Sega Updates from Tokyo Game Show 2000

Saturday:
All right, SegaWeb has posted a video of Phantasy Star Online in MPEG format. You can get it by clicking here.

And, as we told you a while back, Sega had a fish tank sim at the show. It’s called Fish Life, and the fish are shown on a bright LCD monitor. You can touch its monitor and it effects what the fish do as well.

Finally on this update, we can tell you that Sega is planning to make a huge announcement this Tuesday. My sources say we all will be very happy with this announcement, so stay right here to The Sonic Scene, as our new format tomorrow will help us deliver this better to you on Tuesday.

11 AM EST: This is no April Fools joke (because if it was, all of the Sega sites would be in serious trouble). We will start with SegaWeb’s viewpoint on Samba de Amigo:

Around the time of the last Tokyo Game show, Sonic Team had announced that they were making four titles. One of them was Samba De Amigo, a wacky, colorful music arcade game. Now, with little element of surprise, it’s headed to Dreamcast.

The game appeared in playable form at TGS, complete with the Dreamcast maracas and mat. The total package including both of these peripherals and the game is set to be quite expensive, but with two players and preferably a couple of beers, this truly is an entertaining game.

Players test their sense of rhythm and general funkiness by shaking their maracas to the beat, and in different positions according to how the screen advises. The whole game is themed around Mexico and a nice bunch of typically friendly Sonic Team type characters.

As you’d expect, there is no difference at all between this and the coin-op. It may as well have been the same machine on display as at the last TGS, in terms of both technical performance and crowd-gathering. This is going to be big, so watch out for Samba, set to hit America in the summer, we’d assume.

And now, here’s some insight from IGNDC:

While Sonic Team was weary of a home conversion (the construction of low-cost maracas controllers seemed to be a difficult proposition), the boys in R&D have pulled out all the stops to ensure a quality peripheral. Both maracas are connected to a foot pad (with two large monkey feet painted on it), which hooks up to a plastic bar with two magnetic sensors. Each maraca has a magnetic device attached two inches below the maraca handle, which works with the foot pad to dictate maraca height. There’s definitely some rocket science going on here, and it’s infinitely cooler than the Sega Activator™, in any case.

The maracas are lighter than the arcade equivalents, making for slightly less tiring gameplay sessions. Each controller features a yellow start button at thumb-level, and makes a pleasant shaking sound when throttled.

As for the game itself? Raw brilliance. Aside from the original arcade game, Sonic Team has included a plethora of new features, including a training mode with tons of mini-games. There’s the maraca equivalent of Whack-a-Mole, a “copy the beat” game a la PaRappa, and a posing mode that will tie you up like a game of Twister. The maraca controllers also allow taller folks to play – the original arcade game assumed the maximum height was 170 centimeters, making things difficult for six-foot-four gaijin such as myself.

What more can be said? Great gameplay, an outstanding selection of music, and gameplay that will leave you sweating. And as Sega’s press packet says, “You can get excited and also it will be good for your diet!”

And, finally for now, SegaWeb divulges the facts on PSO, once again:

With lots more footage of the game on show and demonstration of how the interactivity between players in the game works, TGS proved to be something of a success for PSO. Let there be no mistake, THIS is the online PRG to watch out for. Some facts, as revealed by the official new trailer for the game:

There can be as many players in the game as there are players in the world. Yep, up to six billion.

They all join in in realtime, interact in realtime, fight in real time. They can do anything they want and it all makes a difference.

Players can go anywhere and do anything, and interact with anyone else in the world, Situations, scenarios and emotions develop in realtime.

The game never ends. Phanasy Star Online lasts for eternity.

The language barrier is destroyed – this is another issue the Sonic Team claim to have taken care of, they claim. Players interact from ALL over the world.

It will revolutionize gaming, and remain the premier online multiplayer RPG forever, with Internet upgrades and realtime development.

Quite simply, the possibilities are endless with Phantasy Star Online. The sky is the limit with this project and Sega has the right developers in the driving seat to accomplish this ambitious goal.

Retaining the characters, the style and the general awesomeness of the Phantasy Star we all know and love, PSO is like a dream come true. If this works, and believe me, from the demo Naka-san game, it certainly looks that way, the this will change the way games are played forever. And that is NO exaggeration.

And if this is all true, the Sonic Team could have an epic RPG on their hands. On the next update: What’s this about Sega forming a new company? Get all the details, plus news about other hot Sega games…

Friday: It is very clear that most reporters covering this are very hyped up about Phantasy Star Online. However, IGN’s Dreamcast Site took a slightly less biased viewpoint:

As opposed to previous video-only showings, the game was finally on Dreamcast hardware, and though I was initially blown away, I have to confess I was a little concerned with what I saw today. As many of you may know, the Phantasy Star series is one of the RPG’s genre’s finest, and ever since I heard this game was going to be an Online affair, I had my doubts as to whether or not the strong plot line that made the series so famous would be done justice in a game who’s emphasis was on interactivity. From what I saw today, it could go either way.

Visually, the game is just breath-taking. The environments are lush, the characters are typical PS fair, and the enemies are quite menacing. The effects seem really cool, and the character movement, albeit slow, is still well done. In fact, I doubt you’ll hear anyone say PSO doesn’t look really friggin’ cool.

And conceptually, it seems to be doing some cool stuff, as well. Sega was quite busy hammering home the point of “real-time console network gaming” via PSO, and from what we witnessed, it should work pretty well. The game will run on Swatch’s “BEAT” system, as opposed to a 24 hour clock with time differences. In case you’re not up to speed on things, “BEATS” are a standard time measurement invented by Swatch (the watch manufacturer) that completely ignore time zones. What this means to us as gamers is that you can say to your buddy across the country “I’ll meet you at the city at 500 BEATS,” and it will be the same time for him as it is for you, regardless of how far away he is. This means you won’t have to adjust for a difference in time zones when trying to (excuse the pun) “synchronize your Swatches.”

To see how it all came together, we witnessed a demonstration by Naka-san featuring three live players and one computer-controlled character going through the world, all in real-time. They primarily showed off the game’s language translation system, which will allow gamers to communicate through basic phrases in all sorts of ways. What we got to see the characters meeting, discussing what they wanted to do, and then where they wanted to go. What was really cool is that one screen showed a Japanese gamer observing the conversation in his native tongue, and yet another screen showed the same scene through the eyes on an English-speaking gamer, and I could totally follow along. It certainly showed a great deal of promise in terms of letting us play on the promised “worldwide simultaneous network.” Gamers chat using little bubble windows (as in Ultima Online), and they actually didn’t get in the way too much, even in combat.

I can say this with confidence as the next stage of the demo was a series of enemy encounters, where we got to check out the battle system in some detail. This is where the game started to lose it Phantasy Star charm for me. First of all, the combat is in real time! Yeah, many of the original weapons and enemies from the earlier PS games are present, and the combat effects are killer, but what in the hell happened to good old fashioned turn-based lovin’? This ain’t your momma’s Phantasy Star people, and from what I saw it looks more like a four-player Zelda than an RPG as far as combat goes. Not that I see this as a bad thing, but it just isn’t Phantasy Star in that regard. You could seemingly switch to a first-person view in combat, though, which was kinda sweet, but could also encourage a Quake mentality, which could help worsen the lack of traditional gameplay here. We’ll see.

Another glaring issue I noticed was the level design from the areas we witnessed. There just wasn’t much going on in terms of direction, and everything was incredibly linear. Basically, all you could do was follow a path from a gate, where you then followed the path into an area that contained new enemies. You then defeated said enemies and moved on to the next gate. And it just kept repeating. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be much story, and the emphasis seems to lie in communication and hunting, much like Everquest. Now, that is all fine and dandy for a massively multi-player RPG, but for my favorite series ever to forego story in favor of some gimmicks? Bah. Let’s hope this is just a result of the game being early, as I can play Zombie Revenge if I want some mindless killing.

One positive thing I can say with regards to the game’s new direction is that Sonic Team certainly seems to be thinking of ways to best make use of their newfound connectivity capabilities. Not only was combat well done in this sense, but there were some cool things like obstacles that required a group effort to move. Everyone in the game had to work together to keep going, and if more elements like this are worked in, especially of the skill-based variety, the game could be enjoyable despite strong plot elements.

At any rate, since Online play was the big emphasis here at TGS, it is doubtful we’ll know more about the game’s story and gameplay focuses until E3, so don’t get too down in the dumps just yet. And besides, there’s always Eternal Arcadia…

With this in mind, die-hard fans of the Phantasy Star series might be a tad concerned at this point. For the rest of us, though, this should turn out to be an interesting RPG. We’ll have it all covered for you.

ORIGINAL STORY

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While other companies had a less than stellar showing at TGS, pretty much everyone agrees that Sega is the big thing @ TGS so far. This may be why: Yuji Naka has at the PSO demo, and what a show it was. The GIA filed this report:

The plot of the game is simple: an unnamed planet is in the process of being developed, and before the player can land on it, the planet explodes. The goal of the game is to find out why this happened. This is done in 4-character parties. However, unlike a typical role-playing game where one player controls four characters, PSO allows a player to control only one character. This means that four different people, be them human or AI, must team up and play the game together, each of them controlling a single character. PSO allows each player to create their character, and has control over stats, skills, and even physical appearance.

In designing the game, Sonic Team has taken advantage of the fact that the game will capitalise on an online co-operative party. Many parts of PSO will require multiple players to concentrate their forces to continue on. This can be anywhere from a door that requires three or more people to open to the item and information exchange that will be part of the game. Players must seek out other characters, as well as interact with those in their own party, to succeed in the game. This even comes down to the point of resurrection – as it is impossible for a dead character to revive himself, another party member must do so. If the dead player has ignored the rest of his party, they may choose not to come back for him, leaving him helpless, as well as quite dead.

One part that Sega wanted to impress on people at the show was the title’s worldwide playablility. With a prospective user base of “over 6,000,000,000 people,” Sega has provided tools to help players interact with people in other countries. As first seen in the Sonic Team puzzler ChuChu Rocket, players in PSO can select different phrases that can be sent in one of five languages: Japanese, English, French, Spanish, or German. Thus, while the American chooses “Hello,” the Japanese player reads “Konnichiwa.” This fits in with the theme of “live entertainment” and “communication with others,” which Sega has branded the title with.

In order to show off this ‘live entertainment,’ Mr. Naka, along with two other members of the design team, logged online to play a bit of the game with a person who was still back in Sega’s head office, and not at the show. Aside from being the first public demonstration of the online capibilities of the game, this short demo gave a good idea of what the communication aspect of the game will be like. The person at Sega headquarters was even able to cause some commotion in the crowd when he announced, via the game’s chat system, that a volcano that had been brewing for a while in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido had finally erupted. Aside from giving the crowd a bit of a stir, it proved that the game was truly online and was not pre-recorded in any way (we later did confirm that the volcano did erupt while the demo took place).

While Sega was able to prove that the online gameplay worked, there were more questions that needed to be answered. One of the biggest obstacles to clear was the issue of progress. If Kelvin and Larissa are playing together, and Larissa goes to bed while Kelvin continues playing, what happens tomorrow when Larissa goes to play the dungeon that Kelvin has already completed? While Larissa can’t continue on in the company of Kelvin, the PSO system uses a ‘matching’ system, so that Larissa can find other players who are wanting to do the same thing that she wishes to do. While it may not be the ideal solution, it is one that should work fairly well.

Although Sega is pushing PSO as a primarily multi-player, online game, players who don’t want to play online don’t have to. As mentioned previously, the computer can control any characters that the player wishes. While this does cut back on the amount of interaction that a player can do with his teammates, it does provide welcome news for those who wish to play the game by themselves.

Many Phantasy Star fans will be curious to see how the game compares to the previous installments. Many of the creatures seen in the demo were familiar faces from the Genesis versions, and the character designs shown were fairly reminiscent of past games. The world itself seems to fit in with past worlds, although given the Dreamcast’s power, the world is much more lush and vast than earlier ones. The biggest difference in this installment is the battle system. Gone are the menu driven fights, replaced with an action-RPG style that is similar to Square’s Mana series. How this will affect the feel of the game exactly is yet to be seen, but this news is sure to give a few fans second thoughts about the title. It can be said that the battles presented at the show flowed nicely, and did not suffer from slowdown or other problems, and in the end this action-driven system may just prove to have been the best way to go.

While many have had their doubts on how an online console RPG would actually work, Sonic Team seems to have done a good job putting together theirs. The real test for the title will come this summer, when Sega’s prospective 6,000,000,000 person user base gets a chance to try the title out for themselves.

That six billion figure is not a typo, friends, that is PSO’s capability for online aspects. We will have more on this as it becomes available.