SEGA released its SEGA Astro City Mini Arcade unit to close out its historical 60th anniversary. Today we will be unboxing and giving you my early impressions of the unit, while I work on a full review that should be up on here by Monday! I also got the ‘The Game Center Style Kit’ which adds a fully functioning piggy bank bottom, stool and marquee with stickers.
What have been your guys’ impressions of SEGA Toy’s Astro City Mini unit?
Famitsu published their New Year card messages from 44 Japanese company, which many teased about what will be going on in 2021. One of these companies that let out some information on their 2021 plans was Atlus, which stated:
“13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim received high ratings and numerous awards, as well as surpassed 300,000 total sales in the year since its release.
“In addition to Shin Megami Tensei V and Project Re Fantasy (title tentative), which are in active development, in 2021 we’re also planning a ‘Persona 25th Anniversary’ commemoration project. Please look forward to it!”
I’ve been playing 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim and having a great time, good to see it succeed even though I think it deserves a lot more sales than 300,000. I’m also looking forward to finally getting a real title for Project Re Fantasy and maybe even have it release!
As far as what the ‘Persona 25th Anniversary’ project will be, it will most likely be a Japanese only affair but we shall see.
[Source: Gematsu]
What better way to celebrate Ichiban Kasuga’s birthday than a late review of Yakuza: Like A Dragon? This title is a big entry into the main Yakuza series that isn’t only changing the main character but also a lot of traditional elements of Yakuza games that fans come to expect. Today we dive deep and see if all the changes are worth it!
Even though SEGA has sold a majority of their arcade locations in Japan, the company isn’t going to stop making arcades and they showed that today with the announcement of the ‘GENESIS CREST’. This new arcade unit is being created by SEGA-SAMMY Creations and is a brand new high end arcade cabinet by the company.
“The Genesis Crest cabinet will provide expansive game library and more immersive gaming experience to all kind of players with an ultra high definition 4K monitor on 49 inch and alluring LED lighting effects.”
As far as I can tell, this will have nothing to do with SEGA’s FOG gaming idea. They did say that the machine will have a continuously updating library of games and pointed to this list of games available. Four games. Not a great start especially considering they look like mobile game. Sadly it seems this is one of those machines that is really used to play mobile type games. Something that is popular right now at arcade places. The machine is set to ship out January 2021.
The wait for Persona 5 Strikers is almost over! I know there has been a lot of upset fans that Persona 5 Strikers had been pretty hush, hush on its release in the West. This trailer was actually leaked, so its not ‘OFFICIALLY’ announced yet. Persona 5 Scramble actually came out earlier this year in Japan, in February. That means that it will be 1 year that we get it in the West. Its not that bad of a turn around. The game takes the Dynasty Warriors hack and slash style and combines it with Persona 5‘s great storytelling and characters. Even better? This is suppose to serve as a sequel to the original game.
2020 is so crazy that now Persona is real time combat and Yakuza is a turn based game. Wow.
There was rumors that Koei Tecmo put on their finanical report that they weren’t publishing this title in the West, that’s because its being published by Atlus (aka SEGA basically). As always, I’m super excited to return to the world of Persona 5 and see where this game takes the franchise.
Hey buddy, you like SEGA handheld consoles? Remember the SEGA Nomad? It was a small size SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive that you could take on the game. Yeah, like a Nintendo Switch but in the 90s. Recently SEGA has been celebrating the companies 60th Anniversary and they posted the following video above, a class room type setting going through the history of SEGA hardware. One of the pieces shown off for the first time? The SEGA Venus, which was a prototype that became the SEGA Nomad.
Its interesting to see the early designed console, it looks cool but the color scheme seems to be very different from anything ‘SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive’ related, which went with more ‘black’ slick style, this has a more bronze/grey look. Also seems that this version had more normal looking front facing buttons compared to the final model that hard buttons that sort of reminded me of the launch SEGA Saturn buttons (on the unit itself).
[Via: SEGA-16]
It looks like those SNK Atomiswave arcade ports continue to pour in for the SEGA Dreamcast. It seemed I even missed a few, but I had to come do a post for the release of both Guilty Gear Isuka and Rumble Fish 2! I have seriously been waiting for Rumble Fish 2 since this whole port thing got started.
Guilty Gear Isuka GDI Download | Rumble Fish 2 GDI Download
Its also cool to see other people in the community start porting some of these arcade titles over, even adding little short cuts to get into Time Attack and other options. Is the Atomiswave ports the best thing to happen to the Dreamcast in 2020?
Recently someone hacked Capcom and got terabytes upon terabytes of hidden company data, including the source code to a lot of Capcom games. It looks like the hackers will slow drip information on Capcom games and one of the new updates is some of the games that the company is working on. One of the big ones that most SEGA fans will be into is a ‘Power Stone Remake’ which was slated to release in Q3 2024, so years off.
Here is a list of a ton of other games, apparently being worked on at Capcom:
How do you guys feel that Capcom is already planning on releasing Street Fighter 6, up to 3 times with various DLC before the game is even shown?
[Via: Push Square]
The Atomiswave arcade ports are continuing at such a rapid pace that even your humble blogger, such as myself, is having issues keeping up. You can always check the past released titles by checking out our Atomiswave tag.
This time we have two sweet surprises as we are getting Arc System Works’ Fist of the North Star and the beat ’em up Demolish Fist. Both are really nice looking titles and totally worth checking out.
Demolish Fist GDI | Fist of the North Star GDI
Now we will wait for Rumble Fish 2….
Looks like now that the Sammy/SNK arcade board, Atomiswave, has been figured out and its actually easy to port over titles to Dreamcast, we got a slew of them. Now the latest one is King of Fighters Neowave, which also had a port on PS2 and Xbox back in the day. I never tried the game, but heard it got mixed reviews upon release.
You can download The King of Fighters Neowave GDI here
Expect many more upcoming updates of even more Atomiswave arcade ports, which of course is a good thing.
When MegaVolt85 started porting all those Atomiswave arcade ports to SEGA Dreamcast, there was one game I really wanted. Dolphin Blue, which always gave me this ‘what if Metal Slug met Ecco’ vibe. Now, thanks to efforts of fans like MegaVolt85 , us SEGA fans can now enjoy Dolphin Blue on their SEGA Dreamcast!
You can download the Dolphin Blue GDI Here
The best thing about the Atomiswave arcade ports is there are still a lot of Atomiswave games yet to come, like Rumble Fish 2, Fist of the North Star, and a few Guilty Gear titles.
Here we go, Dreamcast-Talk user MegaVolt85 has blessed us with yet another (I feel like I’ve typed this way too much) Atomiswave arcade port, this time another obscure title: Faster than Speed, an arcade street racing game by Sammy USA from 2004.
Faster than Speed has ‘trick maneuvers’ and ‘Nitro boost’ to beat your opponents. From SEGA’s description back in the day:
“Enter the exciting street-racing world of Faster Than Speed where the winner rules and the loser walks! Hit the street with the most addictive driving experience of your life! Pick from 8 customized rides. Faster Than Speed will take your players into the exotic, dim-lit, back streets of over 6 tracks challenging the quickest, the fastest, the baddest, and the most stocked racer conquers the asphalt! To take down your challenger, you need to burn the street with a variety of high-speed tricks.”
You can download the Faster than Speed GDI Dreamcast Image here.
This is the 6th Atomiswave arcade port we’ve gotten, we also got: Metal Slug 6, King of Fighters XI, Samurai Shodown VI, NeoGeo Battle Coliseum, and Knights of Valour: The Seven Spirits.
If you guys missed the news post about the latest SNK/Sammy Atomiswave arcade ports to Dreamcast, Dreamcast-Talk user Megavolt85 has been porting the titles over. According to him its rather easy and only needs a few lines of code changed to get them working on the SEGA Dreamcast. He has ported over Metal Slug 6, King of Fighters XI, Samurai Shodown VI, and NeoGeo Battle Coliseum. Now, for his fifth title he choose… Knights of Valour: The Seven Spirits? I actually never played the franchise, so I’m interested in trying it.
I do know that the franchise has a ton of entries and this title actually is the fifth release in the franchises history.
You can download the GDI file for the Dreamcast via the Dreamcast-Talk thread. I do know a few of the last few GDI games have gotten CDI (to burn on disc) images as well.
While Kazuma Kiryu is a big, strong Japanese man that has slapped children and even killed a few people. It seems that series Creator and Producer Toshihiro Nagoshi doesn’t want his leading hero in fighting games because, he doesn’t want him hitting women. According to a recent Red Bull France interview:
“We do get this request a lot. Of course there are exceptions, but fighting games generally have female characters, and personally I don’t really want to see Kiryu beating up women.”
Its understandable to feel this way since Kazuma Kiryu is a old school type and wouldn’t make sense for a character like him to assault women. I don’t disagree with him, but fighting games aren’t considered canon or real. Its like, are we really gonna say Mario is out there hitting women and knocking them into a internal abyss when he ring outs them? I think you guys all agree that Kazuma Kiryu joining a game like Tekken 7 or even a new Virtua Fighter won’t ruin his character?
As most of you guys have known, SEGA has been largely effected by Covid-19 this year, so much so that they actually sold 85% shares of their Arcade management business earlier this month. This obviously caused a lot of people to panic and predict that SEGA was going under. Now we have SEGA-Sammy’s new financial report to look at and see how much damage the virus has done to a company like SEGA.
I’ll try to point out interesting things that I find in the report below: