The Weekly Five: SEGA Vintage Collection wish list

SEGA’s latest wave of Vintage Collection titles have arrived, and they have deservingly been very well received by fans. Initially, the collections were nothing more than single titles released to XBLA and PSN. Nothing more than ports of Genesis and SEGA arcade titles with the same basic menus for each release. Not to say that they weren’t good fun, but there was no real personality to the titles aside from the games themselves. Thankfully, SEGA and developer M2 made the latest Vintage Collections as true “collections” filled with the fun expected from classic SEGA titles. On XBLA, each collection touts three games and features a fully 3D menu with recreations of arcade cabinets and game consoles. Other features include a juke box where every sound and song can be played as well as a bevy of screen settings. This week’s Weekly Five will look ahead to future waves and what we hope to see from future Vintage Collections.

Ex-SEGA and Microsoft Employee says Natal will fail


Scot Bayless knows a thing or two about failing, he was Senior Producer at SEGA of America when they came up with the brilliant idea for the SEGA 32x. He also served at Microsoft as Studio Manager. Seeing all those studios closing at Microsoft Games Studios, don’t think he did a great job there either. This is what he had to say about Microsoft’s add-on.

“When I met with Microsoft in 2008 to look at Natal I asked: ‘When will you integrate this into the 360? Their response was: ‘We’re probably going to wait and see on that.’ To which I said: Then you’re going to fail.'”

He makes a great point about splitting the user base apart. Game development is expensive as it is, HD consoles finally reached the “above 35 million units sold” area and now developers will have to risk doing games for a smaller market that owns Project Natal or Playstation Move? Will casuals buy them? If Natal is $150 as rumored, they won’t. Again, we don’t know if Microsoft has “integrated” Natal with a new SKU, but if the bundled rumor price of $300 for an arcade is correct, a bit tough to lure in “the casuals. ”

Why would they buy expensive add-ons and consoles when the Wii is integrated with motion control since day one, costs $200 dollars and has a slew of motion based games already?

[Source: Now Gamer]