Xbox live Arcade is being upgraded first game is BONK!

MotherGunner · 02/09/2006, 01:05 AM

Various Xbox 360 forums have lit up across the interweb today as an interesting post boasting inside info concerning some of Microsoft's plans the Xbox 360 this year.

1. Sometime around November 2006, MS is launching a complete media service on the marketplace. This will range from 99 cent songs, to 3.99 streaming movies. (just said the prices, you do your own math to convert them to points).

2. AT next E3, MS will announce a partnership with Blizzard that will bring World of Warcraft exclusively to 360. The deal is done, and Blizzard is working on porting the game and a console control scheme. This game will also include a unannounced expansion that the PC gamers will have to wait about a month to get after we get this game. The other news, I don't know if this is good or Bad to you guys, but only 360 gamers will be on specific 360 servers, he said this was because the game will include voice chat, and it wouldn't work with PC gamers.

3. Wasn't sure on a exact date, but said Halo 3 will be out before X'mas 2006. Exact words were Quarter 4 of 2006.

4. There will be over 50 Sega dreamcast games on the xbox live arcade within 2 years. Launched a handful at a time, he said the first game will be Bonks adventure, which should be out in September 2006. Every dreamcast game released on 360 will be priced at around 10 dollars.

Well I would say these all sound like they could happen. The Dreamcast games sounds very interesting and the fact that Microsoft's Peter Moore was president and COO of SEGA of America lends itself to the possibility of them pulling it off.

esteban · 02/09/2006, 01:08 AM

I wasn't aware of Bonk's Adventure on Dreamcast, or on any Sega arcade / console hardware, for that matter. Am I losing it

?

TR0N · 02/09/2006, 01:09 AM

Don't they gota go through, Konami frist? Afther all they do own, Hudson

MotherGunner · 02/09/2006, 01:13 AM

Don't know about getting permission...but the thought of getting some old school
Soul Caliber on the 360 is awesome...

...Was Bonk on Dreamcast? Maybe in Japan only?

Keranu · 02/09/2006, 01:57 AM

I am greatly confused of how Bonk is in here. From my knowledge, Bonk has never appeared on Dreamcast. However, I'm glad to see that Bonk himself is apppearing as the first arcade live game on X-Box 360

.

PC Gaijin · 02/09/2006, 09:43 AM

The only Bonk on Dreamcast was through the PC Engine download service. The only one of those rumors that sounds plausible is the first one about some sort of media streaming service.

Dark Fact · 02/09/2006, 10:37 AM

Bonk? With Microsoft? That's news to me!

I wonder if this means that Microsoft is planning on obtaining NEC for their bandwagon. It would rule to have the classic NEC library released as a download service kind of like what Nintendo is doing for its revolution.

esteban · 02/09/2006, 07:57 PM

Quote from: "PC Gaijin"The only Bonk on Dreamcast was through the PC Engine download service. The only one of those rumors that sounds plausible is the first one about some sort of media streaming service.

Dude! Tell me more about this! I've never heard of the PCE download service (or anything of the sort) for Dreamcast. Feel free to include links as well.

CrackTiger · 02/09/2006, 08:35 PM

Quote from: "stevek666"
Quote from: "PC Gaijin"The only Bonk on Dreamcast was through the PC Engine download service. The only one of those rumors that sounds plausible is the first one about some sort of media streaming service.
Dude! Tell me more about this! I've never heard of the PCE download service (or anything of the sort) for Dreamcast. Feel free to include links as well.

The way that I remember it, both MD & PCE games werre planned to be available through a rental service. They were supposed to get downloaded to the VMU.

At the time, I wondered how the rental aspect would work since the games would be downloaded, but after the initial announcement, the local game mags never reported on it again.

PC Gaijin · 02/10/2006, 12:21 AM

It was called DreamLibrary. I don't remember all the details, but the games were downloaded into the Dreamcast's RAM, not to the VMU. You could play the game for one or two days for something like 300 yen.

The odd thing is that I'm not sure if you actually downloaded any ROM images from Sega's servers, or if what you downloaded was some kind of activation code. You needed Dream Passport ver. 3 (Japan's DC web browser) to access the DreamLibrary. I got a copy of Dream Passport 3 when I bought the DC BBA, and you could actually start up the emulator and play a couple of (time-limited) games on it without going to Sega's web site by entering a file location on the GD-ROM in the browser. I remember reading at the time around the web (sometime in 2001) that there were actually a lot of ROM images on the disc itself, so as I said before I guess what you downloaded from Sega was an authorization code or something to get the ROM to start up. If you remember how Sega handled downloads for DC games (like the add-ons to Skies of Arcadia, the extra songs in Samba de Amigo, and the quests for PSO) you didn't actually download anything other than a little save file to unlock content that was already on the game disc. I bet the DreamLibrary stuff worked the same way. Since I couldn't connect to Sega's Japanese servers at the time I never got to see how the whole system really worked. The emulator was definitely there though, I fooled around with it but as I said the couple of games that were playable had time limits, so it was just something to mess around with once and forget about. I'm pretty sure I still have DP3 somewhere; I was going to dig it out to test but I can't find the damn thing (that's a whole other story, I was going to post about this in the "pictures of your Turbo collection" thread, but when I moved awhile back I packed all my stuff up without really organizing anything and now I have a hard time finding stuff without unpacking lots of things I don't want to).

esteban · 02/10/2006, 04:07 AM

Quote from: "PC Gaijin"It was called DreamLibrary. I don't remember all the details, but the games were downloaded into the Dreamcast's RAM, not to the VMU. You could play the game for one or two days for something like 300 yen.

The odd thing is that I'm not sure if you actually downloaded any ROM images from Sega's servers, or if what you downloaded was some kind of activation code. You needed Dream Passport ver. 3 (Japan's DC web browser) to access the DreamLibrary. I got a copy of Dream Passport 3 when I bought the DC BBA, and you could actually start up the emulator and play a couple of (time-limited) games on it without going to Sega's web site by entering a file location on the GD-ROM in the browser. I remember reading at the time around the web (sometime in 2001) that there were actually a lot of ROM images on the disc itself, so as I said before I guess what you downloaded from Sega was an authorization code or something to get the ROM to start up. If you remember how Sega handled downloads for DC games (like the add-ons to Skies of Arcadia, the extra songs in Samba de Amigo, and the quests for PSO) you didn't actually download anything other than a little save file to unlock content that was already on the game disc. I bet the DreamLibrary stuff worked the same way. Since I couldn't connect to Sega's Japanese servers at the time I never got to see how the whole system really worked. The emulator was definitely there though, I fooled around with it but as I said the couple of games that were playable had time limits, so it was just something to mess around with once and forget about. I'm pretty sure I still have DP3 somewhere; I was going to dig it out to test but I can't find the damn thing (that's a whole other story, I was going to post about this in the "pictures of your Turbo collection" thread, but when I moved awhile back I packed all my stuff up without really organizing anything and now I have a hard time finding stuff without unpacking lots of things I don't want to).

Rock on, thanks for the scoop. This is certainly an area of PCE history that needs to be more thoroughly documented. I have 1-2 U.S. Dreamcast Browser CD's... I wonder if they have any "bonus material" on them (probably not)?

akamichi · 02/10/2006, 06:39 AM

Actually, I used the Dream Library a couple of times. At the beginning of the service, you could play a couple of games for free. None were PCE games though. From my impressions, it seemed like you did d/l the game/ROM before playing. I say that because if the game was on disc somehow (ie encrypted), it wouldn't have taken 5 mins to startup.

I wasn't aware of any games on the dream passport disc... I might have to check it out again. I do remember that one of the PCE games offered was Magical Chase. At the time, it seemed that was the only way I'd be able to play the game w/o shelling big $$$ for it on ebay or some store in Tokyo.

As for Skies of Arcadia, that game required a key that had to be download and stored on your VMU in order to unlock the full game. I don't remember how much it cost to unlock, but it was Y980 for the "locked" version.