It would seem Konami that pretty much everybody thought their press conferences were bad. Like, famously bad. This year their entire Pre-E3 Event was compiled of pre-recorded segments over the course of 55 minutes, and while it did wonders for removing the bad it also seemed to remove that little something we came to expect from Konami. What was it.. love? Compassion? Connection to the fans?
No, wait. That was the bad. It’s probably for the best, for everyone concerned, they decided to go this route. Hit the jump to see a little of everything you need to know about this year in Konami.
- For all you soccer fans, a new Pro Evolution Soccer is on the way which will feature a more in-depth system for controlling not only the player currently in possession of the ball, but also the rest of your team to create a more fluid experience.
- They show off NeverDead. It’s a 3rd person shooter featuring an interesting mechanic where your character can have his limbs removed through various means, traverse and continue fighting without them, and reattach them on the fly. The gameplay video showed off a few quick scenes of combat, but most importantly, a scene where he’s hopping around on one leg and a scene where he has lost his entire body and is simply a decapitated head rolling around. One thing to note: The E3 trailer for NeverDead has an exclusive song by Megadeth, called “Never Dead“.
- A bit of information about a new upcoming movie in the Silent Hill franchise; Silent Hill: Revelation 3D which is being filmed in Toronto, Canada. Following that is an announcement for the Silent Hill Collection, featuring Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 in HD. They also briefly mention Silent Hill: Book of Memories, a brand new game for the Sony NGP, followed by this delightful picture:
Silent Hill: Downpour is the first of the big titles showcased in the conference. Focusing on convict Murphy Pendleton, the story kicks off during a prisoner transfer where the prison bus runs off the road due to a giant hole in the pavement and ground. The bus rolls over the side of a cliff, landing the survivors in Silent Hill. There’s a shot of Pendleton and a cop walking into the town while the cop remarks, “‘Fraid all the roads are out; every last one,” in a very calm manner.
The trailer then begins quick-cutting through various Silent Hill-isms; demon stripper, police brutality, guy with a giant hammer, and things crawling at the player. The trailer ends with a tentative release date of “Winter.”
Hideo Kojima of Kojima Productions, while not making an official appearance at E3 this year has a veritable smörgåsbord of offerings. Kojima Productions are working on a new feature for all of their games going forward, called ‘Transfarring’. The idea is that you’ll be able to play one of their games on your Playstation 3, save your progress, then transfer your game data to your handheld device of choice and continue on from exactly where you were, playing the same game across the different platforms. The feature locks the game data on the console when you transfer it out to avoid any version conflicts during the process. You will then be able to play for as long as you want on your portable device, and when you are finished transfer your game data back to your console and continue there. A working example of the Transfarring feature gets shown off, utilizing Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker as an example. In 11 seconds they are able to transfer their game data from a PS3 to a PSP, and an additional few seconds later completes the transfer from PSP back to PS3.
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker will be included in the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, which will also feature HD versions of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Kojima Productions is also working on a Zone of the Enders HD Collection, including HD versions of Zone of the Enders and Zone of the Enders 2: The Second Runner. These HD collections will be totally remastered games, not uprezzed versions running on an emulator.
The Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and Zone of the Enders HD Collection will also be available on Xbox 360 as well as PS3, and while each of the games included in these collections will have Transfarring capabilities they will only have them for the Playstation systems. The Metal Gear Solid HD Collection has a current release window of November 2011, while the Zone of the Enders HD Collection is being aimed at 2012.
Metal Gear Solid: Rising is still in a release window of 2012, though nothing new is going to be shown at E3 this year. What fans can expect from Rising is a game that takes concepts established in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and expands on them, while pushing them in a more futuristic, more sci-fi direction. [Ed. note: It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure MGS4 had two to three story mecha-cow-tanks and nanobot vampires. Not really sure how you can get more sci-fi than that.]
The next game from Kojima Productions is as of yet an unannounced title, still in the planning stages. While they have nothing to announce about a game at this time they can announce they are building a brand new, original game engine called the FOX Engine. They have been working on this brand new engine since the end of MGS4, and continued working on it through the production of Peace Walker.
It is the hope of Kojima himself that, when completed, the FOX Engine will be the best game engine in the world. While noting that he can’t say anything about his unannounced project, he wants his fans to know that it will be multi-platform and “Transfarring enabled for a global audience.”
The Kojima Productions segment ended with a message from Hideo Kojima to his fans where he said,
“This year will be a year of preparations for Kojima Productions. I’m very sorry I wasn’t able to make it to E3 this year, but this year we have MGS: Snake Eater 3D for the 3DS, and the (MGS) HD Collection coming to Xbox 360 and the PS3 to look forward to. And in 2012, we have Rising and maybe others to represent the Kojima Productions brand. I plan on going to E3 next year, so until then thank you for watching and see you at E3 2012. Thank you.“
The entire conference came to an end with a vague teaser of really just a single image. A fireball flies out of a dark background, forming into the ‘C’ of the Contra logo. Fresh Contra game from Konami? Here’s hoping it’s a touch better than Hard Corps: Uprising.
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