The Con E3 2005 Hands-On

Earlier today, during a visit to Sony Computer Entertainment's E3 booth, we were able to get our hands on an E3 demo of The Con before meeting with two members of the game's development team and probing them for information. Options available to us in the E3 demo version of The Con included fighting against another E3 attendee via the PSP's wireless connectivity, or jumping straight into a story mode-style fight in which all of the usual prefight betting had already been taken care of.

Much of what we gleaned from our time actually playing The Con was already covered in some detail after we attended SCEA's pre-E3 event. We did get some new information during our meeting with the developers, though, including more details on the game's unique betting system.

The title The Con refers to the fact that the game will let you bet on your own fights before you attempt to maximize your winnings by controlling every aspect of the fight and conning the crowd into placing bets that will improve the odds you get for your own wager. Before any fight where you have the betting option enabled, you'll have an opportunity to specify not only how much money you'd like to bet, but also at what point during the fight you'd like the bet to be placed.

The fight that we were able to get into at E3, for example, had a $400 dollar bet on us to win, but the bet wasn't going to be placed until 45 seconds into the contest. So, for the first 45 seconds we basically had to let our opponent give us a good beating so that the crowd would start betting money on him, which would then increase the odds on our bet. It wasn't nearly as simple as that, though, because if the crowd thought for a moment that we were throwing the fight, they wouldn't bet.

Besides not using the block button a lot, we were able to dupe the crowd by using the left shoulder button both to weaken our punches and to give our opponent an easy shot at our chin every now and then. The crowd thought that our performance was pretty convincing by the time 45 seconds of the fight had passed, and after successfully making our comeback in the latter stages of the fight, our bank balance was looking a lot healthier than it was previously.

Our winnings were no good to us in the E3 demo version of The Con, unfortunately, but in the finished game you'll be able to spend your money at a shop that sells new clothing and fighter accessories and such. Most of the items in the game will be available to purchase anytime you visit the shop, but there will also be rare items that are available to buy only once, for a limited time, or which can't be bought at all and need to be collected from fallen opponents.

In addition to 20 default characters spanning all five of The Con's fighting styles, the game will let you create your own custom characters and, provided you have a JPEG image of your face handy, map your own face onto a fighter. The Con will feature 12 different environments for you to stage your contests in, and although we weren't given any more specific information on it, we were told that you'll definitely be able to play portions of the game against friends who have a PSP but don't have a copy of the game.

The Con is currently scheduled for release in North America this fall. We'll bring you more information on the game as soon as it becomes available.