SEGA DREAMCAST NEWS
Random Dreamcast Tidbits:Sat, 6/19/99
Good news for us American Dreamcast fans--Sega is offering the Dreamcast for rental this summer, before it's released! That's right, starting in July, Hollywood video will be renting Dreamcasts and three games! Sega is also running contests to win Dreamcasts and games.
Sega sold 1,000,000 Dreamcast units worldwide by the end of March (or it might have been the beginning of April)...I believe this fell short very slightly from Sega's goal...a few weeks too late maybe.
Sega announced there will be 25 games available at launch of the Dreamcast in America; however, Virtua Fighter 3tb will not be one of them; it has been delayed slightly.
Dreamcast Sells Out:Sat, 11/28/98
On the first day of its release, Friday, November 27, 1998, the Sega Dreamcast sold out all 150,000 units available. This is one of the biggest launches in video game history.
Dreamcast Import Price:Tues, 11/23/98
According to National Console Support (NCS), the following are the prices of importing a Dreamcast from Japan to the USA.
| System | Game | Price |
|---|
| 1 Dremacast | none | $580 |
| 1 Dreamcast | 1 | $630 |
| 1 Dreamcast | 2 | $675 |
|
Reportedly, and most likely, the prices will drop possibly up to $200 dollars in the following month or so. This is simply because initial demand for the brand-new product is so high.
|
VFRPG/Project Berkley: Yu Suzuki and the AM2 team has been working on a top-secret project for the last three years. They have finally released details on it. It had been referred to with the working title of Virtua Fighter RPG, but now it has the unoficial title of Project Berkley. But what is Project Berkley? According to Yu Suzuki, it is a game unlike no other. It will feature entirely 3-D landscapes of magnitudes never before seen in the video game world. It will cross-genre game, with elements of RPGs, fighting games, as well as others. Not only that, there will be up to 700 interactive characters, including some of the Virtua Fighter characters, possibly at different stages in their life than seen in the current VF games. According to Gaming Age, Virtua Fighter 3tb on the Dreamcast will be relased with a special demo preview of the Project Berkley. Japanese magazines are already showing ads for Project Berkley.
Ad for Project Berkley:
Click on the image to see the bigger version; photo of ad courtesy of Hardcore Gaming's Sega-Holic
According to Gaming Age, Virtua Fighter 3tb on the Dreamcast will be relased with a special demo. It will be a preview of the upcoming Project Berkley (see above).
Capcom RPG: Capcom is going to release a 24-part RPG on the Dreamcast. Each chapter will be on a separate disk, a new one to be put out each month, starting next year. Amano Yoshitaka, who has contributed to the Final Fantasy games, will work on one of the chapters.
Older information, listed from earliest to latest
Sega is officially business partners with Microsoft, Hitachi, Videologic, and Yamaha.
In producing/marketing/whatever with DreamCast, Sega is working with heat.net and SegaSoft.
DreamCast games can be developed on Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0; it uses Windows CE with DirectX.
The CPU performs floating point operations used for 3-D operations nine times faster than the Pentium2 226.
It has a $100 million dollar launch in the USA.
Business partners with Sega for marketing, advertising, and promotion are Foote, cone, and Belding; Alcone Marketing Group; Howard Marlboro Group; and the Catalyst Group. Those compnaies did ads for Levis, Burger King, MTV, and Mazda.
Sega of America CEO Bernard Stolar said the DreamCast mandates "kick-ass marketing."
Some announced third-party publishers for the DreamCast will be Acclaim, Midway Interplay, Microprose, and GI Interactive. This resembles Nintendo's initial Dream Team (which developed early games for the N64, I think.)
Capcom unofficially plans to develop games for the DreamCast, possibly including a separate version of Street Fighter III.
Ubisoft is officially making D-Jumb for the DreamCast, with a March 1999 release. Some possible, but unofficially announced games would be Tonic Trouble and Rayman 2.
Konami is making several projects for the DreamCast--they're officially working on Dragon, and supposedly two other games, also.
The audio chip is AICA with its own RISC CPU and DSP, developed by Yamah with significant feedback from Sega. It's complete real-time 3-D audio, with 2 megs of auido ram, and can handle 64-channel auido.
Tasks are run separately on different parts of the DreamCast hardware, so the CPU can concentrate on graphics and speed.
DreamCast demos at the press releases were a Greek island village kind of place with a zooming view, and a shooting game demo. The shooting game demo used only 20% of the DreamCast's capabilities, and the object of control looked like a flying rayfish.
The DreamCast has 16 megs of general RAM.
The shooter looked like Pysognosis's Novastorm, and Nintendo's Starfox 64, and looked as good as, if not better than, Sega's Model 3 step 2 arcade board.
The shooter had detail only previously possible in uncompressed CG animation.
It is rumored that the shooter was developed at the UK-based Argonaut, which made the original Starfox.
Some sources say that the DreamCast's online, multi-player capabilities will be part of Heat, and some say they won't be.
There will possibly be a Godzilla game as one of the first separate games to go on the LCD VMS.
Tues, 6/16/98--
Godzilla is now officially the first separate VMS game.
A new Sonic the Hedgehog game by the Sonic Team headed by Yuji Naka is in development for the DreamCast. It will be a launch title when the DreamCast comes out in America.
Half of the approximately thirty games to be released simultaneous to the DreamCast's North American late '99 launch will be produced by Sega.
NEW--Wed, 7/1/98
The Dreamcast will be compatible with a new color portable 8-bit system to be released soon by SNK called "The Neigo Pocket." Games from the Neigo Pocket would be playable on Dreamcast if hooked up to the Dreamcast with a special adapter. Also, information that had been stored on the Neigo Pocket would be able to be uploaded by the Dreamcast VMS.
NEC has officially announced it will release two Dreamcast RPGs in winter '98 approximately simultaneous to the Dreamcast's release. In "Seventh Cross" you must raise a creature so it eventually evolves, similar to the popular Tamagotchi toy. However, there are 810,000 possible different final results. "Sengoku Turb" is a humorous action/RPG game that uses a realtime 3-D engine. It has an NPC Audition System, which allows character changes to show up in the in-game movies.
Sega oficially announced that there won't be a Sega logo, or say Sega anywhere for that matter, on the Dreamcast platform. Shoichiro Irimajiri told Sega Saturn Magazine "We have been working on the brand issue for 18 months. We conducted huge market research and found that the Sega name is very strong with the hardcore
game users, but for the light gamer it is not a well-known brand name and in some cases creates some negative feelings. So this time we decided that the brand name of the platform will be the major brand name for the consumer business. So Dreamcast is the name of this platform and we will focus on that." I don't like this; the DreamCast name is stupid enough as it is. Some people in America who have been in the dark for the past year may then see no reason to buy it.
There is a rumor that Sega will release the Dreamcast early in America, maybe in spring or summer 1999. By late '98 with the Japan release, they'll have a flagship fighting game (Virtua Fighter 3--this will make it a seller with very hardcore gamers), racing game (Super GT--this will make it a seller with adults and teenagers), adventure (Sonic 3D--this will make it a seller with little kids), an action game D2, and an RPG Seventh Cross. This sounds like something the American gaming market would go for. Also, Sega has said that it is worried about the Playstation 2 and that's their main competition. So releasing the DC early would seem to combat that. I think that wouldn't be a bad move as long as Sega announces at least a month before the earlier release when they actually plan to.
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