This morning in Konami's booth a new company by the name of Loose Cannon demoed their first title. The game, Zephyr: Rise of the Elementals, is a multiplatform title that is being designed with the Wii as the core platform.

Players started the demo as Zephyr, a Wind Elemental that has the ability to transform into a tornado. His goal is initially quite simple: destroy everything.

By moving around with the Nunchuk, I was able to destroy anything small enough that I crossed over. As I destroyed more and more items and buildings I slowly started to grow, similarly to the ball in Katamari Damacy. This naturally allowed me to destroy bigger and bigger constructs.

Moving around the environment felt smooth and natural. Graphically the game was fairly unimpressive, with a lot of very basic textures and geometry. Additionally, as items were picked up, they were deconstructed into sprite based versions of their former three dimensional selves, likely to avoid system strain. The effect was fairly seemless and wasn't terrible-looking; however, it certainly made the mass destruction much less impressive. Both Zephyr's character and tornado models were unimpressive, lacking any sort of visual flair.

I noticed what seemed to be small framerate hiccups at random points in the demo. I didn't ask if they were intentional pauses after something I hadn't noticed had happened, so it's hard to say if there were any definitive framerate issues.

The Loose Cannon developer present also showed a couple of extra levels that featured some more advanced gameplay involving collection of fire enemies to create combo chains, as well as a boss battle. He also hinted that there were going to be other moves such as dashing and smashing, but I did not play anything other than the simple pick-up-and-play introductory level.

From what I could tell, fans of Katamari will likely be interested in the title, but the lack of visual appeal and catchy music may put a damper on the experience. Aside from some waggle control, the Wii version offered nothing different from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game. Players with access to either of those systems should be much more excited for those versions of the game as they look much better.