SEGA News

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

by

BKV03COCcAAq_Vy
 
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.

Continue Reading ➜

2 Comments

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

by

31210027_p0
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.

2 Comments

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

by

segastock

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.

8 Comments

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

by

segaamusments
 
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!

3 Comments

SEGA testing their Transformers arcade game in China

by

TFG_Poster

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.

3 Comments

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

by

secondsegapluto

[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]

15 Comments

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

by

PSO2
 
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.

10 Comments

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

by

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.

5 Comments

Timegate Studios lays off its entire staff

by

"Free hugs!"

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.

5 Comments

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

by

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.

Continue Reading ➜

No Comments

Sonic 1 heading to 3DS…in 3-D!

by

Sonic13ds

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.

7 Comments

SEGA and Gearbox claim Aliens: Colonial Marines lawsuit is “without merit”

by

Aliens4

Just a few short days after a class-action lawsuit filing in the California court system claiming that SEGA and Gearbox released and sold Aliens: Colonial Marines to the public under the pretense of false advertising, the two companies have responded by unsurprisingly dismissing it .

“SEGA cannot comment on specifics of ongoing litigation, but we are confident that the lawsuit is without merit and we will defend it vigorously,” the publisher said.

Gearbox, however, wasn’t quite so soft of the wording, defending its use of unlabeled demonstration walkthroughs.

“Attempting to wring a class action lawsuit out of a demonstration is beyond meritless. We continue to support the game, and will defend the rights of entertainers to share their works-in-progress without fear of frivolous litigation.”

As it stands, there’s little doubt that due to the very focused nature of the lawsuit that this whole scenario will ultimately end up just being withdrawn or thrown out by a judge. The damage has likely been done in the eyes of players however in terms of the public relations perception, more so for the developer Gearbox than Sega.

The response comes after news that co-developer Timegate Studios has filed for bankruptcy.

[Via Kotaku]

11 Comments

Banjo- Kazooie composer creating the soundtrack for Castle of Illusion HD

by

Castleofbanjo

SEGA and Disney are teaming up to bring Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse HD to all major platforms, the remake will even have a new soundtrack for what it seems. They are teaming up with Grant Kirkhope who is best known for his soundtrack in Rare games like Bajo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark and Golden Eye. Mr. Kirkhope tweeted the following a few days ago.

‘Should hopefully finish my final piece for “Castle of Illusion HD starring Mickey Mouse” tonight!!!’ – Via Grant Kirkhope’s twitter.

So new graphics, new box art and new soundtrack? Hows that for a remake?

2 Comments

Aliens: Colonial Marines co-developer TimeGate studios files for bankruptcy

by

Timegate
TimeGates Studios, who where previously known for their Section 8 games and now for co-developing the controversial Aliens: Colonial Marines has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Texas Southern Bankruptcy court yesterday.

The guys over at Polygon obtained the court papers, which stated that the developer is in debt to more than 50 creditors and owed total liabilities ranging from $10-$50 million dollars. Their top creditors include Epic Games (Unreal Engine), Agora Games (online game service), and DJ2 Entertainment. Funny enough, a local pizza shop was listed in the documents, which TimeGate owes $34.80. Wow, are these developers all in the 7th grade that they can’t pay a $35 dollar bill?

I guess life isn’t good for TimeGates Studios and the recent class action lawsuit isn’t going to help them. Weird seeing them lose all this money and still announce a game last month.

3 Comments