Hello all!

The one big Saturn release last week was Deep Fear by Sega. Commonly dubbed a Resident Evil type game taking place underwater. This is fairly true. The plot begins in the early 21st century with a US submarine, the Sea Fox, being sent to investigate the crash of an unknown object in the Pacific Ocean. With further investigation, they discover that the object was part of a space rocket launched into space nearly forty years before. However, it seems that the pod contains some form of sentient alien creature. The pod is then moved to a deep sea base in the Mariana Trench. The pod undergoes research at the base, and soon the Sea Fox receives orders to begin its next mission..however when docked, the submarine suddenly crashes into the base causing a structural breach. Now it's up to you to find out what caused the accident. During the game you'll encounter various puzzles and mutated human baddies..dispatching the bad guys in a decidedly gory style. The game uses a mixture of real time 3D graphics overlayed with pre-rendered backgrounds in game. Lots of high quality pre-rendered CG cut scenes to move the plot along. The text in the game is Japanese, however the voices are in English. The game is set to be released on the 24th in Europe...while there are no current plans for a US release. I've put some images up in the Snapshots area.

In other news this week, Sega has released two images from their first Dreamcast title, tentatively dubbed 'Godzilla.' Sonic Team has also announced that they are working on a Sonic Title for the DC called Sonic Adventure. The game will be unveiled in a press conference on August 22nd. Check out the Breaking News area for full details. On the site, I've also updated the Japanese release dates section to include some releases for the months of August and September.

In Japan this week we'll see the release of Treasure's latest shooter, Radiant Silvergun. Also coming is Lunar 2 : Eternal Blue from GameArts.

Remember when the Dreamcast was first shown back in May? Specifically the Towers of Babel demo. This demo featured a fly-through of a town, going down various streets, between buildings etc. The level of detail was extremely high. However notice that they've been relatively few screenshots of the demo. Those that have appeared are of rather low quality..blurred. Not showing the true level of detail present. Sega seems very quiet about the demonstration...not releasing any screenshots of it..Sega has asked some people to remove video clips of the demo from their web sites. Well, the demo was created in ten days by Yu Suzuki and a few other people. In speaking to the press, Suzuki explains that the Dreamcast is extremely easy to program. In comparing the demo to the potential limits of the console, Suzuki said: "If this demo was running, say, a 1,000,000 polygons per second, then the machine is capable of producing three times this amount with ease. To make the machine run at its fullest capacity, it would take a lot of time and effort but if we were to push it, Dreamcast would be able to handle 3,000,000 to 3,500,000 polygons per second. But we're still yet to see the Model 3 board do this." He also says that in deigning the console, they wanted to be sure that it was more powerful than Model 3 games to ensure painless porting from Model 3 based games. While it has already been established that the DC will be a 3D powerhouse...what about 2D sprite based games? Well, Hideki Sato of SoJ explains that if one were to change the Z value to zero, the graphics would then be 2D. Because the console doesn't have to calculate the Z value, then theoretically, the console should be capable of even better 2D graphics.

That's all for this week, cya in seven!

-Greg