There are two Segas, really. There’s the Sega in America and Europe, which increasingly pours money into Creative Assembly and Sports Interactive, and saved Relic from floundering after THQ’s tank smashed. A proper PC games publisher. And then there’s the Sega in Japan, the heartland of Sonic, where PC games are still all too often a 3am afterthought, like the Ouya.
It’s the latter Sega that some 7000 concerned PC gamers have written to, to request near-future ports of Bayonetta, Vanquish and Virtua Fighter 5. For starters.
The three games in question have been selected for their perceived economic viability. The petitioners reason that Platinum’s Metal Gear Rising has found success on Steam – debuting in the Winter Sale “just behind the million+ selling DayZ”. Rising shares an engine with Bayonetta and Vanquish, and its sales seem to suggest there’s a place for its melodramatic action genre on PC.
“Vanquish is the title of these three initial suggestions that may best fit the PC platform due to [its] historical strength in the shooter genre,” suggest the petitioners.
Virtual Fighter 5, meanwhile, is the contemporary 3D fighting genre representative PC gaming lacks. Perhaps there’s a reason we don’t have any of those – but the petitioners point to Skullgirls’ PC crowdfunding as proof to the contrary. What’s more, Virtua Fighter runs on the RingEdge arcade system board, which is powered by Windows, after a fashion. It’s hoped that a port might be made easier as a result.
That’s the tone maintained throughout the plea – demanding, but considerate.
“While we understand that no porting effort will be particularly easy or necessarily affordable,” petitioners explained, “we attempted to select titles that would be easier/cheaper to port versus ones that would be more cost prohibitive.”
Their hope is that somewhere between these three games, a course might become clear for a future, PC-friendly Sega. And the petitioners would be especially happy if that route took them by the PS3’s Valkyria Chronicles – a game that owes plenty to the PC’s “strong history of strategy titles”. Hear hear.
Here’s a question: Is there some kind ofdeep-rooteddesign ideology at work that renders heartland Sega ill-suited to our platform? Or is that kind of thinking outmoded?
Thanks, Eurogamer.