P L A Y S T A T I O N   2

- Enix announced delays for two game titles. Dragon Quest Monsters 1 & 2 for PlayStation has been postponed from March 31 to sometimes this spring. Star Ocean 3: Till the End of Time is also delayed from March to sometimes this summer.

- Climax has officially announced Runabout 3: Neo Age for PlayStation 2, a new installment of the popular mission based racing action game. This time the game takes place entirely in the New York City, there will be over 30 missions and dozens of vehicles to choose from, including tanks, motorcycle, bus, fire truck, taxi, 4 wheeler, construction car and many more. There is a new drift-crash system in the game, which allows you to earn bonus scores by destroying certain objects in the race course, such as "shoot-down marks" and bonus chips on the road. At the same time you will receive penalties if your vehicle exceeds a certain level of damage. Runabout 3: Neo Age is scheduled for release in Japan in May.

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- D3 Publisher will release Simple 2000 Series Vol. 2 Edit Racing for PlayStation in Japan on March 28, for 2000 yen. A racing game developed by Yuke's. This game features a Course Edit function, in which a race course can be automatically generated by insert any CD or DVD into the PS2 drive, that means you have an unlimited amount of race courses available in the game! There are 40 playable cars in the game, each one has 12 color variations, and there are 12 playable drivers to choose from. There are also a couple of mini games, such as a "Survivor Mode", in which you have to destroy the opponent car within the time limit.

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- Gust has postponed the release date of their PlayStation 2 RPG Atelier Judie: The Alchemist of Guramnat by one month from May to June.

G A M E C U B E

- Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported that Square and Nintendo have reached an agreement to bring the Final Fantasy series back to both Nintendo GameCube and GameBoy Advance. A new Square subsidiary "Game Designer Studio" will be handling the GameCube and GameBoy Advance versions of Final Fantasy; the affiliated studio will be headed by Akitoshi Kawazu, who developed the Legend of Mana and Final Fantasy series. The studio will be funded by Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi's Fund Q, a fund setup by Yamauchi to encourage game development. Final Fantasy game titles are expected to be released for both platforms by the end of the year. Square mentioned that PlayStation 2 will remain as their main platform, FFXI and FFXII, etc. are still scheduled to release on PS2.

- Square's new affiliate Game Designer Studio is established by a capital of 10,000,000 yen, Akitoshi Kawazu will own 51% of the company, and Square will own the remaining 49%.

A R C A D E   /   M U L T I

- Enix announced their profit forecast for the period of March 2002, the earning will be greatly decrease by 62.7% to 4.2 billion yen, due to delay of two game titles which were originally scheduled for release in March, namely Dragon Quest Monsters 1 & 2, and Star Ocean 3. The sales forecast has decreased by 49.2% to 23 billion yen, and the ordinary profit forecast has decreased by 65.3% to 7.1 billion yen.

- Update on Namco's System 246 arcade game Soul Calibur II, there are two more new / return characters: Astaroth and Yunsung. The game features an improved Guard Impact system, which allows you to run in the 8 directions while you are guarding. It is possible to run continuously in 8 directions by pressing the direction on the joystick twice. When you are knocked down, you can choose to stand up in one of the 4 directions. In certain stages with walls, you will receive additional damage when you get hit and bounce toward the walls, but you can also recover right after you bounced back from the wall. Certain character also have a Motion Blend move (such as Mitsurugi and Nightmare), the character can run while the upper body remain in posture; as a result, the character can run toward and hit the opponent as long as the opponent is within his running path.

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- The Dengeki Console Game Chart is updated, the top selling game for the week is Namco / Monolith Soft's Xenosaga, sold over 240,000 units, followed by Konami's Prince of Tennis and Enix's Three Billionaire. Other new games in the chart include NEC Interchannel's PS2 port of Kanon, Koei's Haruka 2: Romance of Eternity and Kid's Milky Season. Last week's best seller - Temco's Dead or Alive 3 for XBox has dropped back to #8, while Microsoft's Project Gotham Racing has dropped back to #15.

X B O X

- Tecmo announced a new Dead or Alive 3 Booster Disc for XBox, an add-on disc for the game which features new movies, costumes for various characters in the game, these extra features were included in the Japanese and Euro version of the game, which were left out in the US version due to its earlier release. Dead or Alive 3 Booster Disc is scheduled for release in US on May 7, a full version of Dead or Alive 3 is required to run the booster disc. There is a playable demo of DOA3 included if you don't have the actual game.

- Konami will release Jikkyou World Soccer 2002 for XBox in Japan on March 14, for 6800 yen. The XBox version features a new Uniform Edit mode, which allows you to edit the uniform of any of the team in the 58 countries. The game also supports the XBox hard drive, the data will be loaded to the hard drive to reduce the number of disc access.

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D R E A M C A S T

- D3 Publisher announced that they are putting the popular Simple 1500 Series to Dreamcast, a low price series which retail for 1500 yen each. The first game is Simple Series DC Version: The Love Simulation 2, a love simulation game ported over from PlayStation, developed by HuneX.