Coded Arms E3 2005 Preshow Report

Konami's Coded Arms is set to be the first first-person shooter for Sony's PSP. The game's sci-fi setting puts you into a virtual-reality world gone haywire, complete with randomly generated levels and multiplayer for up to four players.

The game's story is set inside a virtual-reality world that was shut down after a serious problem was discovered. But even after the shutdown, the world continued on, mutating further and further and filling itself full of crazy enemies for you, playing the role of a hacker stumbling his way into this abandoned system, to blast up.

You'll be able to smoke up your virtual enemies using more than 30 different weapons, which will include rocket weapons, assault rifles, sniper rifles, and energy pulses. The game will have five different worlds and will feature randomly generated maps.

Coded Arms will have a multiplayer option for up to four players, though it's not confirmed if the game will contain infrastructure-based Internet play or if it will be limited to local sessions. The game will contain fairly standard multiplayer modes, like deathmatch, last man standing, and keep the mark. In what could be an interesting twist, you'll only be able to go into multiplayer maps with weapons and power-ups that you've uncovered in the single-player mode.

From what we've seen of the game to date, it appears to control well and run smoothly. It'll be interesting to see how far it has progressed since it was last shown at the Tokyo Game Show last year. Coded Arms is scheduled for a North American release this summer.