KONAMI'S TGS LINEUP INCLUDES . . . METAL GEAR SOLID 4
 
Metal Gear Solid 4 first debuted at Tokyo Game Show in 2005. It was released on June 12th, 2008. This year, at Tokyo Game Show, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Metal Gear Online are both listed as attractions at the Konami booth. I wonder if they'll be there next year, as well.
 
"Stage events" are also scheduled for the two games. There's going to be some sort of tournament for MGO, and then probably a six-hour talk session during which Hideo Kojima speaks quietly into a microphone and his voice carries seventeen kilometers thanks to the Largest Speakers Known to Man.
 
Aside from that, there's a new Suikoden game -- that's a game based on a game based on my favorite book! -- for the Nintendo DS, with an unfortunately unpronouncable subtitle: "Tierkreis".
 
There's also the new Castlevania game on DS, which will probably play a lot like the last two Castlevania games on DS, maybe with a little bit (lot) of the Gameboy Advance Castlevania games thrown in.
 
The one game I personally am most interested in is Castlevania Judgment, the 3D fighting game for the Wii set in the Castlevania world. When the game was announced earlier this year, thousands of series fans cried bloody murder, complaining that the series had abandoned the fans. I cringed at this: if anything, the game looks like the people in charge are trying to create new fans: they’ve commissioned red-hot manga artist Takeshi Obata (“Death Note”) for the character design duties, for example. And the format of the game itself is more interesting than it might appear at first glance. That is to say, it's a fighting game, though it's not your traditional kind of fighting game. It's apparently controlled more like a Devil May Cry style 3D action game.

Neither of the two 3D Castlevania games on the PlayStation 2 seemed to understand what they wanted to do with the controls or the battle system. Might Judgment be the development team's public experiment with searching for the right kind of game?

That said, the "fan" reaction just goes to show you how silly videogame fans can be, sometimes. The series creators are branching out, trying to welcome in more players, so that they can sell more copies and make more money and thus begin to look essential to their parent company, and the fans are crying bloody murder because the game isn't exactly the same as every other game in the series. Open your eyes, people!

If Konami had made a traditional Castlevania game for the Wii, maybe in 2D, it would have just exposed how awful the level design has gotten; in the DS installments, we put up with it because, hey, collectable items! Hey, Castlevania in the palm of my hand! Hey, Castlevania on the bus! The action -- the friction -- is never the point of the games anymore, which is deeply sad considering how I seem to recall director Koji "IGA" Igarashi saying in the GBA days that his goal was to make a game that people could immediately pick up and feel joy of playing in their first five seconds. The first five seconds of any of the DS installments aren't enough to get through the story scroll screen.

So I say: Castlevania fans! Allow Igarashi and company a little soul-searching! Have faith in this game! If everyone on the internet believes in this game at once, then there exists a huge chance that I might enjoy it when I play it at Tokyo Game Show next week.

I am putting all these words up here because Castlevania Judgment is the game I am most morbidly interested in of all the games at TGS, and I am ready to harshly judge it in a heartbeat.