The makers of coin-op games like Oriental Legend 2, Pirate Revenge, Speed Driver 2 and Battle Stations is teaming up with Sega to develop arcade machiens specifically for the Chinese market. All of those aforementioned titles were made primairly for that particular market, with a few of their games making it to other territories with English translations (as is the case with Speed Driver 2 and Battle Stations), but this is an interesting development as Sega gets a foot into the Chinese market and IGS gets to use better hardware than what they typically use. According to the announcement, IGS will “design a Chinese-language Sega machine with localized features”. Shipments begin in the 3rd quarter of this year, so we’ll keep our eyes open for more developments on this front.
[Via the DigiTimes] [Discuss on the Forums]
When I read “better hardware” all I see is ‘death of 2D IGS games’ 🙁
IGS has been trending towards 3D hardware recently with the development of Speed Driver 2. I think there was another game they did in 3D but I can’t recall what it was at the moment(I might be thinking of BattleStations). Hopefully they don’t eschew 2D though, they have increasingly improved on their work and they could do a lot of cool 2D stuff with more advanced hardware.