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

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.

Virtua Tennis 4 being delisted from Steam and other digital stores

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SEGA is going to be pulling sales of Virtua Tennis 4 from digital stores including Steam on April 23rd, 2015. After this day you won’t be able to pick up a copy of the undeserved critically panned tennis game.

If you have a PC, I suggest you purchase a copy right now for $2.99 on Steam, I feel that the game is well worth it even if it has crappy Games for Windows Live tacked onto it. Its a great Tennis game filled with addictive mini-games.

There are reasons why SEGA could have delisted the game, most of the usually fall in licenses expiring. I wonder what this means for the future of the Virtua Tennis franchise?