Time Crisis 4: From Arcade to PS3

While our team was in the process of creating the Guncon3 for the PLAYSTATION 3 release of Time Crisis 4, we were simultaneously working on the arcade version of the game. There are considerable differences when creating a game for arcade and home release. While the Time Crisis series has been a huge success in arcades for along time now, we decided to make some changes in our formula that would ultimately benefit the PLAYSTATION 3 version.

For our character designs, we knew that the game would eventually be released on the extremely capable PLAYSTATION 3 hardware, so we felt confident in adding a great deal of detail to our models. For example, if you take a look at our enemy soldier designs, you’ll notice that they wear a green radio-type device on their shoulder. As the game features insect-like biological weapons called Terror-Bites, these are devices that emit a pulse that deters these creatures, ensuring that they are not attacked by accident. When enemies unleash the Terror Bites, you’ll notice that this green device blinks and emits a low buzzing sound. This is a pretty minor detail, but there are a lot of these touches throughout the game. Again, as we were confident in the PLAYSTATION 3 to recreate the arcade experience, we put as much care as possible into designing our characters and game world.

As soon as the Arcade version of Time Crisis 4 was completed, we started development of the PLAYSTATION 3 version. Since we already had our graphics in high-res, it was a relatively simple process for us to get the arcade stages up and running smoothly on the PS3 hardware.

Our team hadn’t created any FPS stages prior to this point, so it was a fun challenge for us to try and meet our goal of implementing control via the Guncon3. We were always concerned with giving the player full movement over the character while also putting them in the fun shooting scenarios that the arcade game is known for. As you can see in the image below, our FPS stages are much larger than our arcade stages. On the left is the game’s first arcade stage, with the first FPS stage to the right. I think players will be surprised by how substantial our FPS mode actually is.

We’re now working the European version of the game, but can feel a sense of relief with the game shipping to stores this week in North America. For the Japanese and Asian versions, there are still a few details to finalize, such as packaging. In the photo below, I am comparing the final Japanese packaging on the left to the Asian version on the right. I’m always concerned with selecting the right type of packaging for each region, so I take this step very seriously. You can also see the final US packaging in the below image – it’s very different from the packaging for our other regions.

Our team put everything we had into making Time Crisis 4 as good as it can possibly be. I’d like to thank you all for reading my blog postings, and hope you found them informative. The game will be hitting stores this week, so I hope you enjoy it!