Psy-Phi was announced by SEGA as a new Lindbergh based arcade game . The project was being headed by legend Yu Suzuki and featured two player touch screen fighting/shooting gameplay based on 1-on-1 combat with players floating up in the air and competing in a game which Suzuki described as a sort of “futuristic dodge ball”.
The original release was planned for spring 2006, but the Japanese cabinets were recalled in March 2006 (the units were still in shipping and had yet to reach arcades). It was then unknown whether the game was cancelled or called back for further development.
Anyone heard any more on this, it sounded like alot of fun…!
I have it on very good authority that Psy-Phi is dead. It tanked in Japanese location tests, and that was pretty much the kiss of death, as Sega wasn’t terribly interested in continuing to bankroll an expensive Suzuki project that wouldn’t live up to expectations after the loss they took on Shenmue.
The Japanese reaction to the game’s location test was similar to what I felt when I played it at Sega of Japan after interviewing Suzuki: the game didn’t feel like it had much depth to it, the characters and setting were rather bland, and it really felt too “gimmicky”. They sent a machine to IL (Sega Arcade’s NA distro center) to see if maybe the American market would warm up to it and save the project, but no luck. C’est la vie.
The Suzuki interview I worked on can be found here, BTW:
http://games.kikizo.com/features/sega_yu_suzuki_iv_feb06_p1.asp
I’m probably going to put the Psy-Phi promo media disc I got on eBay for some unreleased game collector to snap up.
Thank you for the follow up Zero-Chan. I guess there are just certain types of games that just won’t make it in the arcade market.