While most people expect game news to be dreadfully slow after E3, this week was definitely filled with action. With Sega unveiling its second-half-of-1999 Dreamcast plans, and Digicube letting loose that Square plans to bring the next Final Fantasy to the PlayStation, the gaming world seems as bustling with action as ever.

　　After the long weekend (many of us were still recovering from the huge drain of E3), we returned to work on Tuesday with full details in from our Japanese correspondent Yutaka Ohbuchi, on Sega's New Challenge Conference 99. In reading through the breaking news, I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw one of the paragraphs outlining Sega's plan to drop the Dreamcast price in Japan on June 24. As many of you may remember, GameSpot News broke the news that Sega would be doing this two weeks ago. While at the time we could only classify it as a strong rumor, we were 99 percent sure that the price drop would be announced. As usual, our sources were correct, and Sega did exactly what we had reported - a price drop to 19,900 yen (US$165). Something we didn't hear about until later was that Sega also plans to drop the price of five games (Virtua Fighter 3tb, PenPen Tri-Icelon, Sonic Adventure, Godzilla Generations, and July) to 1,990 yen ($16) from June 24 through July 31.

　　Sadly, this price drop could add more validity to the rumor that Sega's new console just isn't selling in Japan. According to some reports, Sega hasn't even sold a million Dreamcast units yet (last week only 3,000 were sold in Japan). Sega is hoping that by dropping the price of hardware and software, it can spark interest in the system. More than likely Sega won't see any huge increase in hardware sales until later this year when titles like Shenmue and Soul Calibur are released, since many Japanese gamers feel that only top-notch software can sell hardware.

　　This week we also ran a report detailing the discussion I had with Bleem! president David Herpolsheimer. One of the topics we covered was the PlayStation emulator's current difficulty with DirectX 6.1. "It was really important for us to get the full program out for E3, and we were a bit rushed. So we didn't have time to fully educate our users about the quirks of DirectX drivers, and the full build had a couple of bugs that ­ unfortunately ­ affected compatibility," said Herpolsheimer. Since our article was posted, though, we've learned that Bleem! is also being tested for Direct X 7.0 compatibility when Microsoft releases the update of the Windows API .

　　As we stated earlier, Final Fantasy IX being announced for the PlayStation was one of the big stories of the week. Reporter Yukiyoshi Ike Sato translated a financial report from Digicube that revealed that its owner, Square, would be bringing the highly anticipated sequel to the current PlayStation model and not the next-generation PlayStation as rumors had previously suggested. This morning we were contacted by Square, who reiterated that it has made no announcements and that Digicube was not supposed to reveal that yet.