Hello all,

Last Tuesday I posted some new images from Shenmue along with pictures from the new RPG Evolution. You will find the shots in the Dreamcast Snapshots area on the site. In the news area, you'll find an article regarding the English release of two major titles: Sonic Adventure and Shenmue. Finally, some minor updates if you've neglected to read the news tidbits in the main page...first off, Sega is working on a LAN adapter to connect two Dreamcasts together for offline network game play. The LAN adapters could easily allow for larger scale tournaments to be setup assuming software support for such things. They will be shown at the Spring Tokyo Game Show. Over in Europe, Sega is in talks with a number of telco companies to allow for Dreamcast online access. Previous online efforts such as the Saturn's NetLink were kept from being released on a large scale in Europe due to the relatively high cost of local phone calls. The talks make it apparent that Sega plans to include the modem with European Dreamcast consoles.

At the end of this week, we'll see the release of the long awaited racer, Sega Rally 2. Once slated as a launch title, then gradually moved back for tweaking and testing, the game will finally hit the streets this Thursday. Coupled with the recently released driving wheel, the game should be quite impressive as previous Dreamcast games have been. I've seen a short videoclip of the game in action and it looks great! Online gameplay, the cause of the game's delay, will be free however, instead of using the Internet, gamer's will dial into a Japanese server which essentially makes it prohibitive for people outside of Japan to test out the online play. Hopefully, Sega will in the future allow for direct dial, and Internet play. After Rally 2, the next releases for the Dreamcast will be coming at the end of February: Konami's arcade port, Pop'n Music, and Capcom's highly praised beat 'em up, Power Stone. Starting in March, the flow of Dreamcast titles will pick up (barring any massive delays).

Recent reports from SegaNet (www.seganet.com) state that Konami is well into developing a 3D Castlevania game for the Dreamcast; contrary to prior reports from other sites. The game will consist of the main character being placed in a large, complete world similar to the one giant castle concept from the Dracula X series. The world in which the game takes place is so large that it will have to load into memory in pieces depending on the character's location. Konami expects to show the title at this years E3 show and have it ready for a September release for the Dreamcast's launch outside of Asia.

For Saturn owners, the next batch of games will arrive in early February. On the fourth, you'll see three games re-released: J League Soccer 2, MegaMan 8, and Textutto Lurdo Arukana (RPG). I'm currently working on translating the releases for March and April, there are about eleven titles set for a March release in Japan.

One last thing, with the site taking an international audience, I wanted to know if you'd be interested in having a currency convertor available on the site. Let me know! That's all for this week, cya!

-Greg