands. Being able to do this in reality is very futuristic and exciting. We have worked with motion capturing in fighting games for quite some time. Realistic movement has been one of our strongest interests.

“We were all excited, like kids with a new toy. Everyone on the team was coming up with new ideas. We talked about things like how a ball was thrown in a baseball game. We were all quite excited. In fact, it’d been a while since we had so much fun. We hadn’t encountered anything as innovative.

“On the other hand, the experience itself that people enjoy, really hasn’t changed. So it may not be about creating something that is completely new and different, but rather to deliver an experience that everyone could imagine and relate to.

“Motions and gestures are very real in form, and they are also very personal features. It’s not only about the looks, but how a person moves is also very unique. I think being able to integrate this into a game could be a big step forward.”

Tecmo are famous for their Dead Or Alive fighting games. And also for Ninja Gaiden, Fatal Frame/Project Zero, Monster Rancher, Gallop Racer, and others.
Since this interview, Tecmo has merged with Koei, so hopefully that brings Koei’s games on-board too.

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Keisuke Kikuchi
Executive Producer
Tecmo

We’ve put a lot of thought, but there’s others who do more. That’s why we keep putting more thoughts into it. We want to do better than them. Our team has started planning for games to play on Natal and we came up with 72 ideas all together. When we saw these ideas, we started seeing a trend. My first impression was to become something in a game, but as we went on, we started seeing these ideas in categories.

For example, let’s say there is a small wall. In real life, you do a little jump over this wall. But if your character jumps to the 2nd floor of a building, it makes you feel as if you really were jumping that high.

This is more about the physical experience, but the experience as a whole. I am thinking about a content where you interact physically, and enjoy a more intimate experience within the game.

From Software were also interviewed. They are the developers of a couple of my favourite games: Tenchu and Armored Core.

I can just imagine playing Tenchu and accidentally making a sound in the real world and having the guards you are trying to sneak past hear you and try to catch you. I did find some of the gestures in the Wii version of Tenchu disturbing though, such as having to mime breaking someone’s neck.

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Masanori Takeuchi
Managing Director / Game Producer
FromSoftware, Inc.

“I think Natal is beyond the concept of any existing game. With Natal, I thought that we’d be able to do something new on Xbox 360 again. I honestly thought it was going to be a lot of fun.

I think Natal is more about enhancing the experience. If evolution would leave behind our current fans, I want to be careful not to do so. I hope to expand the current gaming experience, rather than to evolve gaming into something irrelevant to current gamers.

Things like movement and facial expressions could not be reflected into the game through a handheld controller. But with Natal, this becomes possible.

I believe Natal will become very interesting, when combined with games that work with the players’ emotions.”

Kojima are the developers of Metal Gear Solid. But they also made Boktai. Boktai was a revolutionary gameboy advance game that uses a solar sensor as an input device, along with a clock. The game character had a solar gun that he used to shoot vampires, but the gun only charged when the player was outdoors in the sunlight. The stronger the sunlight, the faster your gun charged. Sunlight also affected other things in the game, such as slowly rotting fruit and nuts in your inventory. Sometimes in the game darkness is preferable. Time also affected things in game. That gives you an idea of where they are coming from.

They also made the game PoliceNauts for some ancient consoles, which was unusual in that it supported various console peripherals such as Mice and Lightguns.

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Kenichiro Imaizumi
Senior Producer
Kojima Productions

During our previous production, we tried to build our own controller. We ran a lot of experiments. We tried running electric shockwaves, install a pulse reader, we also tried to build a controller that’s receptive to the strength of the grip. We tried a lot, even a transforming controller. Kojima came up with these ideas, and we worked directly with the manufacturer.

But all the way along, we thought we had to have a controller. And now Natal tells us that we don’t need a controller. We can use our movements, our voice, or the recognition of colours. That’s how we interact with games. It was quite revolutionary to us, we really never thought of it that way. We had imagined it before, but we never thought it would come so quickly. So it took us by surprise.

What we will create on Natal would be something that has no limitations. Ideas from outside the box. I have a strong feeling that Natal will allow us to create things that we really want to create.