Although we didn’t produce any April Fools hijinks ourselves yesterday, there were quite a few April Fools stories that did involve SEGA. Please note that all of these stories were jokes, written by others, and are not in any way true, official or actually happening. Got it? Good.

@alexissantos from VG Tribune sent us a joke article about the Dreamcast 3, complete with faked-up photo and “tipster”.

@dannycosta sent us a story from new SEGA fan blog SEGA Neptune that details two SEGA-themed jokes — Daytona USA and Shenmue 3. The Daytona story is from Games Wire, which doctored up some images from the Dreamcast version and announced that Daytona USA would be on XBLA. The Shenmue 3 story cames from Game Reactor and is all in another language (Sweedish?) and unfortunately, I couldn’t find an English version. (If anyone can translate, please leave it in the comments!)

@warrenprice was the first of many to send us Gamespot’s story about Colonial Marines invading our Tokyo HQ. In a related story, Consumerist included Weyland-Yutani in their “Worst Companies in America” series. Cyberdyne Systems beat Weyland-Yutani 66%/34% though, so maybe Consumerist voters hadn’t heard Gamespot’s report of the Colonial Marines takeover of our offices. (Or, maybe they had.)

@c3Mike sent us Cubed3′s faux-discovery of a Sonic 4 trailer. They even went so far as to make the faux-trailer!

@seganerds had a nice recap of some April Fools jokes as well. They linked to a Siliconera story about SEGA of Japan’s prank of releasing a 7th Dragon movie (site in Japanese). They also linked to a story from Emerald Coast about a new Sonic game called Sonic Speed that would be all hand-drawn.

Thanks to everyone who submitted links to us via Twitter. If you saw a SEGA-themed April Fools article not mentioned here, please leave it in the comments!

The Games Developers Conference has come and gone, but with it we’ve had some excellent coverage come out for The Conduit. Matt Corso, the Art and Creative director for High Voltage Software, was on hand to demo the game and show off the first level to a select few on the Conference.

The coverage is a mix of video and article previews, the best of which being an 11 minute walkthrough featured on Gamespot! This shows off a lot of the customization options available in The Conduit, as well as highlighting some story and key gameplay mechanics.

Here’s a quick summary of the top articles from around the web on The Conduit:

Computer & Videogames has a great Interview with Joshua Olson, discussing Wii graphics, the competition, and more…

Gamepro had a chance to check out The Conduit and added it as one of the best games shown at the GDC event.

Thatvideogameblog enjoyed the Conduit, especially the customization elements for the hud and button placement. Look for Conduit coverage towards the end of the article.

Gamedaily loved the non-stop action and the advanced lighting effects of the All Seeing Eye.

Entertainment Weekly picked The Conduit for one of the 16 Reasons Gamers will Love Spring 09.

See something conduit related that isn’t listed? Let me know, I’d love to read about it and send it around for all to see.

The date is September 29th, 1996.

A SEGA Saturn game is just about to release – upon launch the next day, it will be one of the most advanced games of its time, boasting impressive graphics, CG movies using motion capture, a quirky but well-written storyline, and a soundtrack by a master guitarist. It’s a game about an evil vampire, a skeleton with a guitar, and the sweet sound of the blues. The game spanned two full discs, and was appropriately titled: Mr. Bones.

I picked up Mr. Bones when I was still pretty young. Unsure what to expect (How often do you see Skeletons with Guitars on the front of your games?), I popped it in and soon stumbled upon what would be one of my favorite games on the SEGA Saturn. So earlier this week, when I dug through the Box of Awesome and found this soundtrack, you can imagine how quickly the memories returned:

The music was ripped to my computer within five minutes of arriving home that night.

Just in case you haven’t seen Mr. Bones before, here’s a quick video of the game in action – the movies looked fantastic for the time, the music was done by guitar legend Ronnie Montrose, and the storyline – as you can tell by the script in this clip – was certainly written by someone with a great sense of humor, who was able to take a fairly wacky idea and bring it to life.

“Do you think he’s dead, Bob?”
“Of course he’s dead. Look at him.”
“Maybe we should tie him up, to be on the safe side, Bob?”
“Tie him up? What for? He’s dead… Jim.”

If you found that interesting, you should also check out the other videos of the game, especially the concert level with skeletons holding lighters – or are those lit fingers? I love it when a game knows not to take itself too seriously.

Next up in the box is another soundtrack – this also released in 1996, but it speaks to a number of games from the Genesis/CD/Saturn era – the official “SEGA Powercuts 1″ music CD.

The CD uses the term ‘Slammin’ on the front, a bit of evidence that things have changed over the years. Still, that’s a pretty fantastic roster of games on the album. Sonic, Vectorman, Panzer Dragoon, Ecco, Bug!, and more? The only one that I question is the one called Wild Woody, a video game that – perhaps rightly – has not withstood the test of time.

Tomorrow is our final day in the SEGA Merch series, and we’re going to jump forward in time to the Dreamcast era where we began. We certainly can’t give credit to all those Dreamcast classics with a simple handbag, right?

If you’re a fan of the Virtua Tennis series, the all-new website for Virtua Tennis 2009 has gone live! (If you’re not a fan of the Virtua Tennis series, then you need to play more Virtua Tennis.)

You can check out the Virtua Tennis 2009 website here, or you can click on the pretty picture below, which works just as well.

Speaking of screenshots, a whole batch of new Virtua Tennis shots went out this week! There are a lot of new images from the 360/PS3 version of the game, which are looking very nice – you can check them out here on our Flickr stream!

Virtua Tennis is set to come out this spring, which means it’s almost here. (Judging by the weather here in San Fran, at least, I’d say spring has already arrived.) My SEGA-Senses are telling me that there’s a lot of cool Virtua Tennis 2009 stuff in the pipeline to release soon, so fans of the series should keep an eye on the (virtual) ball – just make sure not to hit any people – or birds.