Hi all,

As as the summer months (summer for most of us anyway) carry on, the slow weeks continue. Not much Sega news has arrived in the past week. There were a few new releases amongst other little things. There were two new releases last week: Dracula X, and Super Rockman Adventure.

First off, Dracula X appears to be more of a port, code wise, of the PSX version. It suffers from some of the same occasional slowdown problems that the PSX version had. Also absent are all of the transparency effects from the PSX version. Overall the graphics are slightly lower in quality. Quite disappointing considering the Saturn's 2D abilities. Gameplay wise, you are now able to choose from any of three characters at the start: Alucard, Richter, and Maria. For each character the background music also changes. Also, each character has an extra 'slot' for carrying an additional item for use. For the lower price of about $40US, gone are the fancy art books, and music CDs. The manual does includes lots of nice artwork, and on the game CD you will find some more artwork image files (have to access through a computer). The game doesn't use redbook audio tracks, so to listen to the music alone, one has to enter the options/BGM playback menu. In short, its a great game, the additional features and two new levels coupled with he relatively low price makes it a good buy. However, the initial run of 30,000 copies has been sold out. It is expected that Konami will only make enough more to fulfill all backorders of the product, the second run should be available on July 7th.

Minor Dreamcast news, NEC has announced that they area working on two fully 3D titles for the console. One is called Seven Cross (due at launch), and Senngoku Turb (due Winter '98). Seven Cross is a life sim title in which the goal is to guide the evolution of a being (you). As you interact with the world, your characters evolution will be effected, and you'll be able to access new areas. According to NEC, the game will have more than 810,000 life-forms to interact with. Senngoku Turb is more of a cartoony type action-RPG. Again set in a fully polygonal world, the game's main character is a girl named Jino-chan. Her spaceship being forced to land on the planet Lion...and on this world there is a war between two feuding countries: Cat and Sheep. She decides to enter the war on the site of the country 'Cat.' Quite offbeat eh?

In interviews with Britain's Sega Saturn Magazine, head of SoJ, Shoichiro Irimajiri, revealed some information relating to the Dreamcast launch. The launch budget for each major region (Japan, US, Europe), is $100 million. Also, there are over 120 DC developers signed on now, and Sega has delivered a total of 1200 development systems. Irimajiri also cited as to why Sega wants to wait another year before releasing the console in the US and Europe:

"We have recognised that the American and European business is much more difficult than in Japan so we decided that we should be 100% or 200% prepared for the launch of the next platform - we want to get enough quantity and quality titles for the launch of Dreamcast. So this year we are 100% happy with preparation for the domestic launch_ and as you know, in Europe and US, the period to develop titles is a lot longer than in Japan - 18 months is the average development period. When we launch Dreamcast next year we will have lots of good titles because we can transfer our best games from the Japanese market to the US and European markets and lots of other third parties will have titles too. Right now our people are visiting third parties and some of the developers have already started games for the US and Europe. This will be the first time we launch a new platform with enough titles for US and Europe." --(c) 1998 SSM

-Greg