Spikeout closer, smaller than thought

Sega Japan has revealed that the hotly anticipated Xbox battler Spikeout: Battle Street is set to launch sooner that expected, hitting Japanese stores on March 24th of this year.

Predictably, Sega Europe and Sega America are offering nothing by way of release dates right now, though Western launches are widely expected by late summer.

However, this good news is tempered somewhat as SPOnG learns that the content to be found within the coded streets of Spikeout will be somewhat smaller than predicted. 12 playable characters will be on offer with a maximum of four playing simultaneously, hardly the epic free-roaming brawl-em-up we were hoping for.

As to why Spikeout: Battle Street will only support four players simultaneously, we are at a loss. The game was due to launch in time for Christmas in the US and its slippage was thought to be a time-buy to uprate the content in time for global rollout. Seemingly, this isn't the case.

As you may be aware, Spikeout is the latest in the groundbreaking arcade series of brawlers from former Sega studio Amusement Vision, headed up by drunken Monkey Ball supremo turned over-tanned boyband reject Toshihiro Nagoshi. The series has already seen home console fatalities, such as the Dreamcast version of Slashout, canned by Sega at 90% complete.