We’re excited about going back to Seattle for PAX Prime 2011! SEGA will be on the show floor in booth 3625, and will have games, swag, fun, and more! The list of games that will be at our booth includes:

• Aliens: Colonial Marines
• Binary Domain
• Renegade Ops
• Rise of Nightmares
• Shinobi
• Sonic Generations
• The House of the Dead: OVERKILL – Extended Cut

In addition to games, we’ll also have some awesome swag items for you to pick up. Some items are free to take, others require you to do something to get them. What will we have, and what do you have to do? We don’t want to spoil all the surprises for you, so you’ll have to stop by our booth to find out!

Attention cosplayers! If you’re wearing a SEGA-related costume, we want your photo! Find me (I’ll be at the reception desk) or Julian (he’ll be near Shinobi) and we’ll snap your photo for the blog.

SEGA PAXtravaganza at GameWorks

We got so many compliments about how fun our PAXtravaganza party was last year. Well, we thought so too, so we’re doing it again! We will have 2 hours of free arcade play, a raffle for some special prizes, food, drinks, and fun! This party is open to the public (you don’t need a PAX badge to attend) and is open to all ages. We are letting people in on a first-come, first served basis and once we reach the venue’s capacity, we will be letting more people in as people leave.

Who: Open to the public, all ages allowed!

Where: GameWorks, 1511 7th Avenue, Seattle, WA

When: Saturday, August 27th from 6:00 PM until 12:00 AM

Food & Drink: We will have food and non-alcoholic drinks available for everyone. If you are 21 or older and would like to drink alcohol, you will be carded and given a wristband at the door. Alcohol will be served in the bar area only.

Game Play: You will receive a card good for 2 hours of free game play from the time you first start playing. You can re-load the card if you wish to keep playing after 2 hours. The card works in all arcade machines in GameWorks. We will not have any demos of games from the show floor at GameWorks.

Prizes: We will be raffling off 20 pieces (one per winner) of rare custom-made merchandise. But we’re not going to tell you what it is yet! Trust us though, you want it.

We created a Facebook event page for the event that  you can RSVP on. Please note that doing so is optional and does not guarantee your entry to the party!

#SEGAPAX

We’ll be tweeting photos and updates from the show! Use and follow #SEGAPAX for all the tweets about our booth, our games, our party at Gameworks, or anything you find that’s PAX and SEGA related.

We’ll also be updating our Facebook pages and this blog with news, photos, updates, and more throughout the show.

LONDON (August 11th, 2011) – Sports Interactive Ltd. & SEGA® Europe Ltd. today unveiled the latest version of their successful football management simulation series, Football Manager™ 2012. Planned to be in stores before Christmas, Football Manager 2012 will once again allow you to take charge of your favourite football team and put your managerial skills to the test.

The award-winning Football Manager series has now sold in excess of 7 million copies worldwide and has topped the UK and many European PC charts for the last seven years, with over 108 weeks at no.1 in the UK to date.

“We’re delighted to finally be able to start talking about Football Manager 2012” said Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive. “It’s another year of evolution, with some revolution thrown in for good measure so we’re pretty sure our dedicated communities, and hopefully lots of new people too, get to play and enjoy the game when it’s released later in the year.”

Counting over 800 new features, not including changes to the rules of the games 50+ leagues, Football Manager 2012 promises to be the most realistic, immersive and playable football management simulation ever for any fan who has ever dreamed of making the big decisions, both on and off the field.

Key new & improved features for Football Manager 2012:

Transfers & Contracts – significant changes to the transfer and contract systems, including loyalty bonuses, better implementation of amateur and youth contracts, an improved transfer centre and the ability to lock areas of the contract negotiation when you aren’t prepared to budge. This helps you to manage your budgets and gives you flexibility in what you offer money hungry players, or agents, as incentives.

Scouting improvements – using several real life scouting reports, a new in-game report has been devised which includes squad analysis, tactics information and information about goals scored and conceded alongside lots of other scouting improvements, giving you all the information you need to prepare before kick-off and throughout the season.

3D Match Improvements – new animations, a whole new crowd system, improved weather system, more stadiums, plus two brand new cameras – “Behind Goal” and “Director Cam” as well as all other camera angles being reversible – meaning you can watch and analyse every aspect of every game.

Manage Anywhere, Anytime – the ability to add or take away playable nations in your saved game as often as you want. Manage in that country at the start of the next season- meaning you don’t have to stay in the nations which are chosen by you to be playable at the start of your career.

Tone – a whole new level has been added to team talks and conversations, with the new tone system, which allows you to specify the way you want to say things – be as cool as a cucumber by saying things calmly or throw tea cups around by saying things with passion. There are 6 different tones to choose from with specific comments per tone.

Intelligent Interface – a new adaptive layout system, which means the higher your screen resolution, the more info is easily at your fingertips. The new interface also contains new filters, customisable columns, a new tactics screen, and lots of new overview screens.

Brand New Tutorial – standing separate from the main game, a mode to help new players find their way around the game easily, whilst also offering tips to experienced managers on how to get the most out of the game, as well as a new in-game “how to” system.

On top of these key innovations, there are lots of areas of the game that have had huge improvements, such as the media system, press conferences, the youth system, newgens, the social networking options, friendlies, international management and many more which will be detailed in a series of video blogs over the coming months, alongside more information about Football Manager 2012.

For further information please go to www.sigames.com or www.footballmanager.com.

Adaptive Layout – Home Screen

Conversation Tone

Match Engine Video

Adaptive Layout Video

Our events & media manager Teri, with our Dreamcast Collection shirts from E3 2010

It feels sooooo good to be back! We’ve really missed blogging about all the cool stuff happening here at SEGA, and we’ve really missed reading all your comments, too. There’s lots of content to catch up on, and we’ll be doing just that over the next few weeks. We’ve also got exciting new stuff coming up. But for now, we wanted to catch you up on some of the changes we made while we were away,  so you don’t stub your toe on our new furniture, so to speak.

Blog Merge

Kellie (me!) enjoying a post-event drink at Sonic Boom 2011.

As you may know, we’ve maintained a few different blogs under the SEGA umbrella for a while now — the SEGA America blog, the SEGA Europe blog, and the Sonic blog included. What we’ve found is that we’re often posting the same content in multiple places — and this is more work for us and not as much new content for you. So we’ve condensed all of those blogs into one single blog (which  you are now reading). Community managers from both sides of the pond will be updating this new blog, and we hope this makes for a more consistent and unifying experience for everyone. We also promise to be as globally inclusive as we can by remembering to specify when promotions, release dates, etc are only for one country or another. But please be patient with us if we mess up occasionally, as this is a new blogging experience for all of us.

Because of this merge, we have a new URL — http://blogs.sega.com — and you may need to update your RSS feeds (if you read us via RSS) because of this. We have put redirects in place for our old URLs, so hopefully we don’t lose too many of you along the way.

I see some of you Sonic fans out there with pouty faces, because you enjoyed reading a blog that was only about Sonic and not our other titles. Well, first of all, I would suggest that you give reading our entire blog a chance, because  you might find something that you really like. But if you really just want only Sonic, we can help you out! The old Sonic Blognik URL redirects to a space on our blog that aggregates all of the Sonic posts on the blog in one spot. If you want all Sonic and only Sonic, this is the place to go.

New Look

Mark (Associate Producer) and Judy (Sr. Brand Manager working on Sonic) play bouncer at E3 2011.

The original structure of our blog is still the same — a 3 column layout with categories on the left and other fun stuff on the right. But we’ve made a few updates and hope you’ll take advantage of them!

First, you might have noticed our new banner, featuring Sonic. A lot of the characters in our old banner were a bit dated, so we’ve changed to a fresh look. Along with the new banner, you may notice that the splotchy background (or blue circles, if you are used to the Sonic blog) is gone and has been replaced with a clean, white background. We also placed links to our social media sites in the banner for easy access. (For ESRB reasons, the Flickr and YouTube point to the SegaAmerica accounts, but the Sega Europe Flickr and YouTube accounts are still active!)

The category list is still on the left, and still takes you directly to any specific game or event you want to see all of our blog entries on. We moved it up the page to make it more prominent and accessible, to help you find what you’re looking for more quickly. We also kept the calendar on the upper right side of the blog, in case you prefer to search for an entry by date instead of subject.

We put some new stuff on the right side, too. We added a Twitter widget, which shows the most recent tweets from the SEGA account. We also added a Facebook friend box for the SEGA page, so you can “like” us right from the blog.

Our final big change, and one that we are all VERY excited about, is the addition of social media sharing buttons on every blog entry. Now you can “like” and share our content on Facebook, give us a +1 on Google+, submit our article to StumbleUpon, or tweet a link to our article on your Twitter. We hope this helps you share our content with your friends and help us spread the SEGA love all around the interwebs!

Welcome Back!

Matt (Associate Producer) and Julian (Clumsyorchid, Community Manager) at San Diego Comic Con 2011

We also made some more minor updates while we were away, like upgrading to a new version of WordPress. We think we’ve got all the bugs ironed out, but if you see something you think shouldn’t be happening (or don’t see something you think should be happening) please let us know in the comments.

What hasn’t changed is our commitment to bringing you all the best SEGA-related news and awesome stuff from around the web. And as you’ve seen in this entry, we like to highlight the people who work here at SEGA. We want you to know that there are real people on this end that are just as passionate about our games and our company as you are. We also love to highlight our fans, because you guys make awesome fan art, come to conventions in amazing costumes, and are just all-around the best fans ever.

We’re thrilled to welcome you back to the new and hopefully improved SEGA blog! Let us know what  you think in the comments. And don’t forget to like/+1/submit/tweet about us on your way down to the comment box.