Next Wave Report: Sega Dreamcast |
 The Katana Project is leveling up! Sega chose to beat E3 to the punch by hosting a press event of its own to make some late-breaking announcements. On May 21st, during the Sega New Challenge Conference in Tokyo, President Shoichiro Irimajiri pulled back the curtains on their next-generation console to unveil it to the world. Its official name is Dreamcast. The release date, you ask? November 1998 in Japan and Fall of 1999 in North America! For Sega, this event served as a platform to outline the capabilities of the console and its final physical design, as well as puff-up the potential of this machine to command a lion's share of the market moving into the new millenium. As Sega moves beyond the Saturn era, SoA COO Bernie Stolar's vow that the upcoming platform will lead the competition will be met with skepticism. A significant portion of the conference focused on hardware. Representatives from NEC, VideoLogic, Yamaha, Hitachi, and JVC appeared on stage to discuss their contributions to the project. Dreamcast is being designed with a 128-Bit processor, an enormous leap from the 64-Bit Nintendo 64 and 32-Bit Sony PlayStation. Its performance will be controlled by a Hitachi chip, an independent NEC graphics engine, and a dedicated Yamaha sound card. Its capability will expand to over 3 million polygons per second, toppling the aforementioned competitor systems with wildly boosted system power. Blast processing is no exaggeration! Sega demonstrated how all this technical jargon will translate into impressive effects like super-realistic water, lighting, shading, and animation. Even more advanced mechanics like a real-time day and night cycle could be implemented now. Imagine a stage in NiGHTS shifting based on the time of day! |
Sega Proudly Announces Their Secretive Next-Gen Product |
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Perhaps the most central element of Sega Dreamcast is the deep involvement of Microsoft. Collaboration betwixt the two companies led to the fascinating inclusion of an optimized Windows CE operating system with integrated DirectX into the console. Magnate Bill Gates even showed up in a pre-recorded video address to build excitement over the partnership, emphasizing Microsoft development tools will be supported to allow for cross-platform compatibility with Windows PC. Sega is confident that the collaboration will be a fruitful one, resulting in a wide-ranging selection of quality games. Time will tell if this grandiose promise of a flexible development environment will hold true, but the debacle of Saturn's complexities surely means Sega has learned its lesson. Right? Networking capabilities make up another vital part of Dreamcast's design. Sega described the console as the premier system for multiplayer games played over an online network. By including a modem in the console itself, internet access and network gaming functionality is included from the get-go. No accessories are required! The growth of online gaming is difficult to ignore. It is therefore most promising to see Sega catch on to the craze. Combining the best of consoles and computer gaming raises expectations quite a bit, we do admit. |
Behold! Sega Dreamcast With Its Analog Controller! Plus Fire-Breathing Head! |
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The next innovation Sega unveiled was the Visual Memory System. This nifty accessory is a removable memory card with a built-in LCD screen that plugs directly into the Dreamcast controller. When connected, the VMS can operate as both a storage device as well as a secondary screen. That screen could display hidden moves during a football simulator, for example, or potentially hide a strategy from your opponent. Then, when taken out of the slot, the tiny VMS may be used as an independent portable device. Like a Game Boy, it can even be used to exchange player data with a friend by linking two VMS accessories together. As one can plainly see, hardware was discussed extensively over the course of the New Challenge Conference. The questions that remained largely rested on software. Video demonstrations predominantly displayed technical data or abstract visuals rather than serious next-gen games. One tech demo showed a 3-D modeled head of Irimajiri as he spoke to the attendees via face synchronization wizardry. Very realistic! Scarily so! Sega did allow a glimpse of an island with the Tower of Babel sitting atop it, as well as a brief technical demo of Sonic running across a map of Japan. Otherwise, the upcoming Dreamcast library will stay under wraps and will likely remain so for the time being. If we're lucky, we may get a better look at the system and its line-up at the E3 conference. |
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