News Analysis

Mecha Godzilla Tokyo Report

AOU Arcade Showcase in Tokyo

After the warm-up session that was the ATEI show in London, the Japanese arcade industry met in Tokyo for the AOU last week. This show is quite small compared to the Tokyo Game Show, yet all the major arcade manufacturers were present, and there were a number of promising new games.

The most noticeable trend at the show was that the low-cost, Dreamcast-based Naomi board is rapidly being taken up by a number of companies. Make no mistake, Sega is beginning to succeed in this arena, and the board makes converting arcade titles to the Dreamcast easy. Let's take a look through the most intriguing news items from the show.

Capcom Vs. Naomi
Capcom showed a number of new titles at the show, particularly Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike, which had four new characters and a new computer-ranking system. It was unclear what board this was running on, but I believe it was a Capcom CPSIII, not a Sega Naomi board.

The wonderful-looking Power Stone was also at the show, running on the Naomi board. It has already been released to arcades, and the news from Famitsu was that the Dreamcast version received a rating of 34 out of 40 (two 9s and two 8s), an excellent score.

Also interesting were the titles that Capcom didn't show. Spawn vs. Street Figher seems to be in production for the Naomi board, and Rival Schools II is also rumored to be partway through, presumably also utilizing the Naomi. These are serious killer titles, and their conversion to the Dreamcast should be simple.

A surprise appearance on the last day of the show was made by a Naomi-based or Playstation-chipset-based (rumors abound) version of Strider 2, the sequel to the classic '80s Capcom arcade game. It was a 2D scrolling game, but also used polygons. While the game looks a little retro, it could still shape up to be great.

Finally, there appears to have been some vague confirmation of what must be one of the most rumored games in history. Yes, SNK Vs. Capcom will finally make an appearance — on the Neo-Geo Pocket. No word yet on a possible arcade version.

Sega Wickedness
I commented on many of Sega's releases in the last MGT Report, but the company showed a number of titles at AOU that didn't make an appearance at the ATEI show. Airline Pilots is a peculiar Japanese arcade concept: a flight simulator that allows you to fly a passenger jet over the skies of Tokyo. It's the first playable title from Sega to utilize multiple Naomi boards, and I believe that it's going to be the new standard for Sega's high-end arcade machines for the foreseeable future. Yu Suzuki's Ferrari F355 also uses multiple Naomi boards, and was shown on video.

Apart from the other Naomi titles (Crazy Taxi, Zombie Zone, House Of The Dead 2), there was a Naomi version of the perennially popular wrestling game, Zen Nihon Pro Wrestling 2, and also Derby Owner's Club, a horse-racing title.

Other Companies Rock
Konami showed a number of games that it didn't wheel out for ATEI, including a new version of Beatmania (which used video as opposed to the weird Japanese animation) and Drum Freaks (a drumming version of Beatmania). As a correction to my previous column, Hyper Bishi Bashi is an actually an updated novelty version of Track And Field for up to three players. [Thanks to GMAN for this info and several other good tips.]

Tecmo's Dead Or Alive II looked excellent, and included some ridiculous outfits for the females. There's a very feature whereby one of the players gets knocked down a massive drop — the video at the expo showed a 20-story fall from a building and a gigantic fall down a waterfall. And the fight even continues afterwards -- wow.

Treasure's Gun Beat made an appearance at the AOU. It's a magical racing game, of all things. Trust Treasure to go crazy. It's due for Dreamcast conversion later this year, too.

Jaleco showed a Beatmania-clone called VJ. The game feautres multiple video screens, which looked intriguing. Jaleco also offered the most interesting use of the Naomi, a strip mahjong game called Su Chi Pai III.

SNK announced that it would develop some titles on Naomi in the future, which presumably means a phasing out for the company's not- super-hot Hyper Neo Geo 64 3D technology eventually. SNK also showed King Of Fighters 99 and had a number of Atari and Midway games on its stand.

Namco didn't have a particularly strong showing, although it exhibited the arcade version of Bust A Groove.

AOU Wrap-up
In all this was a very interesting show, and things bode very well for Sega on the arcade front. The Dreamcast portability issue will help the company's home console a great deal with the number of easy Naomi crossovers.

However, with the recent Playstation 2 chipset announcement (the one that details how Sony's new console will be many times faster than Dreamcast and will feature a DVD drive), things are beginning to look grim for Sega. The threat from Sony's announcement is compounded by next month's meeting in Japan that Sony invited many of its developers to (ostensibly to celebrate selling 50 million Playstations, but with a clear agenda to say something about the next Playstation console). Ultimately, Dreamcast looks doomed. As Edge magazine wrote in its headline this month, "Dreamcast — Too Little, Too Early?" I think so.

Newsbites
Nintendo has again delayed its SpaceWorld show, which was/is planned to be the first showcase of the 64DD. It appears that Shigeru Miyamoto is now working on Mario-related titles for 64DD, so Nintendo is probably hoping that this will tie the company over while it works on a new console. There's also the possibility that the 64DD will be a hit with only a few titles, of course, expecially if some of the Pokemon titles are ported to the 64DD. In fact, Nintendo has announced a Pocket Monster Festival for April, and a number of new N64 and Gameboy titles will be shown there.

The list of the all-formats top 10 selling game developers in Japan for 1998 was justreleased (thanks to Magic Box Gaming News for this information). Nintendo was number one, with over five million units sold, including massive numbers of Gameboy titles, as well as Zelda. Sony came in second place, and also sold over five million units last year. Konami took the third spot with over four and a half million units (a large chunk of which came from sales of Metal Gear Solid and Dual Monsters for Gameboy). Square, formerly dominant, only came in fourth place. The rest of the Top 10 was: Capcom, Namco, Enix, Sega, Bandai, and Banpresto. This list emphasizes that there's a relatively small number of big publishers in Japan — the 10th place on the list, Banpresto, only sold 680,000 units. I feel that those companies that have historically dominated in Japan will continue to dominate into the future, as there appears to be little fluctuation in the fortunes of publishers in Japan. Perhaps this is due to their strong internal development teams.

Japanese Top 10 (For the week of Feb 1- Feb 7)

We end with the Japanese Top 10. Another Bandai license slid straight in to the top spot. The mission-based Armored Core sequel from From Software came in at number two. The original game was a big success, and with Dreamcast titles along the same lines forthcoming, this style of robot blaster will continue to be big in Japan.

With big titles from Nintendo and Sega, and those omnipresent Pokemon-style Gameboy games rounding off much of the Top 10, that's it for this week.

Japanese Arcade Titles Revealed at ATEI

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Simon Carless is a game designer/project director at a UK games developer. His game credits include design on PC and Playstation titles for (amongst others) Eidos and GT Interactive. He can be contacted at h0l@mono211.com. Simon would like to thank Magic Box, Re:Tokyo, Gamespot, FGNOnline, Core Magazine, and his other Japanese sources for the information that helps to write this column.

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