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AM-Net has posted a flyer for Sega’s latest light-gun extravaganza Rambo and it gives us a first look at both the cabinet and the game. The cabinet is a lot like the House of the Dead 4 Deluxe cabinet, as the guns are similar and the small shots from the game look quite good, with lots of explosions and flames which you expect to see in a Rambo game. I can’t wait to see this in action – I know it’s
testing in Europe and the US (I have not idea what the locations are in the US though) and AM-Net says that it will be coming in September (usually the international release isn’t too far behind) and in yen the value of the cabinet is around $16k USD.
So Sega is still not learning how to price their games more competitively IF this price holds for an international release – I learned the other day that Big Buck Safari Deluxe has a new price of around $6000 for operators – so $10000 less than something like Rambo Deluxe or Primeval Hunt, it doesn’t take much to imagine which game operators will go for. Whether Sega will do a standard cabinet for Rambo remains to be seen but I hope that something is done as this looks really cool and I would love to carry it in my arcade later this year, but if I can’t afford it I’ll just have to wait.
Sega may not know how to price a game, but they can sure pick a license. Choosing Rambo and 80s kitsch has to be their attempt to score one in the US market. Love it.
Oh, and how much do you want to bet that the objectives will be “Rescue the hostages, kill the terrorists”?
There is a feeling that though pricy this will be a Killer game – making up for the less than stellar response to House of the Dead 4. Now we need to see a strong game replacement for RaceTV.
Just skimmed through a copy of GAMEStm, and saw a poorly written review on RaceTV – oh how they are coming late to the game, wonder if they have changed their tune over a arcade feature?
I agree that Rambo will probably be an awesome game but someone at Sega needs to pull their head out of their butt and realize that these games would sell better if they were more affordable. I’m sure the excuse is that they won’t have to sell as many units at the higher price but I don’t see how that is an intelligent strategy – the goal should be to get the game out there to more arcades. Even if I could afford to purchase Rambo, how long will that take to pay it off?
What’s the problem with Race TV? I haven’t had an opportunity to play it yet. The cabinet artwork isn’t quite to my taste but it looked very good in the videos. Sort of like a San Francisco Rush update. The sort of balls-out arcade silliness they never greenlight on consoles anymore.
I used to enjoy the bits you wrote for Edge editor. At least, I think it was you who did a couple of articles.
If Sega are going to keep releasing things at very high prices they need to hype them up some more. The American arcade developers make themselves available for interviews and release more information. They’re also very in tune with what the Americans like to play even if they don’t make games quite as elaborate as Sega yet.
You know, this blog could do with more pinballs related updates. I suppose I should just got to http://www.pinballnews.com but I tend for forget about it.
Dear Molloy, Thanks for the comments – I only contributed the (3)EDGE and (2)GAMEStm features. They always claim that they still want to draft them, though I did all the work on interviews and structure (least I got paid). I will be writing for a new publication soon and will pass on the word.
Just for the record – this year we have a strong line-up of games, but also we have the possibility of losing some developers/studios. It is going to be tough, but also there will be a major impetus for the consumer media to try and stick the knife in once and for all.
RaceTV isn’t terrible in my opinion, I thought that it was fun but I guess it wasn’t outstanding. The only thing I really didn’t like about it was that you could smash a car and they fell in front of you which makes no sense. Maybe when Sega decides to lower the price on it I’d pick it up – the same thing is happening with Chase HQ2 – it’s not selling well and Namco is asking distributors if it would sell better if they lowered the price on it. That makes me both amused and disappointed that they actually have to ask if lowering the price on a game would increase sales. They obviously were asleep during business class when it comes to marketing – anyone with common sense should know that the more affordable your product is, the more volume it will push.
We do cover pinball stuff on occasion and we have one writer who usually gets the leg up on that stuff but he’s on a month long internet hiatus (Metafox) and he seemd to be on a year long hiatus before that. There isn’t a lot of news about it out there however. I forget to check pinballnews as well but I don’t want to simple cover everything that they do but I’ll see what I can do.
Lets be straight on the ‘dropping price’ issue.
Namco dose not make ChaseHQ2, they are the distributor – Taito agreed a price with them and they claimed at the time they could sell x for that price (once they added their margin). They are now scared they have badly calculated and are thinking on cutting their margin just to clear stock. They ask operators if they will be at Y, only to clear and not to adjust pricing.
The whole GlobalVR price policy has shaken up the market – revealing how much the big five distributors have ramped up their percentage and boned the trade. Now under pressure we are seeing a rationalization of the margins (a near 20% reduction) and falling.
Good point editor.
I’ve been told that Raw Thrills is about to get very competitive when it comes to pricing. Now that GVR, RT and IT are all doing what they can to bring prices down to sane levels, it’s going to hopefully put a lot of pressure on the Japanese developers to do the same. BBS Deluxe for $6000 seems like a steal, but this is what it should be – fewer games above the $10k mark, more games below the $5000 mark.
I’ve always thought the reason arcade gaming is doing badly was margins. Nolan Bushnell did an interview in Edge’s retro special a few years back and made an awful lot of sense. He was arguing that consoles didn’t kill the arcade, it killed itself with overengineered cabinets that cost too much. I’m inclined to agree.
JAMMA came about in 1983 after the first videogames crash. Everything was fine after that. Then they started to abandon it around the time Virtua Racing and Time Crisis came around. Then all the smaller operators closed and all the niche locations like pizza places, cinemas, bars and video stores stopped having a machine.
All the manufacturers should band together and come up with a JAMMA standard for racing and lightgun cabinets. Most of them are practically identical.
Molloy, I like your observation, but as one that was working in the industry then, I think there may be some error with the reasoning.
From my position the DECO cartridge system was launched first, then a whole hoard of proprietary edge boards standards. Remember this was Japan led and JAMMA standard was not a full standard (Taito, SNK, Capcom, Irem etc – but Sega and Namco and other took time to adopt). I remember sitting in my office at Electrocoin with hoards of ‘Harness looms’ that worked with different edge standards.
The JAMMA standard was grabbed in the US after the depression in videos hit (thanks to the laser games) – Japan created the standard as a means to control the distribution route and avoid a collapse (which they partly avoided). We have a feature in the Stinger coming about how the collapse in the money markets did not totally affect the coin-op scene till the 1984 collapse – as reference now.