While Gamingmaxx took a little vacation from updates, a few friends and myself took a vacation to good ol Disney World for a weekend. On one of those days, we visited Epcot – probably the closest thing to an educational theme park as you can get. As you may have seen in a news story several months back, Sega and the Dreamcast are now a part of a large “Expo” style area called Innoventions. The area is spread out over 4 large exhibition style halls and is chock full of “up and coming” technologies.
Most of the stuff there is pretty interesting, with TV that talks back to you and a very wide array of interactive things.
Most relevant of course to video games is the “video game” section (imagine that!). Lo’ and behold, according to Epcot, the future of video games is Sega and its mighty Dreamcast machine.
The DC area takes up about 1500 sq feet or so.
This seems to be about the average – other companies such as IBM, that have their own areas too and seem to be about the same size. In the DC area there are 8 or 9 rows of DC machines – each row has 5 DCs accompanied by 5 19″ TVs. Off the top of my head, I saw these games available to play – Trickstyle, NFL2K, NBA2K, Flag to Flag, Sega Rally 2, https://www.myboosting.gg/rocket-league-boosting and a few others. Most noteworthy was a very nice suprise – a playable form of Shenmue.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to play Shen Mue as much as I would like (the friends I went with aren’t big gaming fans and were about to start beating me) so I got in about 5 minutes or so of play time. The game was either a full Japanese version or was just a demo of some sort. To be honest, it was difficult to get through the Japanese to figure out what to do. While I can hardly give you the amount of information or content that some other sites have on the import title, I’ll throw in a very brief first impression on the title.
Visually, the game impressed me, the faces are as great as you’ve heard, and are nice clean smooth sheets of skin.
The cities are really fantastic and the variation in the landscape is unsurpassed. People wander the city going on with their lives it seems. One of my friends behind me was watching me play and while I was running through the streets, he joked “Go buy a coke” when he saw the coke machine. When I walked over and got one, he was in total shock, and just about grabbed the controller from me. Control was very simple, and basic movement, running, walking, etc. took about 10 seconds (literally) to get a hold of. I really can’t say much about the gameplay, story or other facets of the game. There was only minimal sound and no music, so I can’t comment there either. What I can say is that I want the game more and more, and playing it has really made me look forward to the US release.
As for the exhibit in general, Sega seems dedicated to actually showing off new titles and keeping the exhibit up to date with current releases.
The Epcot park gets tens of thousands of visitors daily, and the display is a nice way to introduce people to Sega games (you won’t find Nintendo or Sony anywhere in the place). Whether or not it has a significant impact on the video game market, the answer is no. However, its a nice diversion from much of the other things at Epcot, and might drive a few consoles from store shelves.
