|
|
 |
 |
 | | | | |
 |
|||
 |
||||||
 | | | | | |
|
 |
 |
||||
|
Jump Around Promising Dreamcast software sales? Some sales figures out of Japan were recently released, which show how well Dreamcast games have been selling since the console’s release late last year. Bear in mind that Sega has now sold 500,000 Dreamcasts.
(…plus assorted other minor sellers.) From this chart it’s pretty clear that there are two "killer apps" for the Dreamcast: VF3 and Sonic Adventure. The sales of these two games in particular will certainly depend on the continuing success of the console itself, but so far both console and game sales are excellent. Note that Sega hasn’t instituted any bundling deals yet -- for some reason the Japanese seem less prone to bundling a game with a console, so all of the totals in this chart reflect actual individual game purchases. As you scan farther down this list, you can see that despite the fact that Godzilla Generations was universally vilified, it’s the third-best selling release thus far. And how about the fact that July, the graphics-and-text adventure, outsold the crazy but surely more "mainstream" Pen Pen Tricelon? I suspect the sales figures for games farther down the list are the result of distributors and retailers buying equal amounts of all of the launch titles, and realizing relatively small sales of them. It’s an interesting phenomenon. Is Sonic supercharged or not? With a quarter of a million units sold in its first couple of weeks on the market, Sonic Adventure could go on to sell a great deal more. Alarmingly, the game dropped out of the "Top 10 in All-Formats" chart recently, which leads me to believe that the initial sales came as a result of recent Dreamcast buyers wanting to check out the title on their new console. Now that I’ve had a chance to play Sonic Adventure properly, I have to say that I’m disappointed in it. The title definitely has is wonderful graphics -- some of the game worlds are exquisite and the high amount of texture memory lets game developers create lovely natural scenes such as wood buildings, waterfalls, and more. I don’t think reviews have emphasized the sheer speed of this game enough, especially on the first level. When Sonic originally came out on the Megadrive, it blew minds because it was so darn fast, and I have to give Sonic Team their due: they’ve done it again with Sonic Adventure. It really is ridiculously, mind blowingly, heart stoppingly swift at times, and that’s the beauty of it. On the other hand, the way the game employs a freeform Mario-style way of unlocking levels is a bit clunky. The developers made the areas you have to wander through a little too large and complex, although this could be because I’m playing the Japanese version and the story isn’t clear enough to me. Worse still is the way the game’s frame rate drops in certain sections. I think I’m hypersensitized to this problem since I’m currently completing a PlayStation title and we’re trying to eliminate all "slow down", but the drop in frame rate gets significant and annoying in certain sections, especially in the city areas. Worst of all, as you may have seen many of the reviews mention, is the camera behavior. The camera is just unforgivably bad in places, and I’ve been trying to postulate how this important aspect of the game might have been overlooked by the developers. I think it may just be that many of the levels were constructed before the camera system was thought about properly, and Sonic Team thought that in the fastest and most picturesque parts of the levels, they could zoom the camera out. But there is just one camera distance setting in the game, and it must function in both very intricate areas (such as the steps down from the train station) and really massive areas. Since the camera can’t pan in and out according to the needs of the environment, it just doesn’t work for both of them. It’s true that Sega doesn’t have much experience with 3D cameras, but nevertheless cameras should not get stuck in walls in an important title like this. This problem is even more annoying because there’s clearly so much brilliance embodied in the game, and the interface problem ruins the experience on so many levels. So flawed genius it will remain, although there are claims that an improved version will come out in the US and Europe. Maybe there’s hope yet. On a interesting aside note, some of my colleagues just came back from an arcade show, and they tell me Zombie Zone (a.k.a. Blood Bullet, which is like a Final Fight in 3D spin-off from House Of The Dead) also suffers from evil 3D cameras, which spin through walls and sometimes get stuck in them. Looks like this getting these 3D cameras to function correctly is an area where Sega needs some help. Handheld wars. The Neo-Geo Pocket Color will be released in Japan this March, and it may be the first proper competition for the Gameboy Color. SNK has its work cut out, though. It must compete with the massively-selling RPG and Pokemon-style games that the big guns are releasing for the Gameboy in Japan. Sure, SNK has its beat-em-ups and sports games, but these games have never been big sellers for handhelds. So it will be intriguing to see how they do. SNK has game support from Capcom, Data East and Taito, although many of the titles coming from these developers are conversions of puzzle games which have already been featured on the Gameboy in some form or other. One title that I’m particularly eager to see is a special version of Metal Slug that SNK announced for the Neo-Geo Pocket Color. Bandai’s handheld device, the Wonderswan, sounds more intriguing every day. While its grayscale display is a serious drawback in these days of color handhelds, I recently heard a rumor there is a Wonderswan title is coming out which was designed by the late Gumpei Yokoi – the designer of the Gameboy. The Wonderswan will apparently have exclusive handheld rights to some upcoming Square releases, and Tamagotchi-related software is obviously another option for this handheld. Even with these points in its favor, and its relatively stylish design, Wonderswan is still the dark horse in the race to sell the most handhelds. Japanese Top Ten. Take a look at a recent Japanese Top 10 list and see what’s currently hot -- and what’s slightly less hot:
Much like the television show "Dallas" spawned the successful series "Falcon Crest", the Final Fantasy derivatives are paying dividends for their developer, Square. The sequel to Chocobo, called Chocobo’s Mysterious Dungeon 2, comes at a time when the original title hasn’t even been released anywhere outside Japan, and it’s already sold over half a million copies. Zoinks! The continued appearance of the RPG/collecting stuff-style Gameboy titles indicates that this genre will be around for a while. Following on the heals of Pokemon’s success, Nintendo’s Pokemon Cards is a recent title which is sort of a collectable card game for the Gameboy that features the ability to swap data between different machines. It’s a handheld game design recipe that is seeing great success with consumers. It’s also nice to see that Crash 3 is still making the list -- it seems that relatively few 3D platformers have been released in the past few months, and the success of this title proves that a classy game is a classy game no matter where in the world it’s released. Finally, the Beatmania append disc from Konami deserves a closer look. No doubt someone will prove me wrong, but I think this is the first time in a long while (perhaps ever?) that a game made the console best seller chart that isn’t a stand-alone title. The original Beatmania on the PSX came on two CDs, one containing the arcade original and one for 2nd Mix. The 3rd Mix add-on is priced as a budget title and can only be played if you have the original Beatmania CD. It adds a many more crazy rhythms and tunes to a game that can already be described as madcap (and very tricky to play on a PlayStation joypad, actually). Incidentally, Metal Gear Solid fans may be interested to know that, for completion’s sake, the original Beatmania PSX release has a "Metal Gear Solid Bigbeat Remix" as one of the stages, complete with the game theme and sound effects which you can play with in a techno style. Newsbites… Sega’s Shen Mue, perhaps the company’s great white hope for the Dreamcast, has a number of sub-games, including the original version of Hang On, which you can still play in an arcade somewhere near you…Final Fantasy VIII (which has now passed one million pre-orders in Japan) has the same protection system on it as Sony’s Poporogue, meaning that the vast majority of import gamers will be unable to play it. However, suppliers have already worked out several ways around the protection, so all is not lost. Nevertheless, most annoying….The new Sega arcade game, Ferrari F355, apparently uses four Naomi boards and three TV screens linked together. I thought the whole point of the Naomi boards was to make it cheaper for arcade owners to buy machines! Whether this makes a Dreamcast conversion impossible or whether you’ll need four Dreamcasts and television sets is not known. We’ll just have to see!
Simon Carless is a game designer/project director at a UK games developer. His game credits include design on PC and Playstation titles for (amongst others) Eidos and GT Interactive. He can be contacted at h0l@mono211.com. Simon would like to thank Magic Box, Re:Tokyo, Gamespot, FGNOnline, Core Magazine, and his other Japanese sources for the information that helps to write this column. |
|
|
News
Analysis 
