IAAPA: Power Boat, Textminator, Sea Wolf, Tank Adventure, more misc stuff

PLEASE NOTE: This post has been updated to include new information from the show floor

There’s more at IAAPA and first off here are some games from a company that used to be called iMotion but is now InJoy. While we had first posted a video for Power Boat quite a while ago, we hadn’t heard anything about it since and I had wondered whether the game was still coming to the US. InJoy answered that question today by showing off the latest build of the title at IAAPA, along with some brand new cabinets for their tank combat game, Panzer Elite Action. PEA has been available for some time in a different cabinet form but I guess they decided to give it a new, more appealing design. They have kept the motion for both games though, which is a good thing, it helped make Panzer Elite a more interesting game when I played it.

Next up is Tecway Developments and their entries into the US market. They had demonstrated Tank Adventure some time ago in Asia and with them bringing it to the US it will compete directly with the Panzer Elite Action game mentioned above. Also from them is a new game called Ski Jet – from the pic below you can see it lets you choose a boat or plane to play and it’s a shooter in the same vein as Sea Wolf.

Speaking of Sea Wolf, Sea Wolf : The Next Missions was at the show with it’s new cabinet designs. With an upright cabinet and new gameplay it should be interesting to see how this is received as at ASI it was very popular.

For the next game I am not sure who is creating this but LAI games has developed an interesting idea targeted towards the “text generation” and it’s called “Textminator”. The game turns the ‘art’ of texting on a cell phone into an arcade game but right now it’s still unclear as to what the gameplay entails at this moment. “Typing of the Dead” pops into my mind for it but I doubt this is about using text messages to fight the zombie hordes.

Games that use motion capture (immersive reality) in some manner were abundant at the show. 1st is a pic of two people playing a pong game using their whole body (by a company called PlayMotion); 2nd is called Chatterbox (by Anmialive) where you sit in a green screen booth and chat with a virtual character; the 3rd I’m not sure what it’s called but it puts you in front of a green screen and simulates something close to the Playstation Eye Toy.

There also was something called MagiQuest at the show which had a huge booth, Kevin snapped several shots of this one. Labelled the “World’s Largest Interactive Video Game”, one component we see here seems to be some sort of sensor grid that detects your arm movements above it the movement of a wand in your hand so you can throw spells. The control panel allows you to take different actions and the game plays like a more interactive version of those old CD games that were popular, like 7th Guest, etc. MagiQuest will also roll out a waterpark version of their idea next year using gloves instead of wands (pictured below)

Finally, a very interesting picture that Kevin got was of something called Trans-Force, which even features the Transformers font. When looking online, I found a site about a company that makes 3D/4D amusement rides using the Trans-Force name so I assume this setup @ IAAPA is from them but it looks like the dome screen concept. There are flight joysticks inside but it’s not clear at the moment what kind of game[s] it plays. Check back later for more details on this and other games at IAAPA. UPDATE: More information found on this in this post.

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