New PS3 titles demoed in Japan

As well as talking at length about PlayStation 3 and PSP at its annual "PlayStation Meeting" event in Japan this week, Sony took the opportunity to wheel out more developers to talk about and show off their work on its next-generation format, and a selection of details and trailers have started appearing on the Internet as a result.

From Software has shown off a new mech title called Project Force, which will be its first next-generation PS3 title, and apparently runs at 1920x1080 resolution. There's a trailer on IGN, whose correspondent remarked that it "appeared to be fully real time".

Also on display was a now real-time demo of Bandai's Mobile Suit Gundam title, developed by Beck. Bandai admitted that its E3 demo that had so impressed had not been running on PS3, despite the implication at the time, but was a pre-rendered mock-up designed to the PS3 spec. Its PlayStation Meeting demo, which showed an early build of the game using a fraction of the Cell chip's power, was apparently created without the use of any middleware, and again there are videos online.

Other games shown off at the event included a new Koei title. The demonstration of this worked much as the hugely impressive Unreal Engine 3 demo did at E3, with the developer pausing the clip and moving the camera around the world. Characters are said to use an immense 1.5 million polygons each.

There was also a clip of Korean company Webzen's Endless Saga title, word that Factor 5, known to be capable of leading the way technically on new consoles after it put in a strong performance with Rogue Leader on the GameCube, is working on a title called Lair, and perhaps most interestingly of all, the sight of a new Genji title for PS3 from Game Republic. The first Genji is due out on PS2 soon. The sequel should be even more spectacular.

Expect to hear more on these titles and those announced at E3 in the coming months as we draw closer to the PlayStation 3's launch period - currently estimated spring 2006.