Yu Suzuki on next-gen

In a rare interview with Japanese Dorimaga, partly translated by IGN, SEGA's Yu Suzuki has rubbished reports that Shenmue Online has been cancelled and hinted that he might develop next-generation console games as part of his role as head of SEGA's new AM Plus division.

"Although the Sega of today is split into home and arcade divisions, just as it was during Virtua Fighter's era, development is borderless," he said in answer to a question about home console development. Going on, he said he found PlayStation 3 very attractive on a technical level and admired the ease of development of Xbox 360, before commenting on the "Nintendo-like" logic of Revolution, remarking, "it resets the game experience".

As for Shenmue Online, the China-only online world built around his famous Dreamcast (and latterly Xbox) series: "Reports of a halt in development are completely unfounded. We have daily meetings and are currently working hard on the game's development," he told Dorimaga. The game's actually due to launch in early 2006.

Meanwhile, Suzuki-san also spoke a little about his current arcade project, the Lindbergh-based Psy-Phi. He revealed that it originally began life on Chihiro hardware - the Xbox-based stuff - which explains why it's not quite as gorgeous as some of the other titles shown off in SEGA's "next-gen theatre" at E3 this year. He sees it as a kind of futuristic floating dodgeball apparently - having not seen it ourselves, we're not going to argue.