We have a blamtastic podcast for you this week. Me (George), -nSEGA- (Ben) and SEGA Source writer Sanus (Cory) go super off topic. We tip our hats to hippos and Capcom. We also talk about the manly Golden Axe franchise, new Sonic Generations information and much more. Listen, we don’t bite.
With the release of Captain America: Super Soldier, SEGA will be bringing a close to the licensing deal that they started with Marvel several years ago. So after four tie-ins with Marvel Entertainment, has SEGA improved in the quality of their licensed output? Read on to find out in my extensive review on the last game in their Marvel movie tie-in, Captain America: Super Soldier.
I make it no secret that I am a big time Dreamcast fan. It is the SEGA console I own the most games for (around 120 last time I counted) and every September 9th I take the day off from work to host a nine hour Dreamcast marathon. There are many reasons why I love the console, but the number one would have to be the exclusives. Jet Set Radio, Shenmue and Crazy Taxi 2 are fantastic games and have yet to appear on any other console, and I’m totally cool with that. It’s a perfect reason for my Dreamcast to remain hooked up next to my current generation consoles.
But as time goes on, SEGA has been porting more and more Dreamcast classics to other consoles. Great for the gaming community, bad for the Dreamcast. Less exclusives mean less of a reason for gamers to pick up a used console. I know it sounds like I’m being overly dramatic, however this past May I did witness a kid turning down the purchase of a Dreamcast due to SEGA’s recently released Dreamcast Collection. As such, I thought I’d share five lesser known Dreamcast games that remain exclusive to the console and show no sign of receiving a rerelease. If you want these, you need a Dreamcast.
SEGA’s lovable arcade franchise returns, this time with the original series creators behind the development. Many fans have been asking how much new things the team could bring to the table, after already having 2 Virtua Tennis releases on HD consoles this generation. Well, let’s crack open this review and see how the game stacks.
Check out our review cards. These cards will now go on the bottom of our reviews to display scores. I hope you guys like the art. The artwork for the Amigo heads was done by our forum member, Radrappy. Thanks for submitting!
As for the design of the card, that credit goes to our lovely staff member, Barry The Nomad. Tell us what you think! See the rest after the break.
SEGA has a massive stable of iconic characters. From the normal (Ryo Hazuki) to the bizarre (ToeJam and Earl) and everything in-between. But what about the characters you never see? They’re just as iconic, yet they have never had a face to put to the voice. In this week’s five, we will be shining the spotlight on the best unseen SEGA characters. The characters who can define a game without the need for a visit to SEGA’s character design department.
Clockwork Knight and Clockwork Knight 2 were both games that were released early on in the Saturn’s life. Since the Saturn didn’t make too big of a splash, these games aren’t well known to most mainstream gamers and that is a shame.
So what is Clockwork Knight and why does it deserve a new entry? Well, hit the jump and find out.
This week on the podcast you have me (George), nSEGA and Shigs talking about a variety of SEGA topics. We talk about SEGA signing a distribution deal with EA, rumored Sonic related games in the works and go off topic (quite a bit). A big theme of the podcast is the NiGHTS franchise, which turns 15 years old this week.
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SEGA has had some highly rated games released on the PSP, sadly mostly everyone outside of Japan has decided to ignore the platform. Sony recently announced the ‘PSP Remasters’ series. Games from PSP ported over and enhanced on the Playstation 3.
One of the first games to get this treatment has been Monster Hunter Freedom 3, which looks great. I decided to put together 5 games that deserve the PSP Remasters treatment.
When we launched SEGAbits last year, one thing I wanted was to link the forums with the front page comments. There was a bit of an issue with this, we needed a plugin to get this work done. There was one out there and it was called WP United. The issue with this plugin was that it was buggy, the guy that created said that he would be fixing it in the near future and release a new version. Last update? 10 months ago.
This plugin stopped us from adding other plugins to wordpress or even updating it to the most secure version. I have been in talks with our site admin, Shadiwulf to get rid of the plugin. One of our writers members accidentally updated wordpress recently and resulted in a broken site. This meant that we had to get rid of the plugin sooner than I wanted.
So what are some changes?
This week we have a special sexy Sonic edition podcast. He is turning 20 and we are celebrating in style. Graham (from SEGA Nerds) and Shigs both join me to discuss Summer of Sonic, VMUs and much more. Listen this week for a chance to win a Sonic Boom shirt! Sadly, the Jewish man known as Nuckles87 who travels all the time couldn’t make it in time for this podcast to talk about his experience at Summer of Sonic.
Next to the games, perhaps my most favorite Sonic thing of the 1990’s was the cartoon series Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog (AoStH). While Saturday morning’s Sonic the Hedgehog (Sonic SatAM) had stronger plots and more polished animation, AoStH was just too damn fun to be deemed the lesser cartoon. To me, AoStH was a much better adaptation of the games, and when I say games I mean the only two that were released by that time: Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Every episode featured Sonic and Tails playing cat and mouse with Robotnik and his gang of badniks, just like in the Genesis games. Even better, the show kicked off with an awesome mix of the original Sonic theme song, “Flight of the Bumblebee” and “In the Hall of the Mountain King”.
While I was satisfied with this amount of video game fan service, every so often an episode would air that would give the video game fans a little bonus. Something that would make us sit up and pay a bit more attention. Sonic might traverse through a zone from Sonic 1 (gasp!) or Robotnik might make reference to a Chaos Emerald (Hey, I know those!). In celebration of Sonic’s 20th, and my favorite 90’s cartoon series, I present five game inspired episodes of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog!
For Episode 23, I thought I’d go back to in-house SEGA: a fan favorite, and one of the many greats to come from the Dreamcast era. Of course, you can see from the picture that I’ve picked Skies of Arcadia. As an RPG it was, in many ways, as traditional as they get. It had turn-based combat, it had a lack of voice overs, it had chirpy characters, and it had a bright and colorful world much more reminiscent of Japanese RPGs out of the old days than the much darker turn they took with the likes of Final Fantasy VI and VII. That said, Skies of Arcadia also took place in a world in the sky, a truly incredible setting which remains one of the most impressive worlds created for a Japanese RPG that I’ve ever experienced.
In his 20 years of existence, Sonic has not only appeared in dozens of games, but he has also introduced a ton of irregularities. The irregularities I’m referring to are the things that exist within his video games that support the gameplay and the player playing the game, yet don’t make a whole lot of sense within the context of the world within the game. For example, it’s a ton of fun to run through a twirling highway in Sonic Adventure, but why in the world would such a highway even exist? Or what about all those springs and item boxes? Surely Eggman didn’t put them there, because they assist Sonic. So just how and why do elements like that exist in Sonic’s world? In this week’s weekly five, I’m going to attempt to explain five oddities of Sonic’s world. Most of my explanations will probably be complete bullshit, but that’s the fun of over-thinking!
This week, George, Ben (-nSega54-), Aki, and Cory (Sega Uranus) sit down and chat about SEGA being hacked, the latest Rise of Nightmares and Binary Domain trailers, the new SEGA PlayStation Vita team, and much more. Oh, we also babble about Vectorman. You like Vectorman, right?
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