Sega Goes Naomi Crazy

TOKYO - Sega showed off new batches of games at AOU as well. Some of them were:

Crazy TaxiA game from Top Skater team in the AM3 division. You play a cab driver in a West Coast city in the US. You drive through the city, pick up customers and drive them to their destination. It's really pretty simple, but the fun part is that those customers all love to drive wild, so you can drive as nasty as you want. You can drive your car almost anywhere in the city, and there are even customers who want to take a drive into the sea. In this game, some of the locations are you can see are there in real life. Some customers want a ride to Tower Records, Pizza Hut or the Levi's store.

The tunes featured in this game are provided by Bad Religion and The Offspring.

Airline PilotsThis is a flight simulator which puts you behind the wheel of a passenger jet airplane. It utilizes multiple Naomi boards and three TV monitors. Sega developed this in conjunction with JAL (Japan Airlines). The scenery in this game is based on Tokyo Bay.

Zombie RevengeThis is the game formerly known as Blood Bullet or Zombie Zone. It's shaping up quite nicely. Now the game has cool cut scenes during the game.

Giant Gram: Zen Nihon Pro Wrestling 2Giant Gram: Zen Nihon Pro Wrestling 2 is the sequel to the popular wrestling title for Saturn/Arcade. Giant Baba, a head of Zen Nihon Pro Wrestling died from cancer about a week ago. His fighter will stay in the game to be remembered by all wrestling fans. This game will be housed in the Naomi Universal Cabinet. NUC is the one with slots for the Dreamcast Virtual Memory Unit, the Dreamcast's memory card.

Sega announced that you can create your own wrestler on the Dreamcast version of the game and store the data to the Virtual Memory Unit, then use it in the arcade version.

Kurutto Stone is the fist puzzle game designed for the Naomi board, and Derby Owners Club is a horse racing game (what else?).

All of these games are based on Sega's Naomi board. Sega also revealed three more titles for NAOMI. One is F355 Challenge from Yu Suzuki. According to Sega, it's a racing simulator. We were only shown a five minute realtime CG movie. In it, a couple of mechanics tune up a Ferrari, and the competition begins. There's an accident in a turn and some of the cars are forced to retire. But the Ferrari avoids the accident and makes it to the checkered flag.

It's apparent that this footage is nothing but a CG movie. But if this was all processed in real time, it would be amazing footage. The cars during the race look astonishingly real. We really wanted to see a scene from the actual game.

Next one is called Boat Race 2, a boat racing game. Much about the game isn't known yet. It will be released this Summer in Japan.

The third one is called Gun Beat. It's the first title from Treasure for Naomi. It's a 3D shooter/racer.

There was also a new Fantasy Zone in Sega's booth. But unfortunately it's not a video game - it's just a UFO Catcher.

Sega also announced that SNK will develop Dreamcast-based arcade games. There has been no additional announcement in regards to this from SNK.