14 DAY TRIAL // Tecmo and Koei have just completed their merger, and the company has begun to be increasingly vocal regarding the various hot stories of the videogaming world. Recently, it urged Sony to quickly cut the price of the PlayStation 3 home gaming console in order to increase the install base of the platform and make developing for it more attractive.
And now the people behind the publisher are directing their remarks at Microsoft and its claims that Project Natal, the motion tracking system unveiled at E3 and coming in late 2010, should open up gaming for a new set of gamers.
Kenji Matsubara, who is the president of Tecmo Koei, told CVG that “We are very excited about the future with Project Natal and Sony's motion controllers. At the same time, we have some concerns over the fact that we specialize in making action games, so we have to explore whether we can achieve real-time response from a controller-free system. We understand that, for casual gamers playing dance games or some sort of fishing game, this controller-free system can be popular. But for hardcore gamers who like actions games, we have to research and develop games that satisfy our core gamers.”
Tecmo and Koei have created such hardcore videogames like Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden, Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors. All of them involve a lot of chaotic movement and quite a bit of fighting, which will probably be pretty hard to simulate through motion tracking.
Sure, it might be fun, at first, to cut some demons in Ninja Gaiden by actually slashing right and left but the precision movements needed to put together a combo and dodge left and right will probably be too much for someone using a motion tracking controller. A lot of fans of the series will probably insist that the control schemes remain unchanged for future releases.