SEGA Talk #85: Astro Boy: Omega Factor (2003)

On this SEGA Talk, we cover all things Astro Boy and we dive deep into the manga and anime world created by Osamu Tezuka. We also discuss how SEGA’s Hitmaker studio and Treasure teamed up to create the Game Boy Advance classic Astro Boy: Omega Factor!

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SEGA Talk Podcast #12: Crazy Taxi (1999)

We’re back! SEGA Talk turns its high beams on and takes a closer look at SEGA AM3’s classic arcade and Dreamcast game Crazy Taxi. Despite its seemingly simplistic premise, Crazy Taxi offered up a lot of depth and has seen a long and successful history as a franchise with games still being released as of 2017. What are our memories of the game? What was the development history? How do the in-game cabbies compare to real life cab drivers? All this and more is talked about on SEGA Talk!

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If you want to give us feedback, suggest a topic for the next podcast or want to ask a question for us to answer on the next episode you can add them as a comment below or send theme directly to our email. Make sure you use subject line ‘SEGA Talk’ and as always, thanks for listening!

Virtua Tennis 4 being developed by orginal team due to fan feedback


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.