IGN and G4TV give Coded Arms awards

Why (They) Picked It:
You don't see the Japanese making too many first-person shooters. In fact, you don't see many first person shooters made for handhelds period. So imagine our surprise when we heard about this unique project back at last year's E3 -- a first person shooter on PSP made by Konami! If the game ends up being the star title it sounds like, we'll be very pleased as well. Our hands-on play sessions with the game have shown it to be promising (if a little unorthodox), and Konami has put a lot of work into the title since then. The setting is a virtual world where high-tech thieves are trying to hack top secret government secrets. As one of the "Coded Ones", you'll take on a broken alien invasion simulation set to destroy anyone that sets foot in the program. Besides the bevy of cool weapons at your disposal, there's also a random level generator for multiplayer use that gives you an infinite amount of locations to run and gun in. With a Wi-fi multiplayer that supports up to four players, this is looking like unadulterated pandemonium.

Release date and price set for import release of Japan's PSP FPS.
by Jason Allen IGN
Japan will blaze new trails this coming Summer with the release of Coded Arms in Japan, a first-person shooter on the PSP. The release date is set for June 23, 2005, as stated by the official Konami website. The game will retail for 4,980 yen (on the higher-end scale of PSP game pricing in Japan, although with the yen-dollar rate, that's still only $47 by exchange rates.) Not only is this the first FPS for PSP, it's one of the few from Japan's game development community. The gamers of Japan have traditionally leaned away from first-person shooters, a genre most celebrated by European and American gamers. Namco experimented with the perspective in Breakdown, an Xbox game that blended both melee and projectile attacks in first-person; back in the early days of PlayStation, Atlus Software had its Space Griffon series. It will be interesting to see how Konami handles the Japanese launch of Coded Arms -- the North American version of the game is already one of the company's key games for 2005. Coded Arms is promising to push the PSP for all it's worth by taking advantage of the available wi-fi connectivity for handheld multiplayer action. Current calendars put the American release in that same late-June period, so stay tuned to the IGN PSP channel for the latest Coded Arms updates.