News from Lik Sang

If you are into tuning and unique looks, you certainly have taken a read at our Pimp My Ride bits already a month ago. If you are not so much the screwdriver type of guy though, it's clippable Faceplates that you are eyeing for. Good news, we have today re-stocked the popular Deluxe Chrome Faceplate for the Xbox 360. Additionally, we are now carrying two additional high-quality metallic models: Deluxe Gold and classy Copperized Bronze.





Even better, the price for these high-grade shiny armors has been crushed to just US$ 14.95 a pop! For all resellers willing to carry this stylish line of products in their corner of the gaming world, aggressive bulk discounts have been set up as well (head to the product page to check that out; or enter a quantity above 5 pcs in your shopping cart for automated calculation - you know the drill). ...

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Via IGN

Little gems are constantly popping up on the Nintendo DS, especially on import from Japan. One of the nice surprises here at TGS was a title called Pinky Street Kira Kira Music Hour by SEGA and developer Dimple, an accessible little rhythm-action game. It's got little to no chance of being released outside of Japan, but if you like your music gaming on the go, this could be something to pick up from an import dealer.

Kira Kira Music Hour's gameplay is based on a series of three touch panels for you to interact with as the beat rolls by. You hold the Nintendo DS sideways (or bookwise), with the touch panel on one side for gameplay and the other side showing a full-body view of your dancer and her competition. Three panels is a bit awkward for a music game (unless you're listening to umpahpah Polka music, of course), but it works for this game in that it's less exact in the timing over something like Dance Dance Revolution, instead stressing specific movements with your stylus. Up top is a meter showing the song's beat (a bouncing music note shows you where you are) and one of three color blips for an upcoming beat. That color will light up one of the three touch panels when it reaches the beat, and you must take action in that panel to hit the note. Sometimes the note will be just a single tap, other times it will light up with arrows that you must stroke for the music hit. Once you get going, it becomes less a game of reflexes and more of a real music game, as you tap and shuffle left and right to the music, almost as if you're really dancing. Build your "Rainbow" combos and beat your opponent on the dance floor either in single player or multiplayer mode.
As if that weren't enough, there's also a full story mode to play through. Included in this is a large mall town to explore, with several points of interest for your smiley-faced female dancing idol. You can go shopping for outfits for her or visit clubs to play games. There's even a cute photo booth for fashion-crazy girls (and pervy boys) where your 3D character will strike a number of poses as you take pictures of her.

Music is obviously one of the biggest keys to success in a music game, and the synth J-Pop in the demo we played wasn't compelling enough to carry the tune home with us, but it's plenty possible that the music will grow on you if you choose to give it time because of the game's unique gameplay. Pinky Street Kira Kira Music Hour releases in Japan on October 26th. ...

Via IGN

After playing the PSP strategy game Jeanne d'Arc, we were eager for even more portable strategy play here on the TGS floor. Marvelous Interactive's promising Luminous Arc for the Nintendo DS looked to fit the bill, particularly because it promises Nintendo WiFi Connection features.

In play with the TGS demo, however, we were let down. Most immediately, we were disappointed in the control in Luminous Arc, which was entirely D-Pad-driven in the demo. Screenshots in the TGS flyer show the stylus being used on the screen (but not in controlling the character, instead depicted just sort of lying there with the indication that it could be used), so we're hoping that there's no way that this development team ignored the single biggest feature of this system in making this game, but there were no option menus to configure control in the demo. Moving characters around on the grid was thus awkward -- more so than GBA strategy-RPGs without the benefit of a stylus, we should add -- and not ideal.
There was also little unique or interesting about the visual style. Character designs were decent in an anime kind of way, but nobody in the cast of characters stood out from any other anime-styled character to be seen at any given booth at TGS (perhaps with the exception of one cute brown-haired nerd girl with eyeglasses who popped up in Luminous Arc's interminably long opening dialog tree. Dialog sequences use the Fire Emblem talking head poses, and at least feature full voice acting for each character. The screen-filling heads in dialog sequences were nice the first few times we saw them, but after seeing the same few expressions on plain backgrounds over and over again, the appeal was quickly gone, and we found ourselves skipping through the dialog as fast as possible despite the production values in having voice acting. The game itself used a standard 2D isometric game board grid like that seen in countless other strategy-RPGs, not displaying any more detail or vibrancy than countless other competitors on GBA. The game board could not be rotated to show other views, and the stage was small in the battles we played. (OK, so there we're nitpicking, since these were the very first introductory battles in the game, so we'll give them the assumption that things will get better later on.) Enemy designs weren't all that fabulous to us either after we had finished our fights with mutant chickens and bull-headed thugs.

Luminous Arc may be hiding something that we're just not seeing yet, and online features are certainly reason enough to show interest. That said, we saw nothing yet to distinguish this game on DS over alternatives on GBA, and other big-name strategy-RPGs are on the way. Luminous Arc is 70% complete in its TGS form, so we'll take another look and see what a deeper playthrough reveals when the import version is released sometime next year. ...

Alongside the Wii teaser trailer for Naruto at Tomy's booth was a Nintendo DS "Coming Soon" trailer showing off a new fighting game due out for the portable system. The game is obviously extremely early (the video kept cutting away to staged mock-ups of the game with drawn-in characters to show what the game might look like, then switching back to work-in-progress gameplay footage), but with few traditional fighting games on the portable, it caught our eye even at this early stage.


The Nintendo DS Naruto 3D fighting game looked very much like a DS version of Tekken, complete with juggle moves and an 'endless' battle floor that rotates and scrolls with the view as the fighters battle in 3 dimensions. The visual style of the game was surprisingly realistic, using more traditional shading techniques than the cel-shading seen in console Naruto games. 3D character rendering skewed surprisingly more towards realism than any other Naruto game we've seen before, with more true-to-human character proportions versus the light SD techniques used most often to bring mangas and anime to games -- fighters looked more like people than they did cartoon heroes. (It could be that this was just an aspect of the low completion level of the game so far ... we're not sure which way we want the final game to go since the look was kind of cool and distinctive, very much like Tekken in so many ways.) A number of summon-type or special attacks are also available in gameplay, with the bottom screen made up of six huge "buttons" to use special attacks. Despite its more realistic rendering in this video, some very identifiable Naruto effects were displayed, including that cool chalk outline effect Sakura Haruno has in the Cube games when she rages up.
Look for something more on this game when it's ready for demonstration in playable form some time in 2007.

Via IGN ...

Heres an excerpt:

The Mega Man EXE series, also known as Mega Man Battle Network was finally put to rest after over a dozen games in around five years (and that's not including the Chip Challenge spin-off and GameCube platformer.) But if you thought you would never see this enjoyable but oversaturated series ever again, think again. EXE is over, but a brand new Mega Man franchise is coming to take its place, and you can see remnants of Battle Network every step along the way. And of course, even though it's a brand new game series, there are already three of them ready to buy.

Called Ryusei no Rockman in Japan (translated out to Shooting Star Mega Man, although we're sure the name will change when this title makes its inevitable journey to America), the game is the spiritual successor to Mega Man Battle Network. This time, it's all themed more after the new ZX series of Mega Men than the original EXE Mega Man, with a character that wears costumes increasingly more like that of ZX. The Mega Man storyline in this franchise doesn't seem to rely on your outside boy character controlling a cyber Mega Man anymore. This time, from what we saw in our admittedly confusing demo (this story hardly makes sense in English, much less Japanese), you finally are the Mega Man, playing as a boy who can use his Mega Man visor to view the cyber world underneath modern life. As day turns to night, you creep into the cyber world -- the TGS demo had us for some reason talking to anthropomorphicized trucks and full-sized trains with faces. Eventually, you slip fully into the cyber world (which looks an awful lot like the Tron-like world of Battle Network) and begin to battle as Mega Man.

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Heres an excerpt:

If a Square or Enix game has familiar characters and yet can't be abbreviated to just DQ or FF and then some roman numerals, you sometimes have to take stock and make sure you're not getting overly excited. Let your fanboy fevor get away with you and suddenly you're the proud owner of Chocobo Racer. On the other hand, there is magic in the fringes sometimes if you're willing to get deep with a series, and the new DS game Chocobo & The Magic Picture Book looks to be a really charming spin-off for the big yellow bird. It comes across as a little bit of a kiddie game, but there's enough for the big kids to enjoy too.

The game is a collection of minigames either built into a story mode in single player or else accessible for many to play together in four-player mode. The RPG story mode features a gorgeous 3D engine as your Chocobo character explores small little pockets of land, speaking with other familiar Square figures as it comes to discover the mysteries of the game's Magical Picture Book. Those mysteries mostly break down into a continuing series of small puzzles and minigames, many which are actually quite addictive. You will see your standard slide puzzles and whack-a-mole stages, but also seen (and available to download and take home from the show via the DS Download feature -- very handy in the long wait for a seat in the Square theater here at TGS) was a nice little puzzle challenge sort of like Minesweeper but faster, where you must tap tiles to reveal instructions for finding the next tile (one, two or three blocks away in any direction) to find the crown without finding an enemy. Another was an otaku's dream puzzle we're informally calling "Speedy Squaresoft" -- on the bottom touchscreen are dozens of classic 8-bit Final Fantasy characters, and up top is a slowly closing door that the characters will be randomly running past, visible for just a split second through the crack of the door. You must tap the correct character based on memory to rack up points.

Full article at IGN ...

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