News

Thursday News Bits

In hopes of making up for the Square-less summer we had last year, Square announced a new ad campaign focused on Legend of Mana, Threads of Fate (formerly Dew Prism), and Chrono Cross. Each title will be released consecutively each month of summer in the order mentioned. Those who preorder one of these at participating retailers will receive a Music Selections audio CD for that particular title. Track selections have not been disclosed yet. Those who preorder all three titles will not only get all three cds (what a concept!) but will also receive a tres chic Summer of Adventure 2000 backpack-knapsack-thingee. Participating retailers are Electronics Boutique, Babbage's, FuncoLand, and Software Etc.

For all you Tokimemo fans, Konami has announced that a new drama series will be released for the Playstation. Each volume of Tokimeki Memorial 2 Drama Series will focus on each of the girls from Tokimeki Memorial 2. The first volume is scheduled for this summer.

On May 1, Enix will be putting an i-mode Dragon Quest game on NTT DoCoMo cellular terminals, which is called Dragon Quest Net. It will consist of two games, a casino and a card game, for play over cellular phones. The games have a monthly fee of 100 yen ($0.95 in U.S. dollars) per month. More Dragon Quest mini games are to be put into the server later this year.

Sentimental Graffiti 2 has once again been postponed by NEC Interchannel. The game, which was originally scheduled to be released in January to mark the two year anniversary of the original, was then pushed back to April 27th. Subsequently, Sentimental Graffiti 2 has now been delayed to an indeterminate date of July.

The Dreamcast love adventure game, Memories Off ~ Complete has been pushed back from May to June. The Dreamcast version is reported to have a new theme song, new scenes, and is able to exchange data with the Neo Geo Pocket version of the game. Yes, another reason to use that DC to NGPC cable I bought so long ago that's been collecting dust!

NEC Home Electronics, the creators of the PC-Engine/Turbografx-16 and developers of Seventh Cross and Sengoku Turb, shut down their game software development department on March 31. They reported that they will develop no more game software until further notice. This doesn't effect NEC Interchannel, however, which is a different subsidiary of NEC and is still in business.

A new Dreamcast RPG is being developed by Sega. Love Hina is based on the new Japanese manga of the same name.

On April 3rd, Electronics Boutique issued a press release stating that they had acquired Funcoland. Yes, this means that Electronics Boutique is now the largest retailer of video games in the world! This also means that Game Informer Magazine is now owned by Electronics Boutique. Funcoland Stores, however, will retain their name, though no word yet about whether they will continue to specialize in older and used games.

Source(s):

Magic Box
The GIA

Date Updated:
April 6th, 2000

Time Updated:
5:04 PM


Sumire Kanzaki


Back