Old Dreamcast titles have been been seeing renewed life this year, and in keeping with that trend Sega has decided to revive its Shenmue series. Instead of breaking out a threequel for consoles, however, they've opted to hook up with Yahoo! Japan and DeNA's new Yahoo! Mobage service to release an online social experience called "Shenmue City." Sega false-started in their last attempt to bring Shenmue onto the Internet via "Shenmue Online," which was never released, but they'll try to get it right this time.
"Shenmue City" will come out in Japan sometime this Winter, according to information in a press release translated at Andriasang. The game is being touted as a sequel to the first two titles in the series that were on the Dreamcast and Xbox, but its platform and approach sound very different from those of its predecessors.
The Yahoo! Mobage site is located here if you feel like browsing around and testing out your Japanese skills. "Restaurant City" from Playfish and "Persona Social" from Atlas are also among the 100 or so titles that will be playable there.
DeNA's a pretty big player in the online gaming world, in case you didn't know. They own 20-percent of Aurora Feint, the makers of Open Faint, and run the Mobage-Town gaming platform on mobile devices, according to Edge.
A Shenmue social game sounds nice enough, I suppose, but an online Dreamcast emulator would be even better.
Have you missed the Shenmue series for the last nine years? Do you want to see "Shenmue City" launch for the U.S.? Share your responses with us in the comment section below.