IAAPA: Guitar Hero, American Idol, Justice League, more

OK, we have finally got some stuff from IAAPA thanks to Kevin Williams of The Stinger Report and it looks like it’s been a great show so far. Here are a bunch of pics for Guitar Hero and a few more from American Idol. We’re still waiting on finding out some extra details on the games but at least we have a better look now. Click to enlarge them:

UPDATE: Bemanistyle has more details on GH Arcade. They say it’s very similar to GHIII but the controllers are built to the standards of Konami’s Guitar Freaks (i.e. much better quality than the home version). They also have a pic of Andamiro’s Pump It Up NX Absolute!.

Seeing how Raw Thrills/Play Mechanix has held several online tournaments this year with Big Buck Hunter giving away many thousands of dollars, we can expect to see some really big GH competitions in arcades next year. With the Coin-Up system arcade operators can also hold their own tournaments, usually cash pot style so there will be plenty of tourneys to go around with GH.

While GlobalVR did not have Justice League at their booth, they did release a video of the game in action (which also shows the cabinet). They are not quite ready to release the game yet (thus meaning that this is not the final build) and are still holding onto details but at least we have a teaser video which shows a little bit of gameplay. The game uses cel-shaded graphics and is apparently two players (I had thought that it might be a 4 player game at one point). You can watch below by clicking on the link for GVR’s website. Otherwise at the GVR booth they had NFS: Carbon, NASCAR and Paradise Lost from what we have seen so far. We tried to upload the Justice League trailer but the codec isn’t supported by WordPress’s video player. Go figure.

[Click here to watch the Justice League Trailer]

Since we’re also on the subject of American Idol in this post, it appears that there are a couple of devices at the show which will compete with AI’s video recording feature. First is a game called Dancing Heads, where you can “Be a star, no talent required”. It looks like a photo booth that will take your picture and integrate it into some sort of music video and dispense a DVD of the video for you to use afterwards. The second game which does sort of the same thing (this appears to be the new trend in photo booth technology) lets you select a song and then it records you bopping to the beat where you then get a DVD showing you and your friends dancing around to the song. I can’t make out a specific name for this one although it has giant boxing gloves on top of it, if that counts for anything.

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