SEGA-AM2

SEGA launches ‘SEGA Arcade Game History’ interactive site

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SEGA has launched an interactive site called ‘SEGA Arcade Game History‘ detailing most of their published arcade machines, to celebrate the history of their long running arcade brands. The timeline starts with the release of 1973’s Pong-Tron and ends with the 2012 release of maimai. Obviously the site isn’t complete since SEGA has released more arcade games, their latest big one being SEGA-AM2’s KanColle that came out this year.

Going to be honest, I love when SEGA puts up sites like this celebrating their glorious arcade past. I wish SEGA West had a English version of this ‘SEGA Arcade Game History‘ on their site, but whatcha gonna do, right?

[Via: Arcade Heroes]

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SEGA AM2’s KanColle Arcade shown off at Japan Amusement Expo

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Kan-Colle-Arcade_1The Japan Amusement Expo has been going on this week, one of SEGA’s big upcoming arcade games is SEGA AM2’s KanColle Arcade which is based off a license property. KanColle Arcade was set to come out sometime in 2015, but SEGA pushed the game back and now its set to come out in Japanese gaming centers this spring.

KanColle Arcade will include a ‘Kanmusume Cards’ dispenser, these cards will be used to create fleets. The game actually has a steering wheel and vessel speed lever for users to play with, which includes four attacks: ‘Main Gun’, ‘Secondary Gun’, ‘Torpedo Attack’ and ‘Air Strike’.

Hopefully after the game is released, SEGA AM2 can work on a in-house property for the virtua generation. Check out the new screenshots below, including a look at the new cabinet!

[Source: Gemastu]

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Classic Virtua Fighter figures now available for pre-order

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FIGURE-016527_08Are you a big fan of the low polygon models used in the original Virtua Fighter? Today is your lucky day because Figma’s classic Akira and Sarah figures are now available to pre-order at AmiAmi. Each figure will cost you 3,560 yen (about $30 usd).

Each figure comes with:

  • Main figure
  • Base
  • Standard expression part
  • Shouting expression part
  • Hand parts

The figures will have a ‘variety of hand parts’ so you can pose them to fit your needs. Not to mention the screaming face. Look at the gallery after the break. According to Figma, they will be making Player 2 variants soon, you can see those figures in the image above. The figures are set to ship this upcoming September, so this is a long pre-order.

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The History of Sega Japan R&D, Part 3: Innovative Heights and the End of an Era

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REUNIFICATION AND TWELVE INNOVATIVE R&D STUDIOS

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Playing up an executive managing director and joking about the state of the Dreamcast at the time, says a lot about Sega’s attitude at the time.

In Part 2 we covered Sega’s golden age, but great heights inevitably can bring great lows. Sega had lots of up and downs throughout their history. They also had great games, lots of them! But ultimately Sega did not make that much money from the Saturn. However, in the arcades they did absolute gangbusters. Sega needed to change their approach in regards to development and also their hardware. The solution was to make the Dreamcast and NAOMI arcade hardware the same and have all of the internal studios make games for it,in turn allowing them further grow and prosper. Twelve R&D studios in total were established, and the nine software studios were not split into arcade and console divisions – they made games for everything. Hisashi Suzuki and Yu Suzuki would manage the arcade business, with Hisashi putting in his final stretch at Sega before retirement.

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Round Table: Can Shenmue 3 live up to the hype?

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Its literally been 14 years since Shenmue 2 made its debut and left many unanswered questions. Over the years the Shenmue fanbase has grown since more and more people have gotten a chance to try the franchise, it has reached some level of mysticism. Having this rabid fanbase, all with individual reasons as to why they like the Shenmue franchise waiting for the next evolutionary step can be daunting to a development team.

Can Ys NET and Yu Suzuki make a game that will live up to the hype? That’s this topic on this week’s Round Table.

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These SEGA Classic Arcade LEGO sets need your support to become reality

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Above is a proposed LEGO Idea by creator SpacySmoke and if you want these to become reality you have to support the idea (which means creating an account at LEGO website). The project has about a year left to get 10,000 SEGA fans to support it and right now its hovering a little over 600 people supporting this awesome idea.

The set that is being proposed comes with a Space Harrier, Out Run and Thunder Blade LEGO arcade replicas. But that isn’t all, it also comes with a male, female and Yu Suzuki themed LEGO persons.

Want to support it? Click here. Want to see more information including screenshots, hit the jump.

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SEGA-AM2 is developing a arcade game based on Kantai Collection

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If you never heard of Kantai Collection (or KanColle as the fans say), its a free-to-play browser game created by Kadokawa Games and is actually a card collecting game. The browser game has over 2.5 million regisitered users and the franchise has been spreading to other media like manga (more than one series), anime series and even a licensed tabletop role-playing game.

The franchise is rising to popularity fast, with the browser game only launching in 2013. SEGA of course wants in on the action, seeing how highly successful other ventures like Hatsune Miku (Which AM2 developed the arcade version of this game) have been for the company.

Personally would rather have SEGA-AM2 announce a new internal IP, instead of doing a license game (especially a card game). But you never know what the future has in store…

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Classic SEGA Ads: Tiger Electronics puts the “L” in Virtua Fighter

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If you thought Virtua Fighter in arcades and on the SEGA Saturn was as real as it could get, Tiger Electronics asks you to think again! Released in 1995, Tiger’s R-Zone (not to be confused with Pizza Hut’s P’Zone) was a portable headset and attached controller that promised a virtual reality experience, but ended up just delivering a headache. Unlike other Tiger Electronic LCD games, R-Zone took cartridges.

Each cartridge contained a transparent LCD display, projecting the game onto a mirrored surface placed just inches from the players eye. As was the norm for VR at the time, red was the color of choice. Leeching off of popular franchises to survive, the R-Zone featured Men in Black, Jurassic Park, Batman, Star Wars, and SEGA’s own Virtua Fighter. Don’t let the ad above deceive you, despite being right in your face, R-Zone’s Virtua Fighter was as far from virtual Virtua Fighter as one could get. Wait… did that kid say “brain chop”?!?

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Rent A Hero English translation finally released

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SEGA AM2’s Action RPG, Rent A Hero, has been fully translated to English and released by the hard working of hackers from Rom Hacking Dot Net. Pretty much finishing what Edison Translation Group left off with only one section of the game translated.

Now gamers can finally get their hands on Rent A Hero from start to finish in English language for the first time ever.

Rent A Hero focuses on a teenager named Taro who has recently moved to Aero City along with his family and receives a armored suit. When he wears the suit, he becomes Rent A Hero, a hero for hire keeping the world at peace and payed for his heroic deeds.

For screenshots of Rent A Hero in English. Click the jump below!

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SEGA Tunes: Cutting corners while listening to Hang-On’s soundtrack

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SEGA-AM2 could really thank most of its success to how popular the game Hang-On was in 1985. This game really opened up for all those other popular SEGA-AM2 peusdo 3D scaler games that we all love today like Space Harrier, Out-Run, Afterburner, and many more.

The track above is called ‘Theme of Love’ and love is probably what kids in the mid-eighties felt when they played this game for the first time. Every time I hear any music from a early SEGA-AM2 games it just fills me with nostalgia and Hang-On‘s Theme of Love does it the best. It just does everything right and is an excellent piece of music.

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SEGA Retrospective: After Burner II – From SEGA arcade classic to SEGA 3D Classics

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After Burner is just one of those franchises by SEGA that took American arcade goers by storm due to the sheer speed of the game, the eye catching cabinet, and its highly detailed (for the time) graphics. I truly believe that After Burner is just one of those arcade games that don’t get enough credit by gamers today, so jump into your F-14 Tomcat and blast through our After Burner retrospective. You never know, you might learn something!

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SEGA Tunes: A look at SEGA AM2’s underrated Sword of Vermilion OST

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Before SEGA AM2 brought Shenmue to Dreamcast owners everywhere, they created a Japanese RPG in the late 80’s for the SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive. That title would help SEGA-AM2 dip their feet into the console market, that first game was Sword of Vermilion. The game was a early Genesis/Mega Drive title and was one of the spotlight games in SEGA’s timeless “Nintendon’t: advertisement campaign.

While Sword of Vermilion was ambitious for its time, it wasn’t really known as a great game and possibly one of the lesser known games by the publisher. But regardless of that status, the soundtrack for this game is actually great. Composed by Hiroshi Kawaguchi (After Burner, Out Run, and more) and Yasuhiro Takagi (Virtua Racing, F355 Challenge and more), both composers who where literally at the top of their game during this time period.

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The SEGA Five: How SEGA-AM2 changed video gaming

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Welcome to our new video series The Weekly Five, a top five list covering a wide range of SEGA topics. We are celebrating The Year of Developers over at SEGAbits.com, that means that each month throughout the year we will be covering notable notable SEGA developers. This month is all about a developer that is close to my heart, SEGA-AM2. What better way to kick off the new series than to discuss five ways SEGA-AM2 changed video gaming.

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SEGA Tunes: Bust down the door and jam to Virtua Cop’s OST

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SEGA AM2 has a huge library of developed games, but nothing is more shocking at how much they change genres and still delivered a game that would defy that same genre. For example, Virtua Cop which in my opinion is one of the best light gun shooters around.

Nothing has a bigger impact on you than the first stage’s music. Its the song that draws the player into the game and Virtua Cop succeeds with its Stage 1 Theme: “Arms Black Market”, giving you that feeling that you and a buddy really are taking down this black market gun rig.

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