TGS06: First impressions

• BlimBlim
• Friday, September 22, 2006 | 3:37 AM
• 11 comments

PS3

I've just walked around the booths for about 40 minutes, looking for most of the big PS3 games. I've still have to see a few, and of course these are just impressions of what I saw other people playing and it will have to be confirmed while playing with a pad. The first videos should be online in about one hour or a bit more.

Devil May Cry 4: No surprise here, this is some typical Capcom goodness. Fans of the series won't be disappointed as the gameplay and the camera system looks a lot like what we had in DMC3, but of course the graphics look a ton better, as expected. Very smooth moving too.
MGS4: The trailer is running on a loop at Konami's booth. It looks as hot as ever, obviously, but I was a tad badly surprised by the framerate from time to time.
Lair: The gameplay sequences in flight in the mountains look really good, but once you get close to the castles and the humans on the ground it looks a bit weird. I you do not like HDR effects you will hate that game with a passion as they are almost overdone. The framerate is also very jerky.
Motorstorm: I had never seen this game running in real life before, and what I saw was quite disappointing. The physics are excellent, but the framerate is all over the place, and worst of all the speed sensation was totally lacking. This is one game I really want to go back and check out again as I simply couldn't believe my eyes. I hope it was only that the 4 people playing at that time didn't know what they were doing...
Gran Turismo HD: Now this is something I never think I'd saw, ever. Imagine a Gran Turismo games being shown with slowdowns? Well, this is happening right now onthe moutain track at least. Something must be wrong with the demo units.
Virtua Fighter 5: A perfect arcade port, already running at a perfect 60 fps on a lot of demo stations. Very good looking.
Virtua Tennis 3: Another perfect port, running on 1080p screens and looking very very sharp. Replays and closeups are running at 30 fps though.
Ridge Racer 7: Honestly if I had been told it was a "track pack" for Ridge Racer 6 I'd have believed it. It still looks good, it's very smooth, but there is now "wow awesome" moment either. The boost effect looked a bit weird.

That's it for now. I'm very surprised by the number of games really lacking in the framerate department. The devs still have a few weeks to optimize their games for launch though, so hopefully everything will be fine in the end.