Sega

Jet Set Radio’s Art Director Ryuta Ueda Working at SEGA Again!

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SEGA’s Ryuta Ueda left SEGA back in 2014, we even did a post. Back then he worked at SEGA for 19 years being the chief ard designer for Jet Set Radio, doing enemy art for Panzer Dragoon Orta and also directing the first two Yakuza games on PlayStation 2! At the time, he left the company to work at Yahoo, but according to Ueda’s Facebook page, he has been back at SEGA since May of this year:

“I have decided to resign from Yahoo Japan and return to my old company, Sega. I am very grateful for the many people I met and the many lessons I learned through various projects at Yahoo!

From now on, I will focus on making games again. Not only do I feel the excitement of making things, but I am also smiling a little at the thought of seeing old friends and meeting new people. I would like to fully demonstrate what I have cultivated through experience.

PS: I’m going to try to update my Facebook page a bit more. Oh, and if you are going to ask what I’m making, I can’t answer that.

What is Ryuta Ueda working on now? I guess we don’t know, maybe he will rejoin Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios on upcoming projects? As of right now, that remains a mystery!

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SEGA’s Ikebukuro GiGO arcade in Tokyo set to close on September 20, 2021

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In a Twitter post on August 2, the Ikebukuro SEGA arcade branch has announced that they will be closed on September 20th. They explained that the lease contract for the building that houses the arcade has expired and is ready for renovation. The arcade opened up in 1993, housing many arcade classics as the rising SEGA boom was taking over during the 90s (a 28-year open service). They also wish to provide the same premier customer service that brought in customers since opening. Currently celebrating the 28th anniversary, exclusive prizes can be won via UFO catcher machines or be bought for the month of August.

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Yakuza 0 Vinyl Pre-Orders Open, Including a Double Deluxe LP and a Six Record Limited Edition

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Looks like Laced Records has opened up pre-orders fro the Yakuza 0 vinyl soundtrack. The company is set to ship the records in October 2021 and this will include:

The cheaper, deluxe record is set to include 27 songs, with on record being green and the other light blue. It will also including songs like “Fever ☆ Time,” “Ignite Your Spirit,” “Koi no Disco Queen,” “One-Eyed Slugger,” and “Setsuna No Ningyohime〜Heart break​ mermaid〜【Full Spec Edition】.”

Now the Limited Edition Six Record Set will offer 90 songs with each record getting its own sleeve and its own ‘color-in-color’ design. If you want “Bakamitai”, you gonna have to spend more money on this edition.

[Via: Siliconera]

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SEGA Japan announces its selling NFT digital content, upsets the internet so much they start trending

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It really looks like the years of hard work to create good PR has all gone to waste, maybe! SEGA Japan announced it was going to partner up with ‘double jump .tokyo’ to create NFT digital content and utilize blockchain technology this upcoming summer. This obviously caused a huge uproar, so much so that it sent SEGA to trending on the front page of Twitter. Oh boy.

For those not in the know and never heard of “NFT”, it stands for ‘Non Fungible Token’. So that doesn’t explain much, but what does it do and what does this have to do with ‘blockchains’ and Crypto? Basically NFT’s right now are a digital way of buying a painting or piece of artwork that only you own and will forever live on the blockchain. For example if SEGA puts an official Sonic piece of artwork, they can allow users to bid with Crypto to see who ‘owns it’. Right now the biggest NFT market is ‘Open Sea’, which lets you browse and explore how the whole thing works.

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SEGA Japan officially allows Japanese users to monetize videos on YouTube and Twitch

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SEGA Japan has released new streaming guidelines for Japanese audiences, which will now allow individual users to monetize videos and streams of SEGA owned games through YouTube and Twitch.

Its actually kinda crazy that SEGA didn’t allow this before considering how games like Yakuza got huge brand awareness in the West due to streamers and YouTubers making videos on the games. But it seems that SEGA in the past allowed users to create videos, but not profit from them. It seems that SEGA is also encouraging players to add reaction faces and comments, but also asking for spoiler tags on videos that ruin story moments. They have also asked not to do unrelated edits that would obscure actual gameplay, which seems a bit vague?

This whole guideline sadly isn’t applying to Atlus or western developed titles such as Total War, but if its a success for SEGA; we can all assume this will all change.

[Via: Siliconera]

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SEGA closes sale on SEGA Amusements International and what it means for the future of western SEGA arcades

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Back in March, SEGA Amusements’ Roger Penninton left the company after 31 years of service. Considering how SEGA’s Japanese management device was hit hard during Covid-19 which ended up selling 85% of the company back in November of 2020. I had a gut feeling big changes were also coming to SEGA Amusement International and I was right.

While most people write off SEGA Amusement International (prior where known as SEGA Amusement Europe) as just a company that distributes SEGA’s Japanese arcade games to the West; they actually have development teams that are creating original titles. One of the recent titles included Daytona USA 3 (or is that Daytona Championship USA?). All the way back in 2016, the company even wanted to try their hands at making OutRun 3!

So who bought SEGA Amusements International and what does this mean for the future? Oddly enough, the management team working within SEGA Amusement International including industry veteran Paul Williams. For what I read, nothing much will change as the company will still be ‘SEGA Amusements International’, still distribute SEGA’s arcade titles outside of Japan and still work on their own original titles.

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SEGA of America Producer and Designer Michael Latham, best known for Eternal Champions, passes away

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SEGA of America’s Michael Lathan has passed away, as reported by SEGA-16’s twitter account. Michael started his gaming character at Rainbird Software where he would localize computer games for the American market, he would then move to Mediagenic where he was a producer for Ghostbusters II and Tongue of the Fatman before the company went bankrupt in 1991.

“It was simply the most fun of any job I ever had. Everything just exploded, and for a young guy in the business it allowed me to do so much so fast. I entered the company as a producer, quickly moved up to run my own production group, and even became a VP before the age of 30, thanks to the unbelievable growth and talented people I worked with. It’s so hard to have all the right people in the right places, and when you do, you get hit companies and products. We were on movie sets, meeting with sport teams, going backstage at concerts – all kinds of exciting projects – and the development teams were still small and you really knew everyone you worked with unlike the mega development teams of today’s games.” – Michael Latham talks working at SEGA during the early 90s

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Shadow Man: Remastered coming to PC on April 15th

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Do you guys remember the game Shadow Man? This action-adventure game by Acclaim launched on almost all platforms back in the day including Windows PC, Nintendo 64, PlayStation and of course the SEGA Dreamcast.

Well the game is coming back as Shadow Man Remastered, while we know its coming to PC on April 15th, its also coming to Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (no dates set yet). Also did you know the game had a sequel called Shadow Man: 2econd Coming on PlayStation 2? Wow.

Check out the press release and screenshots:

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Sonic Revolution Announced for 2021 Online Event

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Sonic the Hedgehog’s 30th anniversary keeps getting better with the announcement of Sonic Revolution, the 7th year that the event has been concurrently going and is the 2nd one to be online. The event has been a Los Angeles-located Sonic convention but due to the Covid-19 virus, the event will be hosted online through the Sonic Revolution Discord servers. Front runners Shanye (@sonicremix) and Licide (@Angelidia) are back to bring the biggest Sonic fan convention in the world on June 19th and 20th, 2021.

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Total War: Warhammer III announced for PC, coming late 2021

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SEGA and Creative Assembly have finally announced the last part of their ‘Total War: Warhammer Trilogy’ which was planned all the way back in April 2015. Total War: Warhammer III is set to launch in late 2021 on both Steam and Epic Games Stores. Pre-orders get a free DLC “Race Pack”, kinda funny that the gaming world is OK with pre-order DLC because the studio actually got grief when the first game launched over this practice.

Hit the jump to read the press release by SEGA and check out the awesome trailer above:

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Sonic Prime to take place in Sonic Team’s video game universe, SEGA crossovers not ruled out

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One thing that the Sonic the Hedgehog brand has been doing recently is trying to keep the brand more streamlined. We first saw this when SEGA took the Sonic license away from Archie and relaunched on IDW, but this time making the story take place within the Sonic Team game universe.

We have also seen another recent shake-up with Roger Craig Smith being let go as the voice for Sonic, with rumors spreading that Sonic Movie voice actor Ben Swartz might replace him (making him the main Sonic actor going forward).

Recently we got the official announcement of the upcoming Netflix show Sonic Prime, but not that much information has come out about what the show will actually be. As we know Sonic Prime is being written by Duncan Rouleau, who did give us a bit of insight into what we can expect from the TV show come 2022, including talking about possibility of future SEGA crossovers:

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Judgment Remastered announced for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Stadia

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Judgment is a great game, one that I think any fan of the Yakuza franchise should give a try. While I enjoyed most of the game, there were moments within the game that could have used polished (one of those scenes is actually shown a bit in this trailer), so I hope the newly announced “Judge Eyes Remastered” (Judge Eyes being the Japanese name) fixes those issues. The new remastered version will cost you $39.99. This will also mark the debut for the game outside a Sony platform, with it being on Xbox and Stadia (who cares about that one, right?).

This is also the first time a RGG Studio game has gotten a world wide release date on the same day in Japan with the rest of the world. The game is set to come out on April 21st, 2021! Judgment Remastered is said to run at 4K at 60fps, but also include all the DLC on the disc. Hit the jump for the press release from SEGA:

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Astro City Mini Review: The Perfect Way To End SEGA’s 60th Anniversary?

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The years come and go, it is now 2021 and I finally put together a review for SEGA Toy’s Astro City Mini. The unit has a lot of things going for it that makes it a must own device, but at the same time has some glaring flaws that we need to discuss. Check out the video above and if you want to see more, subscribe to my YouTube channel.

What are your thoughts on the Astro City Mini? Let us know in the comments below!

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Japanese only Yakuza: Black Panther on PSP gets English fan patch after 6 years of work

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The PSP exclusive Yakuza: Black Panther (also Black Panther: Yakuza New Chapter) or as its known in Japan Kurohyou: Ryu ga Gotoku Shinshou came out way back in September 2010. The franchise got a sequel and even a TV show based on the new, younger leading character. Sadly due to low software sales in the west we never got a localization of this spin-off franchise. There has always been a really good online guide you can use but now you can play it with a fan made patch.

CD Romance patched English ISO

How complete is the patch? Well, its only translated the main story from start to end, but substories haven’t been translated yet. At least this is the feedback I’ve gotten which has made me personally made me want to wait for the full project to be translated. You can check the translation team’s GBA Temp thread.

For those of you that have been waiting for these games to be translated, you can thank: Aegehn, Fshadow, KHHSubs, and FlyingClimber for putting years of hard work getting this released!

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Unboxing SEGA’s Astro City Mini and Game Center Style Kit

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SEGA released its SEGA Astro City Mini Arcade unit to close out its historical 60th anniversary. Today we will be unboxing and giving you my early impressions of the unit, while I work on a full review that should be up on here by Monday! I also got the ‘The Game Center Style Kit’ which adds a fully functioning piggy bank bottom, stool and marquee with stickers.

What have been your guys’ impressions of SEGA Toy’s Astro City Mini unit?

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