Time Crisis: Crisis Zone E3 2004 Preshow Hands-On Impressions

At a recent Namco press event, we briefly went hands-on with Time Crisis: Crisis Zone, the long-awaited PS2 conversion of the classic 1999 arcade light-gun shooter. The home game will contain the entire story campaign from the arcade version plus an entirely new story mode. There is also a collection of "crisis missions," which seem to be one-off stages that you can play through to perfect your technique and unlock new weapons for use in the main game.

So far, Crisis Zone plays just like you'd hope a PS2 light-gun game should. The game makes full use of Namco's own Guncon 2 peripheral, and you'll be able to use two of these if you want to get some double-fisted shooting action. The game uses the same mechanic as the other Time Crisis games: You duck behind cover to reload and avoid enemy fire, and pop up at opportune times to lay waste to your foes. From what we played, the levels have a high degree of interactivity--that is, you can shoot and blow up just about every element of the background that you can see, such as bottles, magazines, and statues.

Crisis Zone will give you three basic weapons--a handgun, a shotgun, and a fully automatic machine gun--to use in the story modes, and as mentioned, performing well in the crisis missions will give you access to even more weapons. We don't know what these other weapons will be right now, so we'll have to wait and see what else Namco has in store for this conversion. We'll bring you more on Time Crisis: Crisis Zone as it develops.