Outrun 2 Japanese Version - Confusion is Sex

Sega of Japan has revealed fresh details of Outrun 2 for the Xbox, with the eastern version seeing uprated content, though not on the scale that was predicted.

We called Sumo to clarify exactly what the deal was as Sega’s PR office remained unavailable. SPOnG suspects that the guys at Sumo are up to something, something almost certainly illegal. Calls placed to the office resulted in quite the most worrying level of paranoia we have ever encountered which is, in fairness, rather charming.

SPOnG said, “Look, here’s a Japanese magazine scan – are these bonus tracks new, or the same as were included for the US and Europe? We can’t tell as we haven’t got the original in our office right now.”

The guy at Sumo, who’s possibly up to something illegal, refused to comment, even though there are pictures in the public domain. No matter, we resumed the hunt for Sega officials.

After placing several calls and emails, we were contacted by Sega’s outsourced press office in London which promised to answer our query and did so with great expediency. The resulting explanation however, was one of the most startling things we heard that hour. “So I spoke with the guy at Sega and he said that the versions are exactly the same, though Sega Japan is going to market it as being something different to customers there. That’s what I was told.”

Slightly bemused, we asked for clarification in writing from an official source. An hour and a half later and this: “I'm just getting approval on a quote from SEGA at the moment and will send this over to you as soon as possible,” arrives via email. But nothing more.

Then, at close of business we get a call from a Sega representative promising action within 14 hours. Isn’t this great? So we went home to bed, got up, came back to the office and, via the magic of peer-to-peer messaging we are told that a document is ready and we’ll receive it soon. And then further communication from Sega HQ: “I can’t give you the whole doc. Essentially, from what I can gather it's the same game, it's just been refined. There aren't any extra tracks - the exclusive tracks are exclusive to the software from the arcade. It's all just been modified slightly, just finite details, nothing new. The same bonus tracks as the euro version - tweaked.”

Make of this what you will, though SPOnG can report that the issue of the Japanese version of Outrun 2 causes an impressive level of flapping and paranoia at Sega. Watch out for PR and marketing claims regarding the game from Japan in the coming weeks.