Crazy, but it appears to be true. The Nintendo Wii version of House of The Dead 2 & 3 appears to have been ported by Sonic Team.
Where’s Sonic? Bueller? Bueller?
Anyways, the evidence that they did the port lies in all the online files residing on Sonic Team’s Japanese servers… Like, here.
After the disaserous game Sonic the Hedgehog (Xbox 360 & PS3), not to mention the even larger disasters (as in, all the Sonic games since Sonic Adventure 2), I can understand Sonic Team’s break… the team needs to re-align after Yuji Naka’s departure.
That said, I think the future is brighter for Sonic Team. The last time Naka-san was away, Sonic Team made Sonic CD. And, as any major Sonic fan will tell you… it was one of Sonic Team’s finest hours to-date.
Assuming this is correct though… one wonders what Sega WOW is up to. We haven’t seen House of The Dead 4 on either Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3… both systems are capable enough of handling a port. Sega, unfortunately, is letting many of its great arcade titles languish in the arcades only. The same could be said about many other games from other branches of Sega. In Yu Suzuki’s absence, Virtua Cop 3 has not hit home… and VC3 was made using almost pure Xbox hardware (no, not Xbox 360, the original).
Imagine a company that made movies, put them into theaters, and then never did a DVD/Blu-Ray release. That’s where Sega is right now, and it’s a big reason why their stock is in the tank. Oh, but they are dusting off Dreamcast and Xbox 1 games and porting them to Wii… where nobody will pay twice for the same game.