Bandai press kit bound with nine seals of Apocalypse

BANDAI HAD an interesting booth at E3 last week - one that was totally mobbed by the anime set. They were not only showing games, but anime as well. In a strange confluence, they were also showing games based on anime. Who would have thought that combination would ever work? The games shown by Bandai ranged from simple kiddie games to complex adult oriented ones. In a reflection of the Japanese market, nearly everything there was PS2, with some PC titles, and a lone Xbox title. This one was developed by the US team, the rest were Japanese.

Bandai is focused on the Japanese market, and most things that come out here from the company are translated Japanese games. The beta games show were not really beta, most were simply not US localized yet.

There were kiddie titles all over the booth, Digimon Racing, the first third party GameBoy wireless title was a prime example. Not many hardcore fraggers rush out for Digimon titles though. Ribbit King was another kid's game, but this one had more potential. Think of it as mini-golf for the LSD set with frogs. You get points for getting combinations of weird effects more than you get for getting the ball in the hole. If you loft it in the air off of a trampoline, then get it swatted by a creature, and hit by 4 or 5 other things, you score big. If you get a hole in one, you don't do nearly as well as a cool combo. This one could be fun for the drunken gamer, or even a sober one, but just don't admit you play it to your friends.

The only other title I saw not based on anime was Galactic Wrestling. Think of it as a bunch of humanoid things and robots wrestling. The complexity comes in when you consider that there are 48 wrestlers, each with its own moves, and 24 teams each with their own unique combo moves. It is a beta tester's worst nightmare, but the stuff that players drool over and come back for.

Then came the the anime based titles, the bread and butter of Bandai. There are going to be enough Gundam games in the near future to choke a horse, and they range from the low end to the high, and just about everything in between.

On the low end, you have Gundam Seed, a 2 player fighter due out this summer. It is one of those low to high end games, that starts out on the GBA, and is a typical fighter for that platform. The same game is ported up to the PS2, where it goes to a full 3D monster that pushes the lighting capabilities of the PS2 platform with a new 'sheen' effect. It looks good, but all the eye candy pushes the game out past the GBA due date of 'summer' and well into 'later'.

There is a cell shaded game called Gundam Force on the way, and it looked fairly nice. While cell shading is no huge trick in modern games, when it is pulled off right, it looks quite good. This one looked completely like a cartoon from the beginning, not a game.

The next one up was not a Gundam game, but definitely cartoony, it is a game based on the anime series Cowboy Beebop. While the anime is called spelled Beebop, the game was spelled Bebop, and Google does not object to either spelling. The Bandai staff was at a loss to explain the difference, but it didn't stop the faithful lining up by the dozen to meet it's creator. Either way, it was pulled off well, take a look at the screenshot.

The last title of interest was Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Like Bebop, if you are a fan of the anime, you will most likely enjoy the game. It was a little less true to the cartoon than Bebop, but in my brief time with it, it seemed to have the feel down right. It was a 3rd person shooter, with some twists from the series. You could shoot the bad guys, or 'hack' them, fade out to an 'invisible' mode with nice effects and do the requisite jumping off buildings. It was all in Japanese text, and looks to be about done except for the localisation.

The whole booth was filled with solid titles for the anime fanatic, barring the occasional kiddie title. They all looked quite good, and some of them made you look twice to see if it was a game or the anime itself running, there was a lot of that in the booth also. Two things stuck in my head about Bandai after I walked away. First was the Bandai wireless booth, it had a lot if Brew logos all over everything, and not much else. Maybe I just noticed it more than others, but the platform choice there seemed as one sided as the PS2 decision on the rest of the games.

The second thing that I noticed was a bit more annoying. The press kit they handed out, a few fliers and a CD, had a massive EULA on the CD packaging. It started out with 'By breaking this seal you acknowledge that these materials are the exclusive property of:' and went on to list nine entities. This is stupid, are we really that paranoid? I think from now on, I will refuse to write about any company that feels the need to bind me to legalese to open its press kit. Stupidity on this level must stop. µ