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Sonic Lost World and Mario & Sonic 2014 announced – Wii U and 3DS exclusives

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During today’s Nintendo Direct, the latest Sonic title was announced: Sonic Lost World. Iwata stated that Nintendo and SEGA have entered into a “worldwide partnership in the Sonic franchise”, and as such, Sonic Lost World will be exclusive to Wii U and 3DS owners. No date was revealed, but November is a safe bet.

Update: It was also announced that another title in the Mario & Sonic Olympic Games series is in the works. Check out a video after the break.

Update 2: The Japanese SEGA site is up, and while it doesn’t offer much, it does confirm a Fall 2013 release date as well as the title being styled as Sonic Lost World.

Update 3: According to The Wall Street Journal SEGA and Nintendo have entered an exclusivity agreement, stating that the next three Sonic titles will be Nintendo exclusives:

SEGA(R) of America Inc. and SEGA(R) Europe Ltd. today announced details of an exclusive partnership with Nintendo of America Inc. and Nintendo of Europe GmbH for the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. The new agreement will make Nintendo consoles the number one destination for Sonic gaming over the next three titles with more details of the individual games being revealed in the coming weeks.

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Fan crams a Gameboy SP into his Game Gear

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Yep, sounds like a very sexual title. YouTube user ModGyver decided to unite both consoles by ripping out the insides of his GameBoy SP and putting the insides into his Game Gear shell.

Now you have the luxury of playing Gunstar Super Heroes and not feel like you betrayed your true blue heritage.

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Sega trademarks “Sonic Lost World(s)”

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Deefy on our forums has done some sluthin’ and found out that Sega of Japan has registered the trademark “Sonic Lost World”. Meanwhile, TSSZ discovered that Sega of Europe has registered the domain soniclostworlds.com. So which is it? Lost World or Lost Worlds? Is this a new, Next gen game? An iOS mobile title? A new chapter in the Storybook series? With E3 right around the corner, we should hear more about this title very soon.

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Sonic the Hedgehog remastered on iOS and Android releasing NOW – new features revealed!

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Via our broniks at Sonic Retro comes news that Taxman and Stealth’s remastering of Sonic the Hedgehog is releasing to iOS today and tomorrow! While some fans have bemoaned the fact that its the same game we’ve seen released again and again, Sonic the Hedgehog remastered has more than enough goodies to warrant a purchase. The game offers up Time Attack modes, remastered music, spin dash feature, slightly updated boss patterns, smoother motion in the Special Stages, and… unlockable characters! We’ll give you a hint as to who they are: one is red and the other is orange. Given Taxman’s work on Sonic CD, there are surely more surprises to be had, but we won’t know of them until the game arrives. Owners of the original Sonic the Hedgehog iOS App will receive the game as a free update. Android owners take note, according to Taxman on the Sonic Retro Forums: “Thursday 16th PST for Android, US & Canada so you’ll have to wait a bit longer sorry.”

After the break, sweet screens of the game and the cool new menus.

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Project X Zone crossover contest – Mash up Namco, Sega, & Capcom characters

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Capcom-Unity in collabration with Namco Bandai Games and SEGA West are hosting a fan art contest for Project X Zone, which is set be released on June 25 in the US and July in Europe, to have your favorite Capcom character dressed as another character from Namco or SEGA. Will someone draw Jin from Cyberbots in Ogami Ichiro’s outfit from Sakura Wars, Frank in Bruno Dillenger’s attire from Die Hard Arcade (Dynamite Deka in Japan), or go all out drawing Felicia with Sonic the Hedgehog’s gloves and shoes? The possibities are endless! The contest runs from today through Friday May 31, 9pm PST and Capcom-Unity will pick up to 3 winners for the limited edition of Project X Zone. There’s also another contest if anyone is attending MCM Expo this year for cosplaying as one of the cover characters in Project X Zone.

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SEGA’s stock reaches six-and-a-half year high

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For much of the last 6 years, SEGA’s stock price has been known as a “penny stock”, or a stock traded below five dollars a share. In recent months, however, this has begun to change. The stock price has been soaring, finishing on a new fifty-two week high every week, if not every few days. Today, SEGA’s stock price has reached its highest point in six and a half years, closing at exactly $7.

Now, keep in mind that a stock price typically says very little about a company’s health. From my very limited experience, I find it says more about investor confidence then anything else, not just in a company but in the stock market in general. Nevertheless, I’m sure SEGA’s recent fiscal report, an improved forecast and promises to pay out dividends have not hurt their stock price’s speedy rise. It should be interesting to see where it goes from here.

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Sega Amusements kicks off “Meet Team Sega” interview series – first up: UK Sales Manager Phil Mander

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While most SEGA fans, myself included, spend much of their time focusing on the home console releases, it’s important to remember that another important side of SEGA exists: the arcade developer and distributor Sega Amusements. That’s right, SEGA is still producing physical hardware! You just have to leave your home to experience it. Over in the SEGAbits forums, we’ve been lamenting the fact that SEGA.com (home of the home console and home/handheld games of things) has done a poor job of directing fans to SEGAarcade.com (home of Sega Amusements). While SEGA has over a million Facebook likes and over 500,000 Twitter followers, Sega Amusements has only 10,000 Facebook likes and a mere 700 Twitter followers. You’d think that SEGA’s arcade division, which predates the home console and games side of SEGA by nearly four decades, would have more love! It would be fantastic if SEGA.com allowed Sega Amusements to make the occasional blog post announcing a new arcade game or a look back at a SEGA arcade classic, or SEGA dedicated a week to directing fans and followers to also like their sister site Sega Amusements on Facebook and Twitter. Share the love.

Rant over, now onto the point of this article. Despite these missteps, Sega Amusements have done a great job on their own increasing their social network presence by way of sharing archival arcade adverts, holding contests and, most recently, starting up their own features by way of a brand new interview series on their own site entitled “Meet Team Sega”. Each entry will profile a member of the Sega Amusements team, and first up is UK Sales Manager Phil Mander. Head on over to the interview and check it out and make sure to like, share, follow, and tweet Sega Amusements to show your support!

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SEGA testing their Transformers arcade game in China

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Wait, SEGA has the license to make Transformers arcade games? That is new to me. SEGA’s Chinese studios will be creating this title, they have made other arcade titles like SEGA Golden Gun and K.O. Drive. Now the team is ready to start testing their next arcade title, Transformers: Human Alliance. Seeing as how Transformers is now a huge brand again, with those Micheal Bay movies, I would not be shocked if they do bring over this arcade title later in the year (and neither is the guys over at Arcade  Heroes).

Not too much information is available about the game yet, but it seems to be a shooting game where humans fight along with autobots to save planet earth. Could this be a light-gun game? Third person shooter? I guess we will see when footage starts hitting the internet.

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UPDATE: SEGA Pluto Auction Ends at $15,500, Still Not Enough

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[UPDATE – 12th May, 2013:] The saga continues!  Vega has responded via Twitter to the utter disbelief of the price being rejected. According to him, the highest bidder got cold feet and backed out of the deal after it ended. A user on Reddit by the name of lordloss has uploaded a photo of a second chance offer from Vega to purchase the machine for $11,000. We’ll update as the Pluto’s saga continues to unfold. What a roller coaster!

After nine days on the auction block, the auction for a rare SEGA Pluto prototype unit amassed $15,500 over 89 bids, but no exchange will be declared as the auction failed to once again meet its reserve price.

This comes after the initial auction garnered only $7,600 and claims from owner Roger “kidvid666” Vega that he picked up the unit for only a dollar. Looks like 15,500 times profit isn’t quite enough to get yourself a SEGA Pluto prototype unit from him.

At this point, we don’t know if it’s straight up greed or if he wants people to start donating organs/first born children. But chances are, if this system is to join any game collection, it’ll take more than $16,000 at least to possibly make it happen.

Start saving.

[Image courtesy of Roger Vega]

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Sega’s big weekend sale on mobile games

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Hey! Hey! Hey! It’s time to save some CRAZY money!

Sega is having a big sale on some of it’s most recent mobile games. Crazy Taxi (with the original Offspring music back in) has a $4 drop to 99 cents. After Burner Climax is also 99 cents while the brand new House of the Dead Overkill: The Lost Reels is down to $2.99 from it’s $4.99 price tag. Both HOTD and After Burner are available on iOS and Android while Crazy Taxi is iOS only. Better hurry, the sale is good for this weekend only.

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Sega Sammy sees fiscal net profit, Aliens shipped 1.3M, All-Stars Racing shipped 1.36M

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Via Joystiq a bit of good news for SEGA fans, and even better news for SEGA parent company Sega Sammy Holdings. Sega Sammy revealed their financial results for the fiscal year ending March 31st, 2013, making note of a net profit of ¥33.5 billion ($331 million), an annual growth of 53.3 percent. However, Sega Sammy’s operating profit decreased year-on-year by 67.3 percent, down to ¥19.1 billion ($189 million). A large part of the net profit was through the sales of “investment securities” and transfers of employees’ pension benefits. Fun stuff.

Sega Sammy made note of a decreased demand for packaged games, and that the company has to adapt towards games on social networks and mobile devices. Don’t freak out, as the packaged games that SEGA has released have been quite successful. Aliens: Colonial Marines, despite all the bad press and low review scores, shipped 1.31 million units. Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed shipped 1.36 million units. SEGAbits reader, and tipster ROJM notes that Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed just might be the most succesful non-Mario related spin-off Sonic game in the third party Sega era. Football Manager 2013 is noted as selling just under 1 million, however Sports Interactive’s Miles Jacobson has recently tweeted that the title has since passed the 1 million mark. Yakuza 5 shipped 590,000 units. It should be noted that as a result of SEGA’s lessening of packaged games that the total number of packaged shipments saw a decline (down 10.8 million overall), but the decline makes sense and was surely expected.

The biggest success, gaming-wise, is Phantasy Star Online 2, with a subscription base of over 2.5 million on the the PC and Vita. As the game is free-to-play, this large number isn’t exactly a gauge for how much the game made in sales, but the company says in-game purchases have “exceeded forecasted levels.” So, the game is exceeding expectations. It’ll be interesting to see how these numbers change once PSO2 releases to the West. As for the future of SEGA, the company forecasts 11 games on PC, 7 on Wii U, 7 on PS3, 6 on 3DS, 5 on Vita, 4 on Xbox 360, and 2 on PSP in the fiscal year ending March 31 2014. The company estimates a 41 percent growth in net profit for the next fiscal year, up to ¥47 billion, or $464 million.

Update: SEGA’s future game forecast is SKU numbers, not game numbers. So say for example, the new Sonic game comes out on 3DS, that counts as one SKU for each region, so that would leave 3 SKU’s for 3DS, one of the other 3DS SKU’s is probably japan exclusive hatsune miku, so that leaves 2 3DS SKU left. Digital games aren’t taken into account for SEGA’s SKU forecast.

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Want a New English Trailer for Marza’s Captain Harlock Movie? Well Here You Go

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UPDATE: So this trailer keeps being taken down from Youtube. If the video above gets taken down again you can watch it here on Dailymotion.

If you weren’t sure yet if the Captain Harlock movie Marza Animation Planet is working on is actually coming to the west, a new English trailer got leaked yesterday from the site of the company that does the marketing for the film in the west. This trailer shows two and a half minutes of footage, mostly with a very not-Japanese song being played over it. I have to say, it’s looking pretty dang good.

Toei also released a couple of other trailers earlier this year and released a small 30 second teaser earlier this week. Besides this, merch and also a localized version of the script has been leaked, so there may be spoilers on the internet. The Japanese release date is September 7th, dates for other countries aren’t known yet.

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Timegate Studios lays off its entire staff

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Timegate, developers of the decent digital title Section 8 and the “too big for its britches” Aliens: Colonial Marines (which Gearbox apparently outsourced a huge chunk of the project to) had filed for bankruptcy last week according to a post from Kotaku. But now it seems like they are going for a chapter 7 liquidation. It appears Timegates’ main publisher Southpeak has dissolved the studio entirely. Employees were sent home early today.

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Total War: Rome 2 Gets a Release Date, Pre-order DLC and a Collector’s Edition

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While we’ve already seen a whole bunch of neat stuff from Total War: Rome 2, there have been no details for when people can actually play the game. So today SEGA revealed on their blog that the global release date is September 3rd, 2013 for both digital stores like Steam and retail.

Of course, a game launch wouldn’t be complete without some pre-order DLC, which the above video shows off. This DLC is called the Greek States Culture Pack and will feature three new factions: Epirus, Athens and Sparta. This will be available on Steam on the same day as the full game for those who pre-order it. SEGA also revealed a pricey Collector’s Edition for the game, hit the jump to see what it includes.

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Sonic 1 heading to 3DS…in 3-D!

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Looks like we’ll be getting a heavy dose of the original Sonic 1 this year.

Thanks to our sister site Sonic Retro, we have learned that Sega of Japan have announced Sonic 1 as the third Sega game (along with Space Harrier and Super Hang-On to get the 3-D treatment. It looks like this will not be the same as the version coming from Christian Whitehead for the iOS. While it will have full 3-D effects, it will still looks to be in 4:3 mode. Besides 3-D other new features include..

  • Switch between Japan/Western version with some minor differences.
  • Spin Dash.
  • New animations in backgrounds like rippling effects in water.
  • CRT mode to give it that “classic” look.
  • Full controller customization. Set it to press A to jump or B to jump, or X to Jump or Y to well you know where I’m going here.
  • Sound settings for PSG and FM.

While the game will be coming to Japan on the 15th, but given how long it’s taking Space Harrier and Super Hang-On to come over here, it may be awhile before we see it stateside.

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