E3 2001 Hands-on: Kameo

Rare's upcoming GameCube adventure game seems to blend elements of the popular creature-collection games and the types of third-person adventure games that the Twycross studio is popular for. The game casts you as Kameo, a fairy princess on a quest to save elemental spirits from an evil troll king.

The game, essentially, plays out via a third-person perspective, and you control Kameo by means of the analog stick. The c-stick lets you control the camera on the fly, and the effect is superb: Everything moves at a very smooth rate, and the stage we played is wonderfully populated, even at this point. Creatures roam around or else flutter about on wings, and the flora seems to react to wind and light.

Kameo's gameplay mechanics are fairly interesting. The game is built around creature collecting, and the mechanic by which you catch the creatures is very "hands-on." Pressing the X, Y, or B button causes Kameo to draw a magical focus, which she uses to trap enemies. Once it's drawn, you use the stick to aim at it, and you use the A button to fire a bubble, once you have a creature in your sights. If your aim is true and you catch the creature, you then have to bind it; this entails moving the captured creature-in-a-bubble toward the center of a rainbow vortex and hitting the A button again. Doing so was fairly difficult, with some creatures: Seemingly magnetic forces pull the bubble in random directions, and this makes sealing the deal a bit more difficult than you'd think. Once the creature is wholly captured, in any case, you're taken to a status screen, which breaks down its attributes for you. Apparently, the creatures in Kameo evolve: The status screen shows you the next phase in the captured creatures evolution, which usually blesses it with a larger girth and a more vicious aspect.

Ultimately, you'll be able to either transform into the creatures you captured or pit them against others in combat. The level of Kameo we played, however, didn't let us do any of this, instead it just focused on the creature-collection aspects of the game. But other stages were available for play at Nintendo's booth, so we'll bring you impressions of those stages very soon. Keep your eyes on this space for further updates.