First off, Tekken news. Are you such a fan of the Tekken series that you would love to check out memorabilia for the game in a museum setting? Then head on over to Osaka Japan to the new Tekken museum that opened up there over the weekend. Andriasang has more details or you can consult Namco Bandai’s press release here (PDF file).
DISCLAIMER: Below will be some news about new arcade hardware by Sega. The excitement that follows such hardware revelations tends to lead us down speculative paths about Sega’s home hardware since there are past examples of them preceding a home launch with the hardware in arcades, like was seen with NAOMI. However since then, they have developed games on many hardware platforms that have just been used for arcades, usually PC-based with unique I/O boards (Lindbergh, Europa, Ringwide, Ringedge, etc.). A few went out to troll Sega fans on Ringedge saying it was going to be a new game system and that never came to pass. Just keep that in mind as the console speculation pops up every single time Sega gives a name to an arcade board. Not to mention that Sega’s home division is in no place to launch a multi-billion dollar effort to compete in this space seeing how they recently had some sizable layoffs and game cancellations.
Arc System Works has announced a the latest iteration of their Guilty Gear fighting series, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R. Aside from the mouthful of a title, it had been announced earlier this year that GGXXACP (without the R) would be a launch title for Sega’s new software-to-arcade-cabinet download service called ALL.NET Plus Multi (although it is often spelled out P-ras Multi). It’s a competing service to Taito’s NESiCAxLive that is already in place in many game centers in Japan. This R version which has just been announced carries something interesting with it too – it is stating that it will be running on Sega RingEdge 2 hardware. There had been talk of Sega showing off such hardware earlier this year but nothing was shown; and at this point we still don’t have much in the way of details about it although Sega last year had been discussing systems for carrying 3D content into arcades. This doesn’t mention anything about 3D but I imagine that with the development of this new online system, RE2 has been made to specifically take advantage of that and maybe add a couple of other upgrades that can be gleaned from the constant hardware updates offered through PC hardware. This image below which is from the official game site that you can visit here shows GGXXACPR as supporting both RE2 and the new ALL.NET network which is all we know about it for now. Here’s a second source confirming its Ringedge 2 as well.
As for the game itself, it will be going on test next week in Japan and features some re-balancing and the usual additions one expects with these fighting games – improvements in the overall game but usually nothing too earth shattering. I admit however that I am not a Guilty Gear aficionado so perhaps there is some big deal here that I’m not seeing. Judging from the video of the game which I can’t get posted here, it doesn’t look like the kind of game that really pushes hardware but it looks good from what I can see behind all of that annoying Japanese text that scrolls across these videos. Hand-drawn, well-animated sprites will always look great and it’s refreshing to see it pop-up every once and a while. I wouldn’t hold your breath on this coming to arcades outside of Japan but naturally they will have a console version of it out fast enough so that the Japanese operators can be properly undermined as is required in the unwritten code of all fighting games released on Planet Earth.
UPDATE: Sega Amusements has posted a new image from their R&D Spy Cam on Facebook. This is just part of the cabinet, not the video game itself I imagine although if it was a videmption game then who knows. A guess – Western cabinet for MaiMai?
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ECM
I like the disclaimer but there’s no way you can stop the Internet!