AOU 09: Up close with Sega's new Ringedge and Ringwide boards

As it tends to do with all its new arcade hardware unveilings (and I've been in Japan for all of them since Hikaru), Sega had actual Ringedge and Ringwide arcade boards on display at AOU. The two were placed in a glass case for some quick photoops (once all the punks with cell phones got out of the way).

Here are a few shots that I took:

The big question, of course, is how do the boards perform? Ringwide, the more oddly named and less powerful of the two had no games on display. But Ringedge was represented in playable form through Border Down, a mech battle game offering 10 versus 10 online fights and fully customized mech units.

Based off what I saw of Border Down, Ringedge does appear to be well beyond the aging Lindbergh hardware. But I'm pretty sure the game, in its current state, could easily be done on the Xbox 360 or PS3. If you're expecting to be blown away by Sega's new hardware, don't be.

You can see what a Ringedge game looks like for yourself in this Border Break gallery page.

Unfortunately, Sega didn't distribute full-resolution shots, but those screens do, I think, do a good job of conveying the look of the game as I saw it on Sega's giant stage screen today (where it was being played by a hot gravure model with a see-through skirt -- more on that later!). The game does have some impressive animation for its mechs, so I think when you see things in motion, you'll be more impressed. There's also that whole 10 versus 10 online play thing, which was presumably more of an emphasis for Sega than the visuals.

We're going to have to see more Ringedge titles before fully judging the hardware. And we may end up getting a good chance at that, both internally from Sega and externally as well. As part of its announcement of the board today, Sega said that it has started licensing the board out to third party software developers. It didn't name any names, but for high end hardware, it looks like the choices right now are either this or Namco's PS3-based system.