TOKYO — Tekken 6 has been in Japan’s arcades since November 2007, so the audience’s relative lack of interest in the demo at the Tokyo Game Show last month wasn’t terribly surprising.

A closer look, however, revealed something special at the corner of the Bandai Namco booth: One of the demo stations for its latest fighting game was running the new “scenario campaign” mode that is unique to the upcoming Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game. Instead of ..read the full article

TOKYO — Here’s a game in which you fend off ninjas with a boxing glove at the end of a stick.

Wait, what?

Students at Nihon Kogakuin College have made a game called Don’t Lose the Secrets that puts you in just such a situation. On the screen, your character is standing in a feudal Japanese palace while ninjas crawl across the ceiling. Jabbing your stick upwards at the right time will knock out an interloper, while a mistimed strike will send ..read the full article

TOKYO — In the race to put more polygons on the screen than their competitors, most new videogames are defined by how they look. There was one game at Tokyo Game Show, however, where the graphics didn’t matter at all. That’s because it’s designed for the blind.

Blind Braver was created at the Tokyo Communication Arts school on Microsoft’s XNA development platform. The screen isn’t entirely blank, as your character is not completely sightless, but the main points of reference are ..read the full article

TOKYO — Motion controllers and the promise of Project Natal might be all the rage this year, but why move at all?

The Adventures of NeuroBoy is a game that monitors your brain activity via a Bluetooth headset (called a “MindSet”) and uses that data to interact with virtual objects. The technology is still limited to measuring “concentration” and “meditation,” so the game itself still relies on keyboard and mouse commands to maneuver NeuroBoy on screen. In order to handle any ..read the full article

TOKYO — Indie developer The Behemoth had a booth on the Tokyo Game Show floor, a small installation in the corner that was easy to miss. I certainly didn’t take notice of it during the first couple days of the show, or else I would have made it a point to visit sooner. The company brought two games to share with the public: a PlayStation Network demo of their Xbox Live Arcade hit Castle Crashers, and its forthcoming third game, ..read the full article