100% Lindbergh update: Hi-res screens and Sonic TGS expected

Sega’s Japanese office has released the first hi resolution images from its Lindbergh arcade platform line-up, as announced last week, showing Virtua Fighter 5, Afterburner, Virtua Tennis 3 and House of the Dead 4.

No gameplay details have yet emerged from any of the above games, though it’s pretty fair to say Virtua Tennis, VF5 and HOTD4 are pretty self-explanatory, with the odd new feature likely to pepper the established series' play mechanics. What is slightly more interesting is how Sega will represent Afterburner.

Now, it’s something of a foot up the arse of the sacred cow when we say that the original Afterburner was, well, a bit shit. Everyone remembers the game as being fantastic but that’s just because we’d all just watched Top Gun and anything with cool 80s music and F-14 Tomcat fighter planes was automatically brilliant.

But actually, Afterburner was hardly a game. It came in some great cabinets was a massive global success but the gameplay of the original game was almost nonexistent – a two-tiered shooter presented in 2.5D. SPOnG has had a close look at new Afterburner, seeing the game running on two occasions behind closed doors at Sega last May – You can read our impressions of this right here. Nothing much seemed to have changed in the Afterburner formula, with the original gameplay looking to have been left pretty much intact. We’ll pin our hopes on the playable version of Afterburner squeezing more out of a great concept than was managed by the original.

Sega also showed of Yu Suzuki’s new game Psy Phi. This title is still a bit of a mystery. Or a more accurate way of explaining things would be to say the game is a total mystery. We don’t know anything about it except it features a girl and has had Suzuki’s name stapled to it. Just don’t mention Shenmue Online…

In related news, the only game thus far missing from Sega’s E3 show reel is Sonic the Hedgehog, a game we saw demonstrated in real-time by an SOJ developer brandishing a Saturn pad. It’s widely expected that Sonic will see daylight at the Tokyo Game Show, kicking off on 16th September, with an announcement likely coming towards the end of this week.

Although there may be a storm of frenzied web speculation surrounding Next-Gen Sonic right now, picking through it you’ll notice that no real details exist – with platform, release dates, development teams and, well, everything still up in the air. Check SPOnG on Friday to see if the Sonic announcement materialises…

For reference, Sega’s PC-based Lindbergh comprises: