Sega AM2 veteran Daichi Katagiri spoke to IGN about his origins, his dual love of games & cars, working under Yu Suzuki, his involvement with series like Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA & his love of the "real-time puzzle game" Outrun famitsu.com/news/202102/09…🇯🇵
on Akira's infamous Doppo Choushitsu input: the initial plan was to give it a 2-frame input window for the negative-edge G at the end but the programmer, who was still thinking in relation to 30FPS a la VF1, said a 2-frame window would be too wide & went with 1 frame, & when...
…he had Katagiri, who was the team's best FG player, test it out, & instead of saying it was ridiculous, he was like "it's tough but I managed to do it", and so it stayed as-is

(for the uninformed, you have to press K+G & immediately release G within 1 frame to do Akira's knee)
Katagiri didn't officially work on VF1, as he was part of a team working on another game, but Yu Suzuki brought him in to give advice during devt as he was the company's best SF2 player; Katagiri expounded upon SF2's attack/block/throw triangle, the purpose of high/low blocking(>
& how VF's big floaty jumps screwed with that setup bc they made crouching-guard super advantageous, & Yu was all "but irl, if you kick a crouching dude, he's gonna get hit, right?"

the next time they played, Yu picked Sarah and Katagiri used the scrapped character Siba, and...
Kitagiri's lame crouch-blocking strat, which he was sure couldn't be beat, was losing to Sarah's new elbow-knee move, which was hitting mid—Yu had come up with a high/mid/low system in the interim, not just to fix the game system but to stay consistent with real martial arts
elements like down attacks and rising attacks also came from Yu questioning why they weren't a thing from a strict martial-arts perspective, first and foremost, and a ton of the game's systems that were considered innovative were conceived & designed along those simple lines
there's a ton of VF2 stuff in here in particular, I wish I had time to go over it…

here's one more for ya: before he joined Sega, Katagiri was pals with Kurita, the future champion VF3 Taka player, and when he won the VF3 championship, they reunited for the first time in ages
a little more from this interview: VF2 Jeffry's ruthless punish-heavy CPU AI was modeled after the famous Jeffry main Kashiwa Jeffry—as Katagiri points out, it's amazing to watch a real person play like that, but when the CPU does it to you, it just feels like cheap input reading

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More from @gosokkyu

29 Jan
former Raizing designer Mitsuakira Tatsuta has been unearthing lots of old sketches and character concepts from the original Bloody Roar🇯🇵 he says he drew ~300 character ideas in that time, with some (like this koala girl) received more coolly than others
an early version of the mole design that eventually became Bakuryu
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28 Jan
M2's patched six of the Sega Ages titles for Switch: Thunder Force IV/Lightening Force, Phantasy Star, Outrun, Gain Ground, Puyo Puyo and Virtua Racing🇯🇵 changes as follows: (thread)
Thunder Force IV: fixed a bug in the opening where a vertical scroll trick wasn't being properly reproduced

Phantasy Star: fixed some PSG noise bugs, as well as other minor fixes

Outrun: fixed a bug that caused ranking data to disappear when the attract demo was left to run for a while, as well as other minor bugs
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27 Jan
mighty bold of Balan Wonderworld to skip the lazy '90s nostalgia play and instead pit itself directly against every crowdfunded game you forgot you backed seven years ago
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Blinx: The Time Sweeper & Blinx 2
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21 Jan
heads up if you, like me, completely forgot this was coming: Turrican Flashback Collection's up on PSN, $29.99/€29,99/£24.99

store.playstation.com/en-us/product/…

store.playstation.com/en-gb/product/…

this collection includes the Amiga versions of Turrican 1 & 2, Mega Turrican & Super Turrican (SNES)
this is the stripped-down version of the two(!) other Turrican collections coming, which are really stretching for extra content: Super Turrican 2, Turrican 3 for Amiga (which is just Mega Turrican), the uncut version of Super Turrican SNES & some minor score/time attack hacks
so yeah, three collections desperately struggling for padding and yet none of them contain the original games by Manfred Trenz (Turrican 1 & 2 for C64, Super Turrican NES), figure that one out

these collections are coming to Switch as well, icymi
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G-MODE's Koichi Takeshita discusses his early work history at Hudson and other studios, joining G-MODE, their early releases under his tenure (including KUUKIYOMI) and the establishment of G-MODE Archives gamemo.confidence-media.jp/873🇯🇵
on G-MODE Archives: bc G-MODE built its name off keitai & i-mode, they feel it's their mission to maintain that legacy, including games from other companies

re: overseas releases, the majority of games are JP-dependent, but they're considering releasing text-light games overseas
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18 Jan
Sega Ages are on sale again on Switch & someone asked me about the enhanced features—I feel like ppl might be sick to death of me talking about em but otoh, there are plenty of ppl who didn't follow them at all, so here's a rundown of what's new for all 19 Sega Ages Switch games:
Sega Ages Sonic the Hedgehog includes both the OG Mega Drive game & the obscure remixed Mega Play arcade version (with score attack leaderboard), Sonic Mania's Drop Dash (& spin dash, ofc), a "ring keeper" helper mode, a Green Hill act 1 time attack & more nintendo.com/games/detail/s…
Sega Ages Thunder Force IV (aka "Lightening Force"), the first-ever international reissue, includes the extras from the 🇯🇵-only Saturn port—the addition of the Thunder Force III ship & a more friendly "Kids Mode"—plus slowdown options, leaderboards & more nintendo.com/games/detail/s…
Read 27 tweets

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