I-Spy with my little eye… omake images from NEC’s quirky Sega Dreamcast real-time spy simulation (known as Espion-Agents in Japan). Although the game didn’t do so well back in the day as a solo play experience, I think it would be pretty cool as a multi-player focused reboot one of these days. Not that this is going to happen any time soon, but I’m sure someone can take the idea behind the game and turn it into something super…
While doing a bit of computer maintenance today, I decided on a whim to dink around with a few Dreamcast games by popping them in my PC and seeing if there were any hidden art or music files. I’d been curious about this for a while, as a few years back I wrote an article about Redbook audio tracks on CD games for Digital Press and was thinking about doing some sort of update. Back when the Dreamcast was released in the US, I popped a few discs into my PC at the time and found only text files with copyright info and occasionally, a game credits listing, and after a few of the same bunches of nothing, I retired the idea.
Flash forward to earlier today and I’m looking on my Japanese copy of D2 for cool stuff, only to find nothing except the usual three files. Then, I grabbed my copy of Seventh Cross and “bingo!* omake surprises galore, all some interesting (and intentionally amusing in a few cases) CG artwork that was removed from the US version, Seventh Cross Evolution. Below are the images from the hidden gallery (the second image gallery file on the disc features some of the same images, but in a higher resolution). I went through a bunch of other DC games as well, but I’ll run those images starting sometime next week… or sooner, if I knock out enough reformatting work to take a break.
Oh, I actually DID find some cool D2 stuff on an import disc or two, but not where I thought it would be. More on that in a bit…
More stuff from the collection. All the import shooters and some key platformers and RPG’s are gone thanks to selling them off, but there’ still a nice selection of games here including a number of titles that would have given both the SNES and Genesis some decent competition had NEC and TTI had the time and money to localized them. Given that these folks had the first CD-based home console out in Japan before the Sega CD (and more than enough games to support it), I wonder every now and them how the system wars of the early 80’s would have turned out had the T-16, Duo and Turbo Express gotten the proper respect.
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 