Straight from SEGA comes word that the legend Yu Suzuki has been awarded the 2011 Game Developers Choice Pioneer Award. I, and I’m certain every other SEGAbits writer and reader, congratulate Yu Suzuki for this achievement. He truly is a gaming pioneer! Insert “Shenmue III please” comment here.
After the break, check out the press release and make note of his official title at SEGA.
Australian gamers do get screwed over by higher priced games, but SEGA is making it sweeter with great pre-order bonuses. This time is a Dreamcast bonus LP.
Seriously, I want one. So if any Australians want to give their copy away, I’ll take it off your hands :). Also JB Hi-fi has the worst business website ever.
[Source: TSSZNews]
SEGA showed off ‘Let’s Go Island 3D’, if you haven’t guessed, it’s Let’s Go Island in 3D. Easy concept to grasp. The game will not require terminator glasses (glasses free 3D). It also runs on Ringedge, using the better specs to achieve double the framerate, since a 3D image has to be displayed twice.
Above is the cabinet for the game, which is housed in a theater cabinet that looks spiffy. The cabinet will have air blowers installed to give it the ‘4D’ touch, so the website for the game says.
Let’s Go Island 3D is coming out in Japan this summer. No news of a Western release.
[Source: ArcadeHeroes]
SEGA details how the Partner System works in Yakuza of the End. To get different partners, you will have to complete sub-stories. Some sub-stories are unique to a playable character. Such as, Kazuma will have sub-plots he completes to get a person to be his partner. Once you unlock a partner, you can share him between all four playable characters.
We already know that if a hostess loves you enough, she will also be able to be your partner.
Nagoshi loves his Sony products. The Yakuza series has been exclusive to Sony, so it isn’t that big of a surprise to see him praise the ‘Next Generation Portable’ (NGP) that was announced last month. According to Nagoshi, 3G is a big deal.
“This is a big deal, Wi-Fi has gotten more accessible in Japan compared to before, but you could hardly call it enough yet. When it comes to Japan, if you want to be able to connect to the net no matter where you are, your mobile phone’s how you’re going to do it. Going with 3G allows the system to be on the same playing field as every phone out there in terms of connectivity, and I think that says a lot about Sony’s drive to make the NGP a success.”– Toshihiro Nagoshi
Some of the issues that Sony had with the Playstation 3 were the difficult and high cost of development, something they might have actually learned from. According to Nagoshi, porting titles is simple and cost effective. Nagoshi’s own team ported over a cutscene from Yakuza of the End running in real time on the NGP hardware for Sony’s Playstation Meeting last month.
SEGA came in 9th place for the 2010 publisher rankings over at Metacritic. They take the publishers’ MetaScore for their 2011 line up and place them in order. SEGA averaged 67.4%, with their best rated title being Bayonetta (90%) and their worst being Iron Man 2 (41%).
SEGA delivered some really great software. Some of our favorite titles included After Burner Climax, Phantasy Star Portable 2, Valkyria Chronicles 2, Sonic Colors and Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing. So for SEGA fans, it was a pretty good year. Next time SEGA should trim the crap, leave the good stuff.
Check out the full list here.
From GoNintendo comes a bit of news regarding an upcoming SEGA press event. Little is said of the event, except that it will happen in a few weeks time and that reps from High Voltage and Creative Assembly will be in attendance. I assume it’ll be at SEGA’s offices in California, though I never should assume as it makes an “ass” out of “u” and “me” (joke).
Should be exciting to hear more of Virtua Tennis 4, as well as the others, however what I’m really hoping for are some reveals. Sonic Anniversary, Sonic 4 Episode 2 or Phaantasy Star Online 2 would all be great. Alan Pritchard did say to expect two Sonic game announcements in the early part of this year. More details to come, obviously.
[Source: GoNintendo and The Sonic Stadium]
The guys over at Eurogamer have grabbed a pretty good interview with Mie Kumagai, producer for Virtua Tennis 4. One of the important questions asked was why AM3 took the franchise back to Japan, when Virtua Tennis 2009 was done by Sumo Digital.
“The reason why it was taken back to Japan with the original studio was looking at Virtua Tennis 3 and 2009 and listening to fan reaction and user feedback, we felt for 4 there needed to be a lot of major changes in the game.
With that in mind, if you’re going to add a lot of new elements, if you’re going to change something quite a lot, to some respect you have to scrap what’s already there. We felt it was a task best done by the original team who understood the game the most, who understood the main concepts and goals of the game the most, and had the most experience. We could constructively scrap parts where we would need to update and think about what could be changed, what could be updated.
At the end of 2009, we felt almost every element in the game was exhausted. So we needed to bring a lot of new things on board. That’s why it was taken back to the original team in Japan.”– Mie Kumagai, Virtua Tennis 4 producer
I love Sumo Digital, but I’m very excited that the original team is back and trying to deliver a fresh game in the series. There is just so much you can do with tennis, I guess we will see the changes when the game launches in the spring.
Yet another trailer for Anarchy Reigns, this time showing off game play for each of the characters that have been revealed so far. Jack, Zero, Sasha and Big Bull.
I’ve seen about 5 trailers for this game so far and I’m still not really sure what it’s all about… Other than multiplayer battles. I wish their trailers would have more information.
I know that The Conduit didn’t light up the charts like we all here thought it was going to do. But does that mean it was a failure? Nope, according to the team, if Conduit 2 sells the same number of copies as the first, it will be a success.
“That’s a misnomer in our industry. By and large people look at it and they say, if it’s not a million unit seller it’s a flop. That’s preposterous. If I make this bottle of Coke, and let’s say there’s 10 pence of materials here – coloured water, sugar and a glass bottle – if I sell this for a pound, I’ve just made money. Whatever the product is, if it costs you less to make than you end up making off the thing, you make profit. As long as the profit margin is strong enough, then you get enough of a return and you can make another. The biggest misconception of consumers of the industry is that million-unit benchmark. When you really look at the number of games a year that sell over a million units, it’s almost none of them. If that really were the minimum bar for a success, the game industry would be gone in under a year. There are thousands of games released that don’t sell a million units. There are like 10 games a year that sell over a million units. But if you can sell a few hundred thousand copies – 300, 400 thousand copies, which is in the range that we did – we made money off that. We did well. Although it was a considerable budget for a Wii title, it was not the kind of budget a Gears of War had. If we’d spent the Gears of War money, then we probably wouldn’t be having this discussion now. We’d be back working on something else. We’d always like to make money. Everyone would. But if we sold the exact same number of units as we sold with Conduit 1, we’d be high-fiving each other. But I think we’ll do better.” – High Voltage’s Eric Nofsinger
Good for the team, should be able to make its money back at at least.
[Source: GoNintendo]
In Europe, if you want that DLC, you will have to opt into buying the limited edition of the game. In America, we don’t have the choice of a limited edition, so if you buy a new version of Yakuza 4, you will get a one-time DLC code to use. You will get:
If you pre-order the game via Gamestop you’ll receive a free dynamic Hostess theme. Not bad at all.
[Via SEGA]
It isn’t new for software companies to use an animal to promote their products. Even as I type this, I’m looking at a orange fox hugging a blue globe (firefox). So it’s no surprise that the Facebook creators had a similar idea:
“True story: in the very early days of Facebook, Sean Parker wanted to make Facebook’s mascot a hedgehog. We had early plans to build a local business program around each college on the site (a Yelp-like service similar to what later became Facebook Pages). As part of that, Sean wanted us to send each participating business a little blue stuffed hedgehog. Matt Cohler and I even sourced a couple companies to make them.Sean actually wanted us to get a real hedgehog for the office. Turns out they aren’t street legal in California, or something, but I guess he found a way to obtain one in Nevada. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your affinity for hedgehogs) Sean couldn’t convince any of us to drive there to get one.”
The local business program was shelved mid 2005 (we decided a revenue product wasn’t as important after the Accel financing), and Sean let his dream of the hedgehog go with it.
This would have probably ended up with SEGA suing them and them making a sequel to their hit film, The Social Network.
Rebellion Studios has announced that their internal game engine known as Asura works on Sony’s PSP successor, NGP (codename). The technology was used to power the SEGA published Aliens vs. Predator last year.
“The technology, design and art teams have worked incredibly well with Sony’s newest device. We have managed to make our engine fully functional, and looking great on the hardware in double quick time. We’ll be attending DICE and GDC to show what we have created and look for business partners.”– CEO of Rebellion, Jason Kingsley.
The team now has a demonstrable demo running. Rebellion says it’s a “Multiplayer third person shooter”. Of course no one knows yet who the publisher will be or if its Aliens and Predator related. How did they get the engine working so fast? They said that the whole engine is internal, this includes physics and lighting. So porting it was easier than waiting for middleware.
Mike Hayes already expressed that he wanted to do another Aliens vs. Predator on 3DS. Maybe doing a NGP version is the way to go?
[Source: CVG]
So SEGA had their Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity event this weekend, where they said they where going to reveal some Phantasy Star Online 2 news. The news is that alpha testing will start this summer. How do you get in?
You need to get a special code, the code can be obtained in two ways. The first print of Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity will have codes inside, it will have a yellow sticker on the cover stating it has the code. The other way is playing Phantasy Star Universe and Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst (which is still active in Japan), SEGA has not given details on what you will have to do to get them.
So you get the code and you’re in, right? Nope, the code just lets you get into a drawing for the beta. Damn, SEGA are really making it hard. No word on how we in the West will be able to play or if it’s being published here…
[Source: AndriaSang]
If you already made up your mind that you are going to purchase Conduit 2, you probably won’t want to see the first 30 minutes of the game. But if you are on the fence about it, because you hated the AI and level design on the first one, this is for you.
Check it out, it might change your mind.
[Source: GoNintendo]