Frankly, I think the four bucks is a small price to pay to improve upon Ayane’s look and give Rachel something more business-like to wear. But it’s also four bucks worth of virtual clothing. You’ll have to judge for yourself.

Ayane, Momiji, Rachel and Ryu each get some fancy new duds in next week’s Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 costume pack, available on November 19 in North America for $US3.99. Momiji shows off her meaty thighs in her Matsuri Festival costume; Ayane sports the latest Venice Festival fashions; Rachel dresses up like the other sort of Ney York Working Woman; and Ryu prepares to hide in a snow bank with his Special White costume.

Seems like Ryu is getting the short end of the stick here, but then Sigma 2 was never really about Ryu, was it?

Announced back in June of this year, NBA Unrivaled is Tecmo’s entry into the basketball video-game market since 1992’s Tecmo NBA Basketball, the basketball companion to Tecmo Super Bowl. Like Tecmo NBA, Unrivaled features cut scenes and exaggerated special moves, making it more NBA Jam and less NBA Live.

Unlike the game from 1992, however, NBA Unrivaled features all 30 NBA teams with top players from the latest rosters, full 5-on-5 arcade gameplay and full 1080p HD support.

NBA Unrivaled drops on Wednesday on the Xbox Live Arcade in North America, Japan and Europe, with a PlayStation Network version coming in the near future.

For the launch of Ninja Gaiden II, Tecmo released a series of viral-type ads. Here’s how they made them. Fascinating.

As leaked yesterday in the upcoming issue of Japanese mag Famitsu, Tecmo Koei is hard at work on Fist of the North Star for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

The manga (Hokuto no Ken) debuted in 1983 and went on to spin off two animated series and motion pictures.

Dubbed Hokuto Musou, the game is scheduled for release sometime next year. Wasn’t that interested — blurry magazine scans do that — but this leaked footage has me intrigued. Looks fun! With all that blood, wonder what rating it will get in Japan.

The clip is originally from Nico Nico Douga — hence the scrolling Japanese text.

The manga debuted in 1983 and went on to spin off two animated series and motion pictures. Check out the Japanese opening.

Details are still scant, but early (and blurry) scans characters Kenshiro, Rei, Raoh and Yuria. The game is scheduled for release sometime next year from the folks at Tecmo Koei.

These questions popped into my head last week in Tokyo. Koichi Yamaguchi was the game producer in question: A nice Japanese producer with an apparently nice game.

His game is called Again. It’s a crime, mystery-solving game on the DS. And it has a lot of non-gameplay story sequences in it, something that would foil him the night he tried to show it to me, Crecente and McWhertor during a party at the pirate-themed club in the New Otani Hotel.

I had never met Yamaguchi before we stood on the dance floor for his impromptu demo at this mixer for overseas media and the video game producers at Tecmo Koei.

On a cheat sheet handed to reporters entering Yamaguchi had listed his hobbies as “drinking beer and speaking English”. One or both of those gave him the courage to approach me, Crecente and McWhertor to flip open his DS and show us his game, Again.

Yamaguchi didn’t have to say much to get me interested in Again. By the time he told me that the game was developed by Cing, the makers of the solid DS adventure games Another Code and Hotel Dusk, I was adding it to my mental list of games to follow.

The amiable game producer, however, didn’t want to just drop the name of the development studio and be done. He wanted to show us parts of the game. And that introduced the problem — the one making me wonder if we should blame nightclubs or game design for what happened next.

He started losing us. Each of us, in turn, got distracted. There was a crowd. People were saying hello. But there was also the issue of his game stating with lots of text. Speech balloon after speech balloon appeared. Each needed a tap of the screen to go away before another appeared.

What could normally have been story set-up was now just interference. I think it was Crecente who was getting pulled away the most by PR folks and who knows what else. Yamaguchi urged me and McWhertor to pay attention. He kept tapping, right past the dialogue. The subtext was that his game’s text wasn’t important. “Wait for the cool part,” he he said. More tapping. More flipping past intro stuff.

Yamaguchi would not have had much trouble if he was showing us action. If he had been able to jump to a chase scene or a boss battle or something else that dynamic, the quality of his game alone should have been able to determine whether we kept watching or suddenly remembered we just had to doublecheck the smell of the room next door. But his game may not even have chase scenes to show. It is a mystery game that mixes animation with short clips of real, filmed actors. It is an investigation game. It is a talking game. It is a game requiring focus.

But it’s also a game that isn’t really a game for its first few minutes. It’s something you watch, something you tap through before the playing begins.

In a quieter setting when there’s more time, the long non-interactive part of Again might not be a hindrance to catching a potential player’s attention. But in a pirate-themed Nightclub? I felt bad for Yamaguchi, but I wondered if he had inadvertently exposed a flaw in his game’s design. If so, then we’d have to deem so many games flawed, because so many of them start this way.

Eventually he got to the cool part. That part is the core aspect of Again: The DS, held book-style shows a place like, say, a room, in the game’s present timeframe on the right screen and that same space in another timeframe, the past, on the left. The player compares the two, looks for clues, then manipulates the scene in the present. Noticing a difference might help reveal the whereabouts of a switch to a hidden door, for example.

The three of us had to leave Yamaguchi because we really did have a dinner to attend. He’d had only a few minutes to show us his game, enough to catch my interest but barely enough to show what it’s like to actually play his game.

Blame the pirate-themed nightclub? Or blame the staple of game design that starts Again?

This two-sided document was handed to reporters who attended a Tecmo-Koei event in Tokyo last week. Video game producers from the recently-merged company mingled with press like us. At least, that was the goal. This sheet was designed to help break the ice and the language barrier.

And it might have been educational, too.

For the record, Tecmo’s Kohei Shibata did do his zombie walk. It was passable.

Also, note the lack of info for Yosuke Hayashi, who Crecente and I last saw at E3 when he was talking about Tecmo’s role in co-developing Metroid: Other M. I asked him how the game was going. He said, “Very, very good.” I did not ask him about his likes or dislikes. Nor did I request a fun fact. Next time!

[PIC]

They should probably figure that one out.

We played the Tokyo Game Show demo of Quantum Theory at the PlayStation booth, immediately feeling comfortable with the controls. Quantum Theory feels immediately like standard third-person shooter stuff — aim and shoot with the left and right triggers, take cover behind walls and sprint with the X button. Quantum Theory—simply known as Quantum in North America—looks to have borrowed heavily from the current generation of shooters, then given a Japanese visual flair.

While the shooting and hand-to-hand combat is stock stuff, Quantum Theory has something its forebears don’t — an AI controlled lady-partner named Filena. Oh, and you can throw her. Simply tap the L1 button when Filena is around and Syd will launch her toward your target. When we tossed her at a foe shielded by a mounted gun, she hovered above them momentarily, firing what appeared to be an electrically charged weapon, stunning the gunner.

A second attack with Filena, performed by holding down the L1 button, will send her flying directly at the enemy, slashing at them with her sword. The time commitment dedicated to holding the button down a second longer deals more damage, as one might expect.

Two levels were on hand at Tokyo Game Show. The first showed off Syd and Filena’s co-op abilities as the player shoots through a series of ornate-looking—but somehow also generic-looking—bad guys. Killing one turns them instantly into an explosion of mustard-coloured goo. And killing those goo-filled enemies can be done with one of Quantum Theory’s many guns or a melee combo attack.

Quantum Theory’s guns have fancy names and fancy designs—many look like dragon heads or a chaotic metal sculpture worn on the arm—but they do pretty standard stuff. The Impulsus is a shotgun. The Plasma Lancer is a sniper rifle. The Gravedigger is a machine gun. And the Arc Screamer shoots electric bolts. You can carry three of these beastly looking weapons at a time, picking them up (down, with the D-pad) from fallen foes. They sound chunky and look heavy, but don’t give much of a sensation of weight.

The second portion of the TGS Quantum Theory demo shows off the game’s other core gimmick, the living tower that Syd and Filena climb throughout the game. The game was advertised to offer organic cover, with waist-high walls growing and shrinking so that Syd and his foes can hide behind them. But I was a little surprised to see just how much of the tower was in flux. Massive bridges and platforms shifted as I walked through the level. That added some small amount of platforming, part of the action game elements that Tecmo is bringing to the genre.

While some of what Quantum Theory is bringing to the third person shooter genre is interesting, the game currently smacks of a Gears of War clone, with animation, character design and gameplay aspects that feel more copied wholesale than inspired by. And even though it’s still many months away from its “early 2010″ release, the game looks rough. The graphic design is officially described as an “art nouveau style world that is on the verge of becoming postapocalyptic, which merges the beauty of organic motifs with technology”, but it tends to be dark, depressing and garish with muddy textures and chunky geometry.

On the bright side, it sounds like Quantum Theory director Makoto Shibata is not oblivious to some of these visual problems. He said during an interview at TGS that the team will continue to work on the game’s graphics over the coming months. Shibata also says that the team will be improving upon the enemy AI to make the action a little more interesting. We hope that the game’s iffy camera is also on the list of planned improvements.

There’s definitely potential in Quantum Theory, if the combination of third-person shooting and action game mechanics can find the right balance. What we know of the storyline so far is interesting, as is the organic tower that Syd and Filena must climb. But we’ll check in on it closer to completion to see if some of the kinks have been worked out.