Namco Holds Business Meetings in Japan, Sonic Storm Renamed to Mach Storm

The slow news period we’ve seen this summer may be starting to come to an end, at least where new game products are concerned. Japanese manufacturers are beginning to hold public “business meetings”, where they show off some product that will be released by the end of this year or the beginning of next. The first to do this before the traditional industry trade show in September is Namco.

For most of the new product they showed it involved “Medal Games” (kind of like redemption games but coin-centric instead of ticket-centric), a new crane machine and two video games. One of those is another version of the drumming game Taiko No Tatsujin slated for a release in December (don’t expect this to get any sort of official release out West) and the other is one we found out about earlier this year which had been called Sonic Storm, now dubbed Mach Storm. This is one to keep an eye out for in the West as it was first heard of on a US location test (it should be noted that we do not know how that test went and have not seen the game on the US side since) [Images below via AM-Net]

Recently we did discover that this is a modified version of Ace Combat: Assault Horizon. With the new information we have an idea of the price now (in a currency calculator its about$23,000 USD – not terribly surprising given it uses the “Gundam Pod” cabinet and those are always about $20k) and the five locations where players can get into some dogfighting is Miami, Tokyo, Paris, Dubai and Washington D.C. The game also includes a camera for a player avatar/reaction shot.  The data comes from the flyer below where there are more details in Japanese; it seems to indicate some force-feedback in the controls but missing is the air blasting – the US location test had some wind effects. That could be a feature disabled just for Japan or it could have been removed all together based upon testing feedback.

This is slated for a Japanese release this December; unknown when/if the US/European release might be although with the IAAPA 2013 trade show in November we will find out for certain then.