Imagine the look on my face when I found the CR Tekken pachinko (CR鉄拳) released as an ipad/iphone game on the Japanese appstore. Finally, no need to sit through hour long youtube videos of people playing the pachinko anymore, just to get a shaky-cam glimpse at some never-to-be-seen-live-in-the-west Nina goodness.
This is by no means a review of the app since I can neither read what any of the menus, buttons or commands say nor can I follow the story bits depicted on the screen while playing. Add to this that I have never in my life played an actual pachinko machine and it's pretty safe to say I have absolutely no idea what's going on here. Oddly enough, the game still is strangely addictive. What I know is that the player is supposed to turn the handle in the lower right of the machine to fine tune the strength with which those little metal balls are shot through the machine, aiming for specific spots, all the while events are triggered on the screen with some of them requiring you to push the button in the lower left at certain times to achieve certain things. The rest totally escapes me. What that huge analogue stick thing in the lower center of the machine is, I don't know. What any of the stats at the top mean (other than time played), no clue. How to influence the outcome of any of the video events, I have no idea. There's one of Nina and Anna battling it out going from gun to knife to gun to rocket launcher to sword (!) in a nicely choreographed fight scene. Nina is supposed to win here (as you can see in the video below), but I have no idea what's going on or which button to press for how many times, and I miserably fail each time, so Anna always comes out on top, much to my consternation. I know I have readers from Japan; help me out here please :-)
Helpful blondebomb reader and fellow Williams fan sccatke kindly pointed me towards pachi-tekken.jp that has 2 of Nina's CR Tekken video sequences. Cheers mate!
CR Tekken is available (only) on the Japanese appstore for 1500,- Yen.
OM NOM NOM
ReplyDeleteGod, these shots and vid-clips look gorgeous. I don't know what kind of money Bitsy or Fields have that they can throw it around on material this good purely as a time-waster on, essentially, a slot machine, but I'm so glad they did. Other points:
- I wouldn't call this the best fight choreography I've seen in a Tekken cutscene, but I love that the Nina/Anna duel isn't just punching and kicking, what with all the weapons being pulled out of seemingly nowhere, Anna using one of her own G-Corp guys as a human shield (mean!), Nina countering an RPG by just shooting the warhead in mid-flight until it explodes which is delightfully mad...it's imaginative and fully in-character for these two.
- The character models and environments look fantastic, though I kinda already suspected as much.
- Battle damage! Okay, it's kind of absurd that Anna could snip the 'ring' off Nina's top without, y'know...slicing her boobs off too...but I love the cheesy sense of drama we get from this, and from the 'good/winner' ending.
- So Anna's dead now? Is this canon? I mean, I guess most Tekken fighters have survived Yoshimitsu dicing them up for years, but Nina's a lot less merciful than that guy. Or maybe Nina just tore up Anna's dress to get back at her for the aforementioned ring, and Anna fainted because she's a wuss/that ensemble was EXPENSIVE, DARLING.
- The anime sequence doesn't have much to talk about, but I will say I approve of this rendition of Nina far more than I did the one from Tekken: The Motion Picture. The hair being smoother helps, as does the clearer, 'smaller' facial features. It just looks more specifically like Nina and not just a generic female wearing Nina's clothes.
HaHa yeah, the Nina - Anna fight is very "Japanese". These Pachinko producers seem to have a thing for blondes and swords, there's a Tekken pachislot (鉄拳3rd by Yamasa) that also has a scene of Nina wielding a sword. Namco should take note and have the sisters guest star in a Soul Calibur game.
DeleteBtw, I just extracted and unpacked the games' files and found a great video demultiplexer for Criwares UMD code. There are so many Nina/Anna scenes in CR Tekken... when I'm done going through each of the scenes, I'll put a compilation together. They've really done Nina justice in the game, she looks even better in the scenes fighting alongside Jin.
I'll await your findings with much excited gibbering. :)
DeleteAlso, do you have any links for YouTube/etc. vids for 鉄拳3rd? I don't think I'm familiar with that one.
Can't direct link, since the site is running on flash, but if you go to the official site http://www1.yamasa.co.jp/tk3/ you can select different events from the menu on the left, an overview will open and you'll find a video demoing these events on the top right, next to the red plus sign. There' one with Nina and Jin in a tag team battle against Chreddy and one of the videos also has the scene of Nina holding a sword and shooting the camera. I have also seen one of Nina sitting outside a cafe, standing up and turning towards the camera and blowing a kiss lol. The usual pachinko madness/awesomeness :-D
DeleteAh...okay, I had seen some of this one too, but got confused and figured it was just alternate footage from CR. It's odd that there'd be 2 Tekken pachinkos from 2 different developers made close enough together that they'd both be drawing from TTT2/T6.
DeleteI think I prefer CR's more story-ending approach to its videos, but I like that 3rd takes the game engine models and animations and does something new with them, like how the brief bit of Nina fighting Christie uses regular fight animations but adds in the dramatic crash zoom when Nina uf+2's Christie out the way, or when it's Nina and Jin wiping out a full squad of guys one after another.
I think that's because CR is a pachinko and 3rd is a pachislot, so they don't cannibalize each other.
DeleteNina is much more heavily featured in CR it seems, but I haven't seen enough of 3rd yet to be sure.
3rd is also available on the appstore, so I should be able to extract some videos from the files. Though it seems to be a smaller (+free) demo version with really bad res videos. There's a full app for Yamasa's Tekken2nd (also for 1500Y), if that one has some good Nina footage I'll buy that and see if I can find something there.
I'm so glad these companies release their pachi stuff on ios, otherwise we wouldn't get a chance to see some of these videos. With all this extra footage and the seemingly high production values these pachi machines are really quite something.
I watched all 1000+ video files of CR. Eh. The videos run beautifully (not at very high resolution since it's optimized for mobile devices, but it's direct feed so it's much better than any of the videos on youtube) Only problem I'm having is with the hca sound files.
When you say 'Eh' do you mean the videos aren't very good? Or is there just an abundance of Xiaoyu and Paris Hilton buggery?
DeleteDon't get me started. Luckily all the Parislol stuff is relegated to an extra (event-)section of the game, where our 3 yuri superstars dance around and play dress up as anime underagers.
DeleteThere are some high production quality CG scenes featuring Xiaoyu and Asuka, but each of those features just one of them paired with either Jin or Devil, so they are surprisingly serious in tone.
Lili fans only get a pre-school version of their superhero in shitty animated short movies and Bitsy/Fields don't waste much time on her. In that regard, they're doing much better than Namco.
Awesome fight
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0DO8EP4ZAE
Pretty awesome, yes.
DeleteI'll put this one and the other version (with Anna winning) up on youtube soon. Also scenes of Nina lending Jin a hand in a fight against Jack, Lee and Anna.
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DeleteYou can extracted CG video from the game files? Looking forward to view it on full HD version! And hopes more Anna scene^^
DeleteIt's not HD by any means, the videos had to be compressed to fit the mobile app. They're much better than any of the videos out there, though, and since they're direct feed we likely won't get anything better until someone rips the actual arcade and unpacks the video files.
DeleteThere are quite a few Anna scenes, indeed. :-)
Hi,may I ask how do you extracted so much CG scene in Iphone devices?? What software do you use?
ReplyDeleteSure. You need to download the app to your PC via itunes and locate the app file (CR鉄拳 1.0.0.ipa). If you're on PC it's Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Mobile Applications.
DeleteThen you can simply rename "CR鉄拳 1.0.0.ipa" to "CR鉄拳 1.0.0.rar" and unpack its content. Go to Payload/ TKK.app/ and you'll have some additional folders and some compressed cpk files. The CPK files are what you're looking for (TKK_RESOURCE_1.cpk, TKK_RESOURCE_2.cpk, TKK_RESOURCE_3.cpk, TKK_RESOURCE_S_E.cpk).
You will then need to use QuickBMS and run the cpk.bms script (written to decompress Criware video files. Criware is the engine CR Tekken runs on). I can't direct link to the script, but if you google it you'll find it online somewhere, if not, I can send it to you.
After running cpk.bms on the CPK resourse files with QuickBMS you will have all videos (hundreds) extracted and ready to watch. I use VLC media player.
Let me know if you need any help.
I have extracted the zip and get the cpk files...but I have difficult time for using QuickBMS to extract cpk files, can you show me the progress of extracting by using QuickBMS step by step? Thanks in advanced
DeleteMm...I think I success get to open CPK file by QuickBMS after much hard search google working. But one more problem:how to open these white file inside it? For example:The file "00007715_mti_rsb_vs_An" which extracted from TKK_RESOURCE_1.cpk, I tried to rename and make it mp4 extension,but it is still not playing on VLC player...How should I deal with it? Please help...this is seems last step to me for viewing video inside game
DeleteGreat, you did it!
DeleteI'm so sorry, I forgot to mention the final step. The files you get out of the CPK files should have no obvious format and should totally look like the one you mentioned. So you've done everything right. What you need to do now is to convert these files into m2v files with a program called VGMToolbox. I use vesion r930.
Open VGMToolbox. In the small drop down menu to the left select and expand "Misc. Tools", then "Stream Tools" and select Video Demultiplexer. In the main window for Video Demultiplexer choose USM (CRI movie 2) from the Format drop down list in the options menu.
Now you only need to drag&drop the (unknown-format-)video file into the main window of VGMToolbox and the program will automatically convert the file and create an M2V file in the same folder you have the original file stored. It's that simple. VLC media player will play that file.
The resulting file will have no sound, though. I'm still working on converting the separate sound streams.
Hope this helps. If you managed to do everything so far, this last step will be no problem for you. Glad I could help.
btw, are you from Japan?
"00007715_mti_rsb_vs_An" will be converted to "00007715_mti_rsb_vs_An_40534656.m2v" and should be a short video clip of the Jin VS Anna title screen.
DeleteGo through each of the Jin videos, there's a lot of Anna in there. :-)
Thank you so much for the technically way of provided , it is working and get played well on VLC (only) ,finally ！ It was really a complicate and headache way to open game files,you are genius ! Now I can enjoy Anna's action scene frame by frame^^
DeleteI am from Malaysia and this is one of my favorite Nina fan website .Looking forward for your continually great working on Nina informaton (along... with Anna) ! ^^ It is sad for Anna always overshadows by Nina and no one really take her seriously<.>
DeleteMay I ask how to open HCA file in TKK_RESOURCE_S_E.cpk , the VGM toolbox seems can't convert it io M2V files。。。
DeleteThe HCA files can't be converted to M2V because they aren't video file. They should be the audio to the video files in the CPK's.
DeleteGood to hear it worked well for you, I'm glad I could help.
Anna is the underdog, yes, but a lot of people really like her. To me it seems like she's one of the few characters in video games who can be overtly sexy and lewd and still be taken seriously by most of the players. I like her, and when I'm bad mouthing her it's only that I sometimes get frustrated with Namco focusing too much on the sibling rivalry. The way they have Nina working for the Zaibatsu and Anna for G-Corp is a brilliant way to give both of them a purpose in the bigger picture but still have them face of against each other from time to time, though.
Thanks alot for your kind words!
Can you put more Screenshots on there win Nina Wins? I don't want to see Nina die...
ReplyDeleteI will put the video for the CR Tekken CG scenes up soon, it will have the version where Nina beats Anna. It's much more spectatcular than when Anna wins because it's the ending the players see when they succesfully complete this scenario in the pachinko game. :-)
DeleteRespect and I have a neat present: Who Repairs House Foundations house repair quotation
ReplyDelete