April GETs

Keeping with the Milestone theme, I picked up these two Naomi GDRoms relatively cheaply. Not your typical style shooters, Milestone shmups favor function over form with complicated scoring mechanics and simple cell shaded artwork. Maybe its the need for variety over Cave danmaku, but I'm finding these games refreshing. The catchy techno soundtracks also help to hold my interest.

Sega Dreamcast still alive and kicking!

Believe it or not, but there are two new games coming out for the Sega Dreamcast in early 2006! Yes, even though Sega pulled the plug on the Dreamcast two to three years ago, its big brother Naomi (still in use in arcades today) is having new games developed for it in Japan. Since the Dreamcast runs basically the same hardware as Naomi (less some texture memory), porting arcade games from Naomi to Dreamcast is relatively simple. There were a trickle of Naomi to Dreamcast ports released in 2004 and 2005, and now it looks like the trend is continuing into 2006. Sega was gracious (smart) enough to reopen Dreamcast licensing with these developers, and is even jumping on the marketing bandwagon by bundling new Dreamcast consoles with these games (only in Japan of course)!

Better yet, these two new arcade ports are exactly the style of game which I enjoy the most, vertical shooters. :-) The new games are Radilgy by Milestone (to be released 2/16/06), and Under Defeat by G.Rev (to be released 3/23/06). Preorders are open now at playasia.

Sample videos of each game are located on the sites linked above. If you can't find the Under Defeat ones, here is a complete Stage 2 replay.