TGS 2009: Japanese Developers Show Project Natal Major Love

For once, I believe that Microsoft has put out something that Japanese developers are falling in love with.

Project Natal is being praised by some historically great software developers. The below series of videos shows the greatest development minds in Japan as they spoke at last week’s Tokyo Game Show 2009. Here is the line-up:

CAPCOM’s Keiji Inafune, NAMCO’s Yozo Sakagami, TECMO’s Keisuke Kikuchi, Kojima’s Kenichiro Imaizumi, SEGA’s Kenichiro Nagoshi, FromSoftware’s Masanori Takeuchi, and Konami’s Naoki Maeda.

I’m extremely ecstatic that the Japanese developers are getting on board with Natal, given that they are in Sony’s backyard. I’m concerned about development time for the non-exclusive titles, though. Having to program controls for both Natal and Sony’s motion controller will be difficult to do in the same amount of time as used for previous titles. Of course, this could also mean that there will be different titles from the same IP on different consoles, a la Dead Space for XBox 360/PS3 and Dead Space: Extraction for Nintendo Wii. That seems a more likely scenario in my opinion.

Needless to say, it appears that Natal is being embraced in Japan, and that should make all of us who own an Xbox 360 doing cartwheels down our carpeted halls (wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself on hardwood floors or outside on the concrete sidewalks). If I were physically adept, I would certainly be doing cartwheels.

Source: Joystiq

Keiji Inafune, CAPCOM

Yozo Sakagami, NAMCO BANDAI

Keisuke Kikuchi, TECMO

Kenichiro Imaizumi, Kojima Productions

Kenichiro Nagoshi, SEGA

Masanori Takeuchi, FromSoftware

Naoki Maeda, Konami