Naoki Horii

Posted on 6 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Switch eShop | 0 comments

With SEGA Ages, while the classic games themselves are exciting to see on Switch, fans have also been very curious about what could lie ahead for the series in the future. We’ve already seen that the team is interested in possibly bringing over Dreamcast games. One thing that hasn’t been brought up, however, is the possibility of releasing titles from the SEGA NAOMI arcade board – until now.

In an interview with Game Watch, M2 president Naoki Horii revealed that the team is researching SEGA NAOMI’s titles for Switch. In fact, there’s one unnamed game in particular that they intend to release due to their own personal interest.

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More: interview, Kagasei Shimomura, M2, Naoki Horii, SEGA, SEGA Ages, top

Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS eShop, General Nintendo, News | 7 Comments

There’s a new interview on SEGA’s website with Yosuke Okunari, Kagasei Shimomura, and Naoki Horii. The three developers spoke about the SEGA 3D Classics Collection, which you can read in full right here. One section in particular is worth mentioning specifically.

Shimomura brings up some of the game ideas that were considered before Power Drift was settled on. That eventually leads Horii to say that he wants to see Alien Syndrome realized as a 3D Classic in the future. Adding to this, the team “did a little test on it to see how it would turn out and it was great.” It’s just that there would be a significant amount of effort doing that for all stages.

Here’s the complete interview excerpt:

KS: So rewinding a little bit, before we settled on Power Drift, we had a couple of titles to choose from for this. We talked about Alien Syndrome, Golden Axe, Turbo Out Run, and even Columns.

NH: (looks at the lineup list) These are pretty bold choices.

– I’d like to see Alien Syndrome someday. Stereoscopic 3D would be really effective in that game.

NH: Oh that game is amazing. We did a little test on it to see how it would turn out and it was great. Although, doing every single stage would be quite an effort.

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More: interview, Naoki Horii, top

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS eShop, General Nintendo, News | 16 Comments

SEGA and M2 have worked together to recreate many classic titles on 3DS. We’ve seen the likes of 3D Sonic the Hedgehog, 3D Gunstar Heroes, and 3D Streets of Rage – among many others. But there’s one title the two companies wish they could have recreated for the handheld: the arcade version of Virtua Racing.

Take a look at this excerpt from an interview with SEGA producer Yosuke Okunari and M2 president Naoki Horii:

Is there a title you wish you could have converted?

YO: That would have to be the arcade version of Virtual Racing for me. It hasn’t ever been faithfully ported. There’re four ports to date: Mega Drive, 32X, SEGA Saturn, and Playstation, but none of them stayed true to the original.

The Mega Drive and 32X versions were amazing at the time, but I wish more attention went to Virtual Racing rather than Virtual Fighter. I wasn’t too impressed with Winning Run (racing game developed by Namco at the time), which was released earlier, butVirtual Racing really caught my attention. The 30 FPS framerate gave it a smoother effect compared to other games like Hard Driving and Winning Run.

There was also a Grand Prix mode, where people could play 15 rounds for 200 yen when popularity started to die. I remember having so much fun playing with three other people and figuring out when to replace the worn out tires at the pits. I do feel that I want to re-experience that some day. Many have told me that there’s no reason to bring it back when there’s so many amazing racing games out there, but I’ve got a lot of great memories associated with that game, so I’d love to bring it back if I had the chance.

NH: I got to say, I agree. I’d say Virtual Racing since I like to work on those primitive era games.

– Despite this maybe being the end of the SEGA 3D Remaster Project, I really hope you can make those happen.

YO: Seriously! But I wonder how many of these “final episode” interviews we’ve had regarding this project. Back during Batch 1’s 3D Streets of Rage episode, I was the one who suggested to put “Farewell!” as the title! I thought that was going to be be the end of the interviews.

You can read up on the full interview here. There are lots of interesting comments about the development of 3D Sonic the Hedgehog 2!

More: interview, M2, Naoki Horii, SEGA, Yosuke Okunari