SEGA announces: JSR/crazy taxi/streets of rage and more!

Obviously it's tough to get a gauge on the quality of the games since we only see such a short clip of each, but here it goes:

I looks like SoR is in the vein of a 3D beat-em-up (I suppose in a similar direction as the rumored DC SoR 4 game that was canceled? It has a bit of that over embellished musculature in the character designs that makes it look like a modern fighting game.

JSR does look graphically similar to that "leaked" image that came out about a year or so ago. Looks pretty awesome. I liked Bomb Rush Cyberfunk but was left wanting a more polished experience, so I'm hoping this game follows through on that.

Crazy Taxi looks solid and I hope that Sega haven't lost their touch with making arcade racers.

I'm on the fence on whether I like the art style of Shinobi, where it has that "animation frames are missing" look. But really excited for it nonetheless. A 3D game could be a tall order given the high quality of modern action games, so 2D was a good choice, especially if it was outsourced.

Golden Axe didn't look as exciting for me, but I'm curious if it's a 3D brawler, or if they go in a sort of action-adventure/RPG direction.

All 5 of these are from series I like (though I probably played Crazy Taxi the least), so I hope that all 5 are solid showings to each franchise!
 
Call me crazy but I would kind of love to see SEGA go all out adding guest characters into Crazy Taxi. Especially if they push it as a Games As Service type release.

Could you imagine if they introduced Ryo and his forklift as a guest DLC character for Crazy Taxi? :p Crazy drifting around San Fran with Ryo and his forklift picking people up. I'd be all for that!

I'm very curious about the Hot Pursuit aspect they showed in the trailer. If the online multiplayer side of it is fun then I could see myself getting hooked all over again. I do love Crazy Taxi afterall. Only other thing I could hope for is The Offspring and Bad Religion on the soundtrack with maybe a mix of new thrown in as well. Give me at least ALL I WANT!

Milk us with fan service!

JSR 3 = about time! Granted, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk did very well to scratch the itch but yeah I'm ready for a new JSR game from SEGA themselves. Hopefully they nail the control and get it right both style wise and gameplay wise.

Shinobi looks absolutely awesome to me. Golden Axe and Streets of Rage could go either way at this point. Hoping for the best but yeah, they could go either way.

For me, Crazy Taxi, JSR and Shinobi were the ones that stood out to me the most.
 
I think I was right to be concerned about Streets of Rage. It looks like it's being developed by Komi Games, and from what I can see, they have developed a total of 2 games. This is one of the reasons why I said Sega are disrespecting their older ips a few weeks back. They are outsourcing them to no name dev teams or low budget companies.

The small bit we did see of Streets of Rage looks like Mighty Fight Federation, one of those games developed by Komi Games, and it's art style is not what I would like to see from a Streets of Rage game. It even looks like it plays kind of similar with it's camera angles.

The only one I am confident will be good is Shinobi. The others look considerably low budget. Jet Set Radio could go either way and looks like the one that is getting the most budget allocated to it.
 
Streets of Rage 4 was fully funded, developed and published by other studios, Sega gained nothing from it. So I suspect this time around it will be the same, with the only difference being that Sega will publish the games. This is where they stand to make profit on the games. I suspect that the only money Sega are putting towards these games is marketing and development is being fully funded by these third party studios.

So when Sega said they are bringing back old ips, what they really meant was that they are outsourcing them to third party studios and they would slap their name on it.
 
Hermit said:
Streets of Rage 4 was fully funded, developed and published by other studios, Sega gained nothing from it. So I suspect this time around it will be the same, with the only difference being that Sega will publish the games. This is where they stand to make profit on the games. I suspect that the only money Sega are putting towards these games is marketing and development is being fully funded by these third party studios.

So when Sega said they are bringing back old ips, what they really meant was that they are outsourcing them to third party studios and they would slap their name on it.
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Sega sure as heck got royalties from SoR 4, but you have a point, putting inexperienced small Western studios on such IPs does leave a sour taste in my mouth.

I still remember the borderline unplayable state the S1 & 2 remasters were released in. They were mostly Sega of Europe's project who put the small British studio D3T in charge . Now I'm not blaming D3T, the project was simply too big for them. It took Eigo Kasahara, who had been a project director on the original games, from senior management in Japan to put his foot down. He was understandably outraged when he found out what state the remasters were released in and insisted on it being patched. They even delayed the Japanese release because of the fuckton of bugs it had been released with in the West. I even remember us here at the Dojo forums doing most of the Q&A testing for D3T. We even had a bug template here at the forums and reported dozens of bugs to Sega Europe.

So yeah, now that you mention it, small Western studios and old Sega IPs do raise some question marks.
 
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hyo_razuki said:
Sega sure as heck got royalties from SoR 4, but you have a point, putting inexperienced small Western studios on such IPs does leave a sour taste in my mouth.

I still remember the borderline unplayable state the S1 & 2 remasters were released in. They were mostly Sega of Europe's project who put the small British studio D3T in charge . Now I'm not blaming D3T, the project was simply too big for them. It took Eigo Kasahara who from senior management in Japan to put his foot down. He was understandably outraged when he found out what state the remasters were released in. I even remember us here at the Dojo forums doing most of the Q&A testing for D3T. We even had a bug template here at the forums and finde dozens of bugs to Sega Europe.

So yeah, now that you mention it, small Western studios and old Sega IPs do raise some question marks.
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Remember the abandoned remake / remaster that Digital Foundry reported on a few years ago? That was D3T's original job before Sega cancelled it and had them work on the rereleases instead. How Sega could ever think such a small studio is capable of pulling that kind of thing off is mind boggling. They just don't have the experience or funding to pull it off successfully.
 
Sega also put Ultimatum Games in charge of porting the PC version of the game to the Microsoft store..........Ultimatum Games have since shut down.
 
I was skeptical at first because I had doubts that Sega was going to match the unique art style of the original games. It is too early for the final verdict of course but the trailer is promising. At least the art style of the games does not look that bad.
 
Dietsoap said:
That's surprising. The question for me now is: SoJ? Or one of the western branches?
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It's Sega of Japan. Division 3, which is headed by Yuya Kimura, is the division that I am hearing is in charge of Jet Set Radio. They are also in charge of PSO2: New Genesis development, something I think has been more of a miss than a hit. They are also the division that is developing the first of Sega's so called super games.

My main concern is that they are mostly known for developing GaaS games. I hope that isn't what Jet Set Radio ends up becoming.
 
Hermit said:
Streets of Rage 4 was fully funded, developed and published by other studios, Sega gained nothing from it. So I suspect this time around it will be the same, with the only difference being that Sega will publish the games. This is where they stand to make profit on the games. I suspect that the only money Sega are putting towards these games is marketing and development is being fully funded by these third party studios.

So when Sega said they are bringing back old ips, what they really meant was that they are outsourcing them to third party studios and they would slap their name on it.
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Sega definitely got a share of the money as they hold SoR IP. It's not like they sold the IP to Lizardcube or anything.

And I don't see what's wrong with outsourcing to indie dev studios.
Lizardcube started with Wonderboy and then delivered SoR4; both titles are highly regarded.
Headcannon was also very indie when it made Sonic Mania, and we all know how that went...

Sure, other titles don't live up to the original, but that could have been made internally at Sega with similar results. The fact a studio is not part of Sega is very irrelevant. In fact, I believe a very passionate small team who grew up loving a specific IP would do a better job than a more experienced one, even with a smaller budget.
Internal devs at Sega are busy on other (successful) IPs, so putting together a team and having them working together properly takes time. It's easier to outsource to a team who is already set up.

Companies don't make games; people do. Money is important to hire the right people, but throwing more money in a project (or keeping it in-house) doesn't necessarily bring better results.

That said, Shinobi is the one I look forward the most. I'm glad Lizardcube is working on it.
 
Not so great news / rumours when it comes to Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi.
Both will be GaaS games, exactly what I feared. Jet Set Radio will have guns and similar to Fortnite when it comes to gamplay.


Take it with a grain of salt for now though. It could easily just be somebody looking for likes.
 
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Hermit said:
Not so great news / rumours when it comes to Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi.
Both will be GaaS games, exactly what I feared. Jet Set Radio will have guns and similar to Fortnite when it comes to gamplay.


Take it with a grain of salt for now though. It could easily just be somebody looking for likes.
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i doubt jsr will have guns. more likely be a single player game with online element like a spray paint "tagging" battles (multiplayer - graffiti as many locations as possible to win?)
 
red said:
i doubt jsr will have guns. more likely be a single player game with online element like a spray paint "tagging" battles (multiplayer - graffiti as many locations as possible to win?)
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Apparently this person has a 100% track record when it comes to leaks and rumours.
 
I was reading through the Twitter thread more and Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi are getting remakes first, then they will release reboots of the games as GaaS titles.

The reboots will be f2p and the remakes will be full price games.
 
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