Hi all,

I'm slowly getting back into things here as I had two midterms last week, along with a paper to write later this week. It's been fairly quiet this past week with only a few Saturn releases, and some Dreamcast news.

First off, Capcom has released the fourth volume in their Generation series. Volume 4 includes Command, Gunsmoke, and Mercs. This week we'll see several new Saturn games released in Japan. They are: All Japan Pro Wrestling featuring Virtua (Sega/Re-rel), Baldy Land (Banpresto), Guyfade Crown (Capcom), She'sn (Kid), Side Pocket 3 (Data East/Re-rel), and Street Fighter Zero 2 (Capcom/Re-rel).

Last week, Sega of Japan announced their pricing plan for accessing the Internet via the Dreamcast. Using an electronic payment system with "web-money" the system is somewhat similar to the use of pre-paid calling cards. One will purchase a set amount of online time, and the time used is accordingly subtracted from your balance. Costing 5 Yen (about $0.04US) per minute the cards will be sold in 2000¥ ($16US) and 5000¥ ($40US) allotments: About 400 (6.7hrs) or 1000 (16.7hrs) minutes per card. Sega expects that 30-40% of Dreamcast owners in Japan will use the system for online access. No word on the possibility of a similar pricing scheme being developed for outside of Japan. However, due to major differences in telecommunications systems costs, its probable that costs will vary quite a bit on a country basis.

Several video clips of Dreamcast games were also released in the past week. The Computer Exchange, a UK based company has posted an 11meg video clip of just about every publicly shown Dreamcast game. The video includes snips from Blue Stinger, D2, Geist, Godzilla, July, Let's Make a Soccer Team, Sega Rally 2, Sonic Adventure, Super Monaco GP 2, and Virtua Fighter 3tb. The video runs for about eight minutes in total. It along with screen shots from the video can be found at: http://www.cerbernet.co.uk/cex/news/dreamcast/index.html The site isn't very fast if one is outside of the UK, so downloads may take quite a while (I could get about 10KBs when my max is about 300KBs). The video is a bit small and low on resolution, but still presents a good showing. One will need a Quicktime video player to view it. Sonic Team has posted several high quality video clips from Sonic Adventure. One video clip for each of the playable characters has been posted (seven in all). They are in MPEG format with audio and are quite sharp, extremely impressive. The page that links to the video clips are in Japanese: http://www.sega.co.jp/sonicteam/sonicadv/dload/cfvol1.html I will post screen shots from the clips and direct links to the clips in the Snapshots area later today.

Well, I'm afraid that's all for this week....work continues on the new areas. I'm currently in need of reviews and writers for the Genesis/MegaDrive and the Dreamcast areas. Let me know, and thanks for reading!

-Greg