E3 06: Fatal Inertia Impressions

LOS ANGELES--During the Sony press conference at E3 2006, amid a flurry of brief trailers, we got to see a little bit more of Fatal Inertia, Koei's WipEout-inspired hovercar racing game. The brief trailer that was shown displayed a number of the game's hovercars racing through a canyon while firing weapons at each other.

The text displayed over the trailer said "futuristic hover cars," "perilous speed," "furious combat," "cunning strategy," and "drivers risk their lives in a struggle for victory and everlasting glory." This builds upon what we know already, and what we saw in our first look of the game when we visited Koei's Toronto studio in the fall of last year. These hovercars will be combating in some type of futuristic contest, although the trailer shown during the press conference did not reveal any new information about the premise behind that story.

What we did see was a number of different car models, which showed the variety that you'll find in the game, and hopefully all of them will be playable or unlockable. As the cars raced through the canyons, we got a glimpse of a weapon dangling below the car that seemed to be held there until the driver launched it forward toward an opponent ahead of him. There was also a brief slow-motion sequence, but we're not sure if that indicates there will be Burnout-esque slow motion during the game or if that was merely a cinematic trick to highlight one of the car crashes. There was quite a bit of action in the short clip, so we look forward to being able to get our hands on it as soon as we possibly can to see how this game has finally come together.

Though we're not certain that the game will be playable here at the show, the last frame of the trailer had the text "Available at launch" across the bottom, and since we now know that date to be November 17, we're expecting to see much more of this game soon.