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Fly Me To The Moon? Playstation 2 - Many Details Cleared Up A number of Japanese magazines have recently managed to reach Sony spokespersons to discuss specific details about Playstation 2, meaning that a number of uncertainties have finally been cleared up, as follows.
PSX games will play exactly the same on the PS2. The CD drive will still spin at 2x (although it's clearly capable of faster), the Dual Shock 2 analog buttons will be disabled, and you'll have to use your PSX memory card to save your PSX games. Sony is implementing these measures to make sure there's no confusion with hybridization. Discs will either be strictly PSX or strictly PS2; there won't be any games that run 'enhanced' on a Playstation 2 but still work on a Playstation. PS2 won't have a Playstation link cable port - mainly because the PS2 serial port is correspondingly more powerful, and not a great deal of people play link games, I suspect. Also, according to the Japanese magazines, the Pocketstation will be compatible with Playstation 2 games as well as Playstation games - interesting, especially since the Pocketstation is considered by a lot of commentators as 'weak', underpowered, and underfeatured, even as compared to the Dreamcast VMS. Still, if Sony is selling 50,000 Pocketstations a week in Japan, which they seem to be, they probably feel that they should continue to support it. PS2 - New Software Announcements! Now that PS2 has a definite release date, the announcements and previews for release software are growing by the day. Although the much-vaunted PS2 golf game Camelot (from the makers of Mario Golf and Everybody's Golf) hasn't yet been announced, T+E Soft have announced a similarly-styled title, Golf Paradise, as a launch title (March 4th, 2000!) It looks to be another vaguely super-deformed but competent golf game, with the real innovation being an automatic course maker - like track construction in racing games, only, uhh, not! If a lot of data is needed for the exact positions of everything in your custom courses, then the new 8MB PS2 memory card will cope with it amply - but the system they're using for course construction looks agreeably simple in any case. Another piece of excellent news is that Ridge Racer V, despite being rumored for a release towards the end of next year, seems to now be a Playstation 2 launch title for March 2000. Alongside Tekken Tag Tournament this is practically a dream launch, and perfect for Namco in getting two of their flagship titles in at launch. Oh, and having trailed the Square Millenium private show extensively in my previous column, naturally, Square have seen fit to postpone it to January 29, 2000! Oh well. When the show finally comes around, we'll be here to tell you exactly what's unveiled in the way of both PSX and PS2 software. Sega Gran Turismo Rival? One of the most interesting rumors this time around is that Sega seems to be planning a new Dreamcast racing game (presumably internally developed). It's tentatively called Sega GT, and it appears they've already licensed 100 cars from Japanese manufacturers, including Nissan, Toyota, Honda and so on. It seems to be coming out in the Spring of next year, about the time of the Gran Turismo 2000 launch on the Playstation, and with 'Grand Touring' modes in Sega GT, it seems like it could be a direct competitor.
This is very interesting indeed, and a sensible move by Sega, because the continuing lack of decent racing titles on the Dreamcast is a major problem. Although the upcoming Metropolis Street Racer from Sega Europe developer Bizarre Creations looks like it'll alleviate this big time, further top-notch racing titles can only be good. Other Dreamcast News There's been further info on the Bio Hazard 2 Value Plus stop-gap Resident Evil 2 port for the Dreamcast, which Capcom is trying to make as attractive as possible for those who already have the title on other consoles. A price of 4800 yen (1000 yen cheaper than normal), a BioHazard 2 soundtrack CD, and a playable demo of Bio Hazard: Code Veronica - which from screenshots is looking absolutely phenomenal - all mean that the late December Japanese release of Biohazard 2 on DC may not be quite as ineffectual as some had feared. Bio Hazard: Code Veronica is currently due in Japan in February 2000, by the way, on 2 CDs. Aero Dancing was an early acrobatics-only Dreamcast flying title, but some decent (although definitely first-generation) graphics were marred by a feel of unfinished gameplay. Still, it has a lot of potential, and it's good that CRI have announced Aero Dancing F to be released next Spring in Japan, this time with combat flying in it too. Since Sony's announcement of a cable modem adaptation further into the lifecycle of the Playstation 2, Sega have also announced forthcoming cable modem support for Japanese Dreamcast users. No date has yet been given for launch, but the partner (Jupiter) has been announced and the scheme will probably be in place before Sony's. This could be interesting, since I don't think anyone expected Sega to be leading on the high-speed Internet-on-a-console angle. Unfortunately, outside of Japan, Sega may not have the infrastructure to get all the deals in place to make this possible - and even Sony will be struggling in areas with very fragmented providers, such as Europe. Misc News Konami has started to include Playstation memory card slots on its Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Freaks arcade machines, allowing people to use Edit Mode at home to make the most fiendish Dance Dance levels ever, and then bring them to the arcades to challenge their friends to beat them! With Asian arcades being much more social in that way, it's an excellent idea, and one that can only extend Bemani's influence. And other companies are still looking at the music genre; Sony has announced a Playstation game called Beat Planet Music for release in early 2000 that looks a little like an into-the-screen 'Tempest'-ish version of Beatmania (or Parappa The Rapper, if you prefer!) Oh, and Namco have filed a lawsuit against Konami about a loading-screen game in one of their baseball titles, a move that can at least partially be seen as a tit-for-tat suit over Konami's targeting of Guitar Jam in the continuing Bemani law-suit war. Woo, you go, Japanese lawyers! The first new Flagship-co-authored Zelda Gameboy title has now officially been announced for February 2000 in Japan, with two more coming over the subsequent 6 months. Quality Gameboy RPG fans have never had it so good - although when a Western translation will come through is another matter altogether, considering the delay that Pocket Monsters Silver and Gold will have in coming to the West. An interesting tidbit from the newswire: Nintendo has had to officially postpone the Game Boy convenience store flash-ROM rewriting service, which was going to be running at Lawson stores in Japan from November. This follows earlier similar schemes for the SNES, but the GB launch has been postponed because of the Taiwan earthquake, which shut down the factory producing the Gameboy flash-ROM cartridges for Nintendo. Yikes!
This time round, it's the fresh-in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure which blazes the way to the top spot for Capcom, with 150,000 sales in the first week. Not as much as Biohazard 3's 1,000,000 unit first-week tally, but still sizable. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is a conversion of the CPSIII arcade game, which uses the same fighting engine as Street Fighter III, so it's a resolutely 2D -- if beautifully animated -- fighting game, based on a relatively obscure anime. Of course, as has historically been the case, the Playstation isn't particularly well suited for Capcom 2D fighters because of the lack of graphics memory for the complex 2D animations. The Saturn fared a lot better for quality of conversion with its 4MB RAM cart, and now the Dreamcast is getting the arcade-perfect conversions. (Indeed, a JoJo's DC conversion is imminent, as well as a hotly anticipated Street Fighter III port.) But the Playstation conversions are still decent quality, and since there are so many Playstations out there, they still do pretty well. Chances are probably slim for seeing this title out on PSX in the West, though. Capcom will probably go with the imminent and more mainstream Marvel Vs. Capcom Playstation conversion, even if it will be stunted by the lack of 2D graphical firepower on the PSX. (Four massive characters and wholescreen animations looked like it was even taxing the Dreamcast version of Marvel Vs. Capcom at times!) Derby Stallion, super-deformed horse-racing management action a-go-go, is also looking like a winner; it's been ASCII's consistently hot title ever since the days of the NES, and this latest incarnation has already sold 650,000 or so. A little further down, Square's new RPG Dew Prism sells a reasonable 50,000 in its first week on the chart, but it'll be interesting to see whether it can keep up similarly steady sales or whether it'll 'flop' for Square by selling, oh, say, only 200,000 or so. The other big Japanese franchises (Bemani, Biohazard, Dragon Quest) are also notching up steady sales further down the chart. And finally, Sega's interesting soccer management title, Let's Make A J.League Professional Soccer Club, comes in at No.10 - interesting because soccer management is a massive games genre in Europe, but not really in the US or Japan. Is this something that could take off in Japan? Quite possibly, since other management games (Derby Stallion, for example!) seem to do very well. 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. |
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