Swingin’ Report Show #40: Aliens Gone Wild

This week on the show George and Barry the Nomad sit down with the Sonic Talk duo Nuckles87 and Shigs. Listen to us talk about the new SEGA laptops, whine about Aliens: Colonial Marines and criticize the Playstation 4 announcement. Like every podcast, you can’t get us to shut up about Shenmue.

[MP3 Download] [Archive]

Amazon has a PC sale going on, download Binary Domain today for only $5

Farewellfeb
Hey, you got $5 bucks and a capable PC? Well, why not pick up Binary Domain? We here at SEGAbits loved the game, check out our review. It even redeems on Steam, so no worries there. What else is on sale for SEGA? Let’s have a look.

Not as much as I would have liked. But it is still quite a nice selection. Though having a nice sell on SEGA & Sonic All-Stars Transformed would have been really awesome. You can check out over 800 games being discount over at Amazon now. Have fun!

SEGA Saturn game designer Kenji Eno died yesterday

800px-KenjiEnoJI2
Kenji Eno was always very anti-Sony and pro-SEGA back in the day. So much so that his franchises turned out to be exclusive and the man would go on a media rampage to put down Sony when he could. He is known for his horror SEGA Saturn titles like Enemy Zero and D (which later got a sequel on Dreamcast).

“I felt betrayed when Sony was treating me like that, so when I heard that the Sega vice president was a very interesting guy, he and I met and created this whole plot. My original conditions to make the game exclusive for Saturn involved my earlier story about supplying 1,000 Saturns for the blind people, and also to have Sega’s president appear onstage, personally, for the event. That was the original plot, and that was what was going to happen until the last minute, but he had a board meeting at Sega, and they were like, “OK, you’re actually appearing?” Like, Sega is a big, successful company, and a high-up management-level guy in that kind of company appearing in a situation like that isn’t good, so everybody stopped him. So he appeared in a video rather than in person.” – Kenji Eno tells 1up in a exclusive interview back in 2008.

Cause of death is said to be heart failure brought on by hypertension. Its funny how ahead of his time he was, one of his conditions to make his games exclusive to Saturn was for SEGA to give a 1,000 Saturn’s to blind people. He even created a game for them called ‘Real Sounds: Kaze No Regret‘ for the Saturn that was later re-released on Dreamcast.

Binary Domain on steam gets update with support for Big Picture Mode and more

tumblr_m7sjz5uqvh1qmzsn0o1_1280
SEGA’s port for Binary Domain isn’t exactly good, so I was thrilled to find out that there was a small 5.5mb update. Sadly I knew it couldn’t fix all port’s problem and I was right.

Fixes: Updated launcher featuring gamepad navigation in Steam Big Picture mode.Fixed issues launching the game on Optimus graphics cards.

Seems there will be another update soon, because…

Known issues: Custom configurations for some DirectInput pads may not save correctly. This will be fixed in an update soon.

Come on SEGA, release worthy updates to your PC stuff and more people will trust your ports!

SEGA among 3rd party publishers to support Playstation 4

ps43rdpartydevelopers-555x308

Even though SEGA wasn’t at the event with a game to show off, it is confirmed that they are working on Playstation 4 content. Whatever those games are, I’m excited. Then again it’s to be expected, SEGA supports all major consoles.

But want to see something not expected? How about Kazuma Kiryu at Sony’s press conference  He was there for a brief moment, hit the jump to see the screenshot.

Aliens: Colonial Marines enters the UK at #1 on the charts


Say what you want about Aliens: Colonial Marines, just to allow some people from the UK to overhear you. Aliens: Colonial Marines debuted at number one in the UK charts, beating out Dead Space 3. This is one of the rare moments that SEGA gets number one on charts, I just wish it was a game that was actually good or that I wanted to see more of. Like Binary Domain or Rhythm Thief.

This isn’t surprising since Aliens vs Predator (the SEGA published one) also did really well. Actually it did better than this one and is the most successful Aliens game in UK history. Now imagine if SEGA released an actual triple A Aliens game? Well, might happen since Creative Assembly (Total War franchise) has been working on an Aliens game for awhile. Hit the jump to see the UK charts ending on February 16th.

Updated: SEGA employee takes to Reddit, says SEGA’s money funded the Borderlands franchise

Randy_Pitchford_Gearbox_Software

EDIT: Aki-at has corrected us, the employee on reddit worked at SEGA, not Gearbox. Though what he says sounds about the same as the Gearbox employee that took to Reddit a few days ago. 

We had a post a few days ago about a Gearbox Worker spilling his guts on the development of Aliens: Colonial Marines. Now we have another one and this time, he is verified. Meaning he sent proper verification that he works at Gearbox Software to the moderators. So what did he say that was interesting?

“Gearbox didnt care about the game, they spent the money from acm on the borderlands games. Look at the release of borderlands and when aliens was anounced, they had the other companies like timegate do the work. When they got the game back timegate had done a terrible job. When it came into sega it was shit basicaly. Gearbox only cared about fixing ‘progression blockers’ (things that stop a player from getting through a level) or crashes” – soetester

The first and easiest is that all that money SEGA pumped through them was actually used to develop Borderlands. Do I see a lawsuit coming? Well, I think something happen since if you go to the Reddit page, his account was deleted. No worries, screenshot of his answers after the break.

SEGA’s Code of Joker gameplay footage recorded at JAEPO 2013


There was a lot of excitement about Code of Joker when little was known. Many users wanted it to be a new console game that would come out in the west. In the end it turned out to be a digital card arcade game that will probably only come out in Japan. Doesn’t mean we can’t see what it plays like. SEGA showed off the game at JAEPO 2013, here is someone playing it at the event.

I know that SEGA has done other digital card arcade games and they have done well, I just don’t know why they always have to change the IP every few years. Maybe Japanese people are attracted to new IPs?

Speed Run: Fan beats Golden Axe in 9 minutes and 27 seconds

Do you like speed runs? Do you like SEGA games? You will love this speed run of the SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive version of Golden Axe by  Jason ‘honorableJay’ Feeney. I’m a bit confused as to why it is picking up attention now, since he completed the deed last year. Regardless, I haven’t seen it and it brings a nostalgia factor.

What is your favorite speed run of a SEGA game? How fast can you beat Golden Axe?

Aliens: Colonial Marines mods add DirectX 10 lighting effects, sharper texture filtering and much more

ACM_2013-02-13_20-04-19-11
The PC community is great, always striving to make their games look better even if the developers are incompetent.  Right now there are two mod packs that are making this game look ‘less crap’ than it did before. The first one is the DirectX 10 mod packs that add some better lighting effects and soften those shadows. The SweetFX mod gives you a sharper texture filter, deeper color saturation and stronger shadows.

Sadly, the game will still suck. But at least it will be prettier to look at it sucking now.

 

Hatsune Miku Project DIVA Arcade is being tested in a Los Angeles shopping center

sXPBP2E

This isn’t the first time that SEGA Japan (which seems to be the one doing the testing) has teased their Hatsune Miku games to American audiences. This last E3, they had Hatsune Miku Project Diva f for display at Sony’s booth. Sadly the game never was localized.

Seems this time around that SEGA is testing to see if there is an interest in Hatsune Miku Project DIVA Arcade, which is being tested right now through March 18th in the Puente Hills Mall. The game has an online pass fee thing, which you get free for doing a survey. It costs four credits to play.

Ecco the Dolphin fan soundtrack up for download

Ecco
ECCOS was shown last year,  creator Andrew Norman Wilson took gameplay footage of the SEGA Genesis game and modified the music in Final Cut Pro. He changed the speed and added echo effects, making it a very different beast from the original soundtrack. Andrew calls it “Furniture music”, not mean’t to be on its own but serve as background noise.

Now Andrew has released the ECCOS soundtrack, you can download seven-tracks, 48-minutes of furniture music. If you are interested in seeing his art project, called ‘Center for Wave Change’, check it out here.

Download:
SoundCloud | MediaFire

Gearbox developer takes to Reddit to shed light on Aliens: Colonial Marines let down

400d373062e065e430f1862f39f919dfc7f06bf9.jpeg__939x820_q85

The developer on Reddit basically confirms that Gearbox didn’t have too much to do with Aliens: Colonial Marines due to the fact that the developer was doing Borderlands 2. They basically got TimeGate to do most of the single player campaign due to this. In my opinion, Gearbox and SEGA should never work again. This game was in the works for 6 years and Gearbox couldn’t give less of a shit about it, it seems. Pecan = code name for Aliens: Colonial Marines.

“Additionally, campaign (which was being developed by TimeGate) was extremely far behind, even as Pecan’s Beta deadline got closer and closer. In April or May (can’t remember which), Pecan was supposed to hit beta, but GBX instead came to an agreement with SEGA that they would push the release date back one more time, buying GBX around 9 mos extension.

Considering that SEGA was pretty close to taking legal action against GBX, asking for an extension wasn’t an option, and so Pecan crash-landed through certification and shipping. Features that were planned were oversimplified, or shoved in (a good example of this are challenges, which are in an incredibly illogical order). Issues that didn’t cause 100% blockers were generally ignored, with the exception of absolutely horrible problems. This isn’t because GBX didn’t care, mind you. At a certain point, they couldn’t risk changing ANYTHING that might cause them to fail certification or break some other system. And so, the product you see is what you get.”

You can read more over at Reddit, even ask the guy some of your questions.