Sega undecided over Xbox arcade ports

Microsoft's Xbox may not be receiving ports of key Sega arcade titles OutRun 2 and Virtua Cop 3 after all, with the company still unsure about demand for the titles on home consoles.

It had been widely assumed that Xbox versions of the games would appear in time since they were developed for the Xbox-based Chihiro arcade machines - which should have made porting them to the home console extremely easy.

However, Sega has apparently not made up its mind either way on the issue - with AM2 producer Makoto Osaki telling Japanese publication Dorimag this week that a decision will be reached based on consumer demand for the titles.

Osaki-san cited difficulties with porting both games to home platforms, mentioning that Virtua Cop 3 would suffer due to the requirement for a light gun peripheral, while Sega has concerns over the tendency for players to rent racing games rather than buying them.

Dorimag reports that a decision on whether the games will be ported to consoles, or remain arcade-only, will be made in the coming weeks. If no Xbox port is forthcoming, this will be a blow to Microsoft, which is believed to have launched the Chihiro arcade hardware in an attempt to persuade arcade game developers to release their offerings on Xbox. This is a tactic which has worked well for Nintendo, whose Triforce arcade system - based on the GameCube hardware - has yielded a number of games which have been developed in parallel for the arcade and the Cube, such as F-Zero GX.