I love my job at SEGA.

I had the chance to run through our Gamer’s Day presentations and got a first hand look at most of our release schedule in one concentrated dose. Normally, the Gamer’s Day is for Press and PR only, so this was quite a treat for me. I’m still very much a fan of Sega and the games we create; and having a chance to see our games demoed by their creators is always a thrill.

The rest of the gaming press has been writing on the day with their impressions of Gamer’s Day, as well as other companies that had showings last week. There’s a lot of good info out there on all of the titles shown, but I wanted to put together a quick rundown of some highlights for me. So of the day, here are some brief impressions of three games I saw:

Sonic Unleashed

The newest Sonic title is basically the game I’ve been waiting to play since I first saw high resolution shots of our favorite blue hedgehog. The graphics are simply amazing, Sonic has never looked better. The world is highly detailed, and the sense of speed has to be seen to be believed.

One of the few ‘wow’ moments for me was when the action swapped from 2D to 3D and Sonic was grinding a railing. From this vantage point, the next challenge was visible from afar and Sonic was racing towards it full speed. The draw distance was huge; you could really get a sense for how big the level was.

So far I’m amped to see how the game will come together; it looks like a good mix of great graphics, great controls, and great gameplay.

Sonic Chronicles

The one thing you don’t get a chance to see in the screens for Sonic Chronicles is how the environment looks in motion. This may seem like a simple thing, but it brings some life to the game that you just don’t see in static screenshots. Of the section we saw, there was noticeable depth to the area with billowing smoke from toxic pipes, surrounding lush green hills. Sonic Chronicles is looking like a lot of fun, and I’ll definitely be looking to play more with the build they had for the Gamer’s Day event.

Samba De Amigo

I actually own two original Samba controllers on the Dreamcast. Every now and again, we’ll break out the maraca boxes and make fools of ourselves to friends and family. I’m not terribly coordinated, but I love the game, and was thrilled to get a chance to actually play it at the Gamer’s Day.

So the big question is: how does Samba feel compared to the original? Pretty much the same! The Wii-motes are much lighter, that’s probably the only major difference I could tell right off. The play mechanics seemed identical, I was able to quickly jump in and start waving my arms like a Samba crazed maniac. It felt really good to play Samba again, and I’m looking forward to playing more of it in the office. This is big on my list to share with friends when it launches later this year.

So there you have it, those are my top picks from the day. I’m looking forward to seeing all our games come together, in addition to these three. If you haven’t already done so, please do check out the coverage across the major sites, there are a lot of good games coming out from SEGA and we had a great Gamer’s Day showing them to everyone.

If you haven’t seen all of the screenshots released for the day, do check out our Flikr page!

Just in time for the long weekend, the Samba Wii trailer that was debuted at our SEGA Gamer’s Day last week. It’s nice to see some fun put back into our trailers, I’m hoping this trend continues . Enjoy!

Unfortunately, the blog version of the video is a bit low in quality, but head over to the Youtube page and check the high quality version for the full experience.

http://www.youtube.com/user/SegaAmerica

Check out the first video in a series of behind the scenes movies dedicated to The Incredible Hulk video game.  The first video, The Beast Within, features a look into the development team that is creating the game along with some pretty early game footage.

We hope you enjoy the movie, be sure to check back for others as there a few more to be released!

Today we’re launching the first in many new blogs on Sonic Chronicles. Straight from the people working on Sonic Chronicles from behind the scenes, we’ll have new insights into what it’s like to work for a developer and publisher for the upcoming Nintendo DS title.

Please enjoy our first posting from Randall Bishop of BioWare, if you see something you like, post and tell us about it!

Five Reasons Why Working on Sonic Chronicles is Fun
Hello Sonic Fans! My name is Randall Bishop and I am the Assistant Brand Manager for the upcoming Nintendo DS game Sonic Chronicles. I work for a company called BioWare who is in charge of developing the game. I am the caretaker of the game when it comes to external communications, advertising plans, and messaging.

In other words, I am the marketing guy from a developer’s perspective. I also work very closely with the great people at Sega who are publishing the game. My typical day mostly revolves around writing emails, talking on the phone and attending meetings. But don’t let that fool you, my job can be pretty exciting! So I have made a list of the top 5 reasons why working on Sonic Chronicles is fun.

1. Sonic’s universe is incredibly vast – The sheer amount of detail that has been put into the Sonic universe throughout the years is astounding! Sega has obviously put in a lot of time and effort in creating this universe and it shows. You could spend an enormous amount of time familiarizing yourself with all the different stories, characters, and locations from past games and comics. It’s great to get lost in this world and discover how much fiction has been written on it. I think its quite an achievement for anyone to become an expert on Sonic the Hedgehog!

2. The art team here at BioWare is amazing – After our artists, I am luckily the first person to see the artwork produced for Sonic Chronicles; and that artwork is truly amazing! Once I get my hands on a piece of it, I circulate it throughout our marketing department so we can ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ahh’ over it. Our favorite type of artwork to look at is the world maps. The world maps are masterfully hand drawn and have an incredible amount of detail. We put these maps up on my 24 inch monitor and with our fingers trace out the path we want to take through the level and point out all the places we want to explore.

3. The game is amazing - Probably the coolest part of my job is that I often get to play the game in order to capture screenshots and videos. Let me switch gears for a second and not speak as a marketer, but as a gamer… Sonic Chronicles is great! For example: Burning around the map as Sonic while being chased by monsters, only to escape by flying across chasms as Rouge the bat is a blast. Also, exploring the maps to collect all the Chao eggs is pretty rewarding. Especially once the eggs hatch and you get to bring those Chao into battle with you and use their powers against your enemies. The combat is also really engaging since you can unlock devastating power moves by having the right combination of characters in your party. I also enjoy customizing the characters in my party so they fit my play style.

4. Its much less serious than our past work - Our past titles at BioWare have been fairly serious and had a more adult oriented theme, so it is refreshing to work within a world with a lighter tone. It brings back the raw enjoyment of gaming with all the bright colors, punchy sounds, and tongue in cheek dialogue. This makes you feel like a kid again; which we often have to do since to design a game for a kid, you need to think like one (What could be more fun?)

5. Small enthusiastic development team - One thing that I am not used to from my past marketing roles is working with people who are my age. Fortunately, many of the people who are developing Sonic Chronicles are around the same age as me. This means that the office culture is enthusiastic, innovative, fresh thinking, and very inspired to work with Sonic since the developers grew up playing these games. However, even though some of the members on the team may be younger, every member has a wealth of experience and are among the most talented in the industry. So we have a lot of fun, and board room meetings are not of the traditional type. It is not uncommon to start a meeting by talking about the latest games we have played, then be interrupted by a Nerf gun attack while we are drawing concept pictures of Sonic and his friends on a whiteboard. Also, the development team is fairly small, so everybody knows each other well. This makes work more like hanging out with your friends while creating something really cool.

Those in a nutshell are the five main reasons why working on Sonic Chronicles has been so enjoyable thus far. There are numerous other reasons, but if I was to list them all this would no longer be a blog – it would be a full website! Fortunately for our fans, I believe that the amount of pleasure we have had making the game will be dwarfed by the amount of fun they will have playing Sonic Chronicles.

At last month’s New York Comic-Con, everyone’s favorite blue dude with a ‘tude was hanging at the Archie Comic’s booth on 4/20/08 – Kids Day. The famous hedgehog delighted fans galore, posing for pictures, and shaking hands. Several thousand comics were given out for free as well as t-shirt prizes to anyone who answered comic Sonic trivia questions. Gotta make sure the fans are doing their homework!

About 65,000 to 70,000 people showed up during the four day long event. This year the booth was overwhelmingly positive of past shows and by far the busiest. Regardless of huge crowds, some days you couldn’t get near the booth, Sonic kept his cool and admirers smiling.

Fans even got a peak of the game cover of Sonic’s upcoming video game – “Sonic Chronicles, the Dark Brotherhood” for Nintendo DS. This highly anticipated RPG will hit stores this September.

Picture this:

Thirty people burst through the door at once; five of them start to ask questions, the other fifteen surround you, and the final ten start screaming bloody murder. On another monitor, ten more people are asking questions, more and more bodies are piling into the room – firing off queries, yelling complaints, and even asking what your favorite type of pie is – no, seriously. You are tasked with a goal that sounded deceptively simple at first: Respond to them. All sixty or so of them. At the same time.

If you couldn’t tell already, I’m having a blast with our new Live GM Support for Phantasy Star Universe! Even as sarcastic as that may come across, it really isn’t that bad if you have a lot of patience and can at least attempt to multi-task. Try hosting these sessions without said character traits, however, and repeated exposure will probably land you in a pretty room with white padded walls and bars on the windows before you make it through the first week. Anyone who has worked customer service before is currently nodding and smiling.

Over the last few weeks Chillaura and I have both been pioneering live, in-game GM Support for Phantasy Star Universe – something that is both new to the title and likewise a good step towards continuing to improve our quality of support online. It has been interesting, entertaining, and (at times) mind numbing.

The following is a mostly accurate excerpt from an actual support session:

GM: “There aren’t any new racial abilities announced at this time.”

Player: “Oh, but my friend told me there were. So what about the Black Nanoblast?”
GM: “That would be a racial ability. There aren’t any new ones announced currently.”

Player: “What about the Human Adrenaline rush?”

GM: “Racial. Ability.”

Player: (After a few seconds) “… Newman Summoning?”

GM: “Racial… No!”

Player 2: “What’s your favorite kind of pie?”

GM: “Apple.”

And that’s pretty much how it works at least three times a day. This is equally as impressive as the day when a three foot tall beast child walked up to me with puppy dog eyes and ventured “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

On the major plus side, we have been able to help a massive number of players in a much faster method than ever before. Live Support came into play just as the Playsega billing server went amok, so it was a good opportunity for us to talk to players about it and keep them in the loop. A few days of PC/PS2 support were spent almost entirely relaying information about progress on that issue alone, but having a point of contact – especially a live person – can make a world of difference when it comes to customer support.

We also recently announced a permanent Live Support Schedule that will run weekly even after Max Attack G is over. It includes a new UK friendly session, and can be found over at the PSU Forums.

Stay tuned for the second addition to the “So you want to work at SEGA?” series later this week.

Until then, we’ll catch you PSU players online!

I know more than a few of you are interested in what it’s like to work at a video game company, and from time to time we’ll try to give you a look at our ritzy, glamorous, fun-filled lives as gaming rockstars. Oh, wait, I’m thinking of someone else… scratch that.

Anyway, yesterday I got to head over to offices of Secret Level, the studio that just developed our Iron Man game and is hard at work on Golden Axe: Beast Rider. It was my first visit to their headquarters, which is only about six blocks from the SEGA offices in San Francisco and is situated in a great location right across from AT&T Park, the home of the Giants.

The building itself is brick both inside and out, and the interior workspace had a lot of character; it was fairly dark inside, but the walls are covered with concept art and posters from Golden Axe and various other games, and employees’ cubicles are also adorned with lots of pictures, action figures, and other random gaming paraphernalia. You definitely know that you’re at a gaming company when you’re inside, that’s for sure.

While Mike, our Golden Axe: Beast Rider product manager, received status updates on the game from various producers and artists, I tagged along and took a bunch of pictures, which I’ve posted on our Flickr account here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23380910@N04/sets/72157604845979266/

There are some decent Beast Rider concept art shots in there, as well as a look at a few computer screens that have various animatics and render art on them. There are a couple other office interior shots as well as a good shot (poached from the Secret Level website) from the roof of the building, showing the ballpark across the street. Finally, I’ve thrown in two exclusive preview screenshots and two new pieces of concept art from the game, so you can get a clearer idea of how Beast Rider is shaping up.

As for experiencing the game itself, I didn’t see any specific gameplay, but the art and renders I saw were pretty unique, and I did see a demo of Tyris riding one particular beast that will deal some severe swipe damage with its claws. There are several types of beast mounts in the game, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and my bet is that there will be points in the game where you have to ride a specific beast in order to accomplish certain goals — but that’s just a hunch.

FYI, our SEGA of America community team (Clumsy, EggShen and myself) are off on Sunday to London to meet with our European counterparts, so we’ll be a bit scarce for the next week. I’ll be back after that with tons of photos of Stonehenge, the Tower of London, and Shakespeare’s birthplace, which I know is all you guys want to see from our big England trip. Until then, happy gaming…

Yesterday we had a nice perk at SEGA and were treated to an advance showing of Iron Man! This was a very a nice ‘thank you’ from our HR department for everyone’s effort in making the Iron Man game come to life. I’m not a movie reviewer by any means, but I figured it would be fun to post some spoiler-free notes on the blog about the day out.

So on the film, my expectations were medium-to-low based on some good trailers, but it was fun to get out of the office and hang out with friends. I’ve been somewhat let down by recent summer blockbuster movies and didn’t think Iron Man would be much different. With that in mind, I’m quite happy to say that the movie was fantastic and I was pretty much wrong across the board.

Why so good? The movie is a full package; it has great acting, good believable story, and solid action. The Iron Man suit looks good and fits into the world quite well, rather than having a poorly done CG moment that looks comically bad from the get go. The actors don’t take a backseat to the special effects, and I never felt disconnected when watching the action sequences.

On the acting side, both Robert Downey Jr. and Jeff Bridges (among others) are great, which is too be expected, but they really own the roles they play. You’ll have to see this for yourself to really appreciate it. On action, the movie does not disappoint and keeps the bigger thrills in check alongside the story. And yes, there actually is a story that is worth watching, and it will keep you interested to the end.

So that’s about as spoiler-free as I can do without going into too much detail on specifically why all of these factors make the movie enjoyable. I can say without a doubt that I had fun and it seems that most the office did too, as it has even come up a few times just this morning. Both the Iron Man Movie and Game will be out this Friday, so be sure to check them out – I’d love to see your impressions!

Iron Man Movie Website

Iron Man Game Website