Thanks to the amazing efforts of Derek Pascarella and his team, Sakura Wars Columns 2 for the Dreamcast has now been fully translated into English and is now available to play on either real hardware or under emulation.
Sakura Wars Columns 2 is a little more than your standard re-skin of Columns featuring different characters and artwork based on a different franchise. The game also features a full story mode that melds the traditional Sakura Wars visual novel and dating simulation aspects into the Columns formula for a truly unique experience. It’s this game mode that benefits the most from the newly translated text.
A full list of download links for the title are available below:
The full development team on this translation is as follows: Derek Pascarella, Chanh Nguyen (Burntends), Natsume38, Danthrax4, HaydenKow, esperknight, VincentNL, nanashi, SnowyAria, NoahSteam, TurnipTheBeet, YZB, cj_iwakura, Ozaline, Matatabi Mitsu, ItsumoKnight, Samantha Ferreira, LettuceKitteh, JoblessFloppy, GriffithVIII, Patrick Traynor, AnimatedAF, Small Nerd and Einahpets.
One of the most infamous lost Dreamcast developments is Castlevania: Resurrection. This 3D Castlevania title was being developed by Konami and sadly cancelled in March 2000. Outside some scant screenshots in magazines as well as some reporting from E3 1999, the game was never showcased to the public in a playable or even viewable form until now.
A digital archivist called Comby Laurent has come into ownership of the 1999 E3 demo that was shown behind doors to the press and it has now been released publicly for the first time. The early prototype of Castlevania: Resurrection can be downloaded from Archive.org and played on real Dreamcast hardware or under emulation.
You can check out footage of the game in action via Retro Core and the embed below:
Fast becoming one of the most important resources for digital archiving of prototype software, Hidden Palace have released another slew of prototype versions of various Sonic the Hedgehog titles. These new dumps of late development builds of Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Spinball and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine showcase some fascinating insight into their development and feature a slew of differences from their final builds.
Sonic Adventure 2 features many grammatical errors that would be corrected for the final build, Metal Harbor and the final Sonic and Shadow battle are considerably more difficult and the driving stages feature different collision results when driving into other vehicles. The full list of differences can be read on the Hidden Palace entry for this release.
All of these dumps can be downloaded and played through emulation or on real hardware from the Hidden Palace entries linked above. Hidden Palace will be streaming and revealing their “last present from under the tree” tonight (31/12/2020) at 10pm GMT on Twitch, so if you’re excited to see more prototypes from their team then be sure to tune in.
A brand new book from the publishers of Japan’s Beep! Mega Drive, SEGA Saturn Magazine and Dreamcast Magazine will release in July 2021. This new book is described as a “tankobon & catalog” of magazine “contributions & retrospectives from many former staff, reprints of the famous reader ratings & more”.
The book will also include 10 Mega Drive games for the PC, a Takara Tomy Mega Drive minifig set and 3 volumes of the Sega no Game wa Sekai Ichi~i~i manga in PDF format. The first 4 Mega Drive titles announced for inclusion with this book are Chelnov, Langrisser, Star Cruiser and Undeadline. The games included have been chosen specifically so they don’t overlap with anything included on the Mega Drive Mini.
A tech demo for a Simpsons game on the Dreamcast has been discovered by ‘sreak’ over at the Dreamcast-Talk forums. This demo of a game called The Simpsons: Bug Squad! was dumped from a Dreamcast dev kit and developed by Red Lemon Studio in 2000 as a pitch to Fox Interactive. It was never greenlit and this demo is the only evidence of it ever existing.
It’s an interesting little title putting you in the shoes of a bug in The Simpsons’ homestead, and you explore the area in a similar way to Toy Commander. You can check out the game in action via the video embed from the Dreamcastic Channel below:
The next retrospective from SEGA Forever has arrived, and this time it’s all about The House of the Dead!
The video focuses mainly on the original arcade series, running from The House of the Dead all the way up to the most recent game in the original canon, Scarlet Dawn. That said, a nod is given to Overkill and even Pinball of the Dead; and they even give some love to The Typing of the Dead II, a great game that flew under the radar compared to its predecessor.
Each title also has the list of platforms it’s available on listed alongside it; very handy for those looking to shoot some mutants at home. We’re really loving this series, and we can’t wait to see what gets the retrospective treatment next!
When Tracker isn’t playing SEGA games, he’s talking about SEGA games. Or drawing about SEGA games. Or all of the above. You can also catch him over on Twitter.
This one doesn’t have any ground-breaking discoveries from SEGA’s archives, but it does serve as a pretty great way to familiarise yourself with the mainline entries in SEGA’s beloved cab-em-up series. It also provides a good excuse to listen to “All I Want”, though to be fair we never need an ‘excuse’ to listen to that song.
SEGA Forever’s also promised there’s more Retrospectives on the way as part of a series, so we’ll let you know when more go up.
When Tracker isn’t playing SEGA games, he’s talking about SEGA games. Or drawing about SEGA games. Or all of the above. You can also catch him over on Twitter.
A new selection of merchandise and hardware have been added to their respective sections on the website. See below for the full list of additions and direct links to each entry:
More SEGA hardware has now been added to our hardware section with detailed articles on every entry, alongside specifications and high quality images. See below for the full list of additions and direct links to each entry:
Another cult SEGA title receives an English language translation! For this release it’s time to get acquainted with the Dreamcast cult life sim L.O.L.: Lack of Love, which has been Japan exclusive since it’s original 2000 release.
L.O.L.: Lack of Love puts you in control of a primitive creature on an alien world who must evolve to stay alive as the planet is being slowly terraformed. The game infamously features no heads-up-display and is played in a non-linear fashion. You can talk to or eat other life forms to advance your evolution.
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