Hi all,

Sorry for being a bit late on the update...I've found with my current schedule I have more time to research and write a proper newsletter on Monday rather than Sunday evenings. The past week has been very quiet for the Saturn. On a sad note, Sega Enterprises head, Shoichiro Irimajiri has stated that Saturn development will stop at the years end, while software production will continue until mid 1999.

Last week there were two new releases in Japan for the Saturn: Real Mahjong ~Summer Waltz~ from Seta and a release of NEC's Black Matrix. On the site, I've made a few adjustments to the Japan release list with the addition of a few games and moving around of others. Magic Knight Rayearth, first long dogged with development delays, and now manufacturing delays (Saturn games aren't exactly on high priority lists of major CD houses such as JVC) should be out by early December. Vic Ireland, Pres. of WD is working with JVC to get an earlier manufacture date. Electronics Boutique currently lists the game's expected arrival as December 15th.

At the end of this week Capcom Generations Vol 4 and Sankyo Fever Simulation Vol. 3 will be released. Generations Volume 4 will include: Commando, Gunsmoke (Ookami), and Mercs (Ookami II).

For the Dreamcast, perhaps the biggest news came this morning with Yu Suzuki and Sega announcing that his Project Berkeley (aka VF RPG) will be revealed to the public on December 20th. The game is Suzuki's original Dreamcast project in development since work on Virtua Fighter 3 was completed. While the game as been commonly been called an RPG, due to its immense scale, Sega has chosen to create a new genre which better defines the game: FREE. 'FREE' stands for Full reactive Eyes Entertainment. Sega claims that the game will set the standard in a new generation of Role Playing style games.

In other VF related news, Sega of Japan has released the first official video clips of VF3 TB to the public. On the VF3 TB web site one will find screen shots and downloadable video clips of the game. The clips are available as a lower res (160x120) long clip, or several shorter higher res (320x240) video clips. All are recorded at 15fps and are available in both Quicktime and AVI formats. While they aren't the best quality, they do a good job of representing the amount of geometry present in the game. As far as I can tell, things look extremely close if not the same as the arcade.

Last week I mentioned Rage's Incoming having a probable November 27th release. Rage has stated that while they are targeting such a release (and the game is ready for it), Sega may push the release of the game back until December 23rd in order to better distribute the release of Dreamcast software.

Well, that's all for this week, thanks again for the support, and keep those e-mails coming as they are very much appreciated! See you in a week!

-Greg