Lik Sang have posted some news of interest to the Dreamcast Scene as a whole and also rumours of a new game, heres the newspost in full.

Dreamcast has just celebrated its fifth anniversary a couple of days ago -Japanese release was November 27th of 1998- and is still going on with pride. Dreamcast has now recovered from the murder attempt two years back and is still pretty much alive thanks to a dedicated amateur scene, thanks to the supporting gamers who are still refusing to throw their systems away, and thanks finally to some audacious professional publishers who still dare to release new commercial games for this extraordinary piece of hardware.

The commercial side is still very active nowadays: Border Down is just out, Psyvariar 2 has just been confirmed and now speculations are mounting concerning SNK vs. Capcom Chaos and Castle Of Shikigami 2 while Sonic Team announced their coming hit Puyo Puyo Fever will have a Dreamcast port (Release Date and Price T.B.A.) as well!

But the really exciting news for this system are now most of the time coming from a deep community of resisting gamers and amateur coders. Today is no exception.

Cryptic Allusion announces a new game: Tryptonite

Back in June, Cryptic Allusion’s Feet Of Fury was the the very first homebrew game to make it to professional release. A couple of months ago, Dan Potter had already confessed that the team was working on a new title, but back then codenamed it ‘Project X’ and did not give further details. Cryptic Allusion has now revealed more info, as well as the title of the game: Tryptonite.

Tryptonite is a 3D “tunnel shooter” game which takes place in space. The player controls a ship that rides around the edge of a tunnel blasting away enemies, dodging obstacles and collecting power-ups.

Whereas Feet of Fury was a 2D game that mostly used the Dreamcast(tm)’s 3D accelerator as a fancy 2D accelerator, Tryptonite will be a full 3D game. Main gameplay elements will be rendered from models with full light shading and texturing (where applicable) like any official DC title. The visual theme will be “retro” but the technology will not!

In single player mode (the primary mode), the player works through a number of levels with various visuals and enemies. When you’re tired of playing by yourself, invite a friend over for a cooperative two-player mode to compete for the high score. Or try the online challenge mode, where you attempt to get a global high score against all the other Tryptonite players by entering a completion code on Tryptonite.com

Additional info such as release date as well as release way will follow up in due course.

New Printed Magazine 100% dedicated to the Dreamcast!

Some people just never give up. This is the case of a passionate DC-scener answering to the nickname of ‘MetaFox’. He has put sweat and blood into putting together a very new printed magazine for the Dreamcast.

After weeks of efforts and organization, the first issue of the magazine finally came through last month. ???DREAM ON??? is not only the first magazine dedicated to the Dreamcast to be published in more than two years but is also the very first of its kind as it is focusing on the Scene and Homebrew aspects of the Sega console. The project is still new and of course not backed up by any corporate publisher which means distribution channels are internet-based and so far not completely built up.

Lik Sang is looking forward to take a look at issue nr1! As soon as we did, we will keep you posted.

Amateur Coding Competition – get your game published!

Also coordinated by MetaFox and the DREAM ON people, a wonderful amateur coding competition is currently held on the Dreamcast.

The goal of the contest is to create a complete Dreamcast game by the end of the year (December 31, 2003). This means full gameplay, graphics, music, sound, menus, the works. This may seem like a steep requirement, but the reward is well worth it. The prize will be a commercial run of your game on professionally pressed CDs. The CDs will be manufactured using the same technique as Feet Of Fury (pressed on CD media and running on KalistiOS) which makes Lik Sang hoping the game will even end up for sale right here one day.

Next to MetaFox, other judges have been named (five in total) including our friend Max Scharl from Dreamcast-Scene.com (formerly known as Dreamcast-Petition) and respectable Dan Potter, main programmer of Cryptic Allusion (development studio behind the KalistiOS and Feet Of Fury).

Everybody is welcome to enter, and the only rules are that it is an original game, and not a port or an emulator. It has to be somewhat polished – it must contain a menu, music and sound effects – but as long as it contains these qualities, all entries will be accepted. Entries will be judged by quality and playability rather than flashiness.

So, get those groups together, and lets see the Dreamcast homebrew community shine.

Of course, every day god makes, amateur coders are making progress on several emulators and other kind of freeware for the Dreamcast. We only picked up a few highlights here above as there are just too many updates to make an exhaustive summary here. So if this is the kind of stuff you like to read, you should head over to dcemulation.org, Dreamcast-Scene, ConsoleVision or Boob! to keep you up to date about what is going on in the vast Dreamcast scene.