REINVENTING THE GAME BOX SEGA HOPES TO SCORE BIG WITH ITS FOOTBALL GAME AND PROGRESSIVE INTERNET CAPACITY.

Byline: David Bloom Staff Writer

The football season kicked off in earnest this week, and beginning today, another kind of big game is under way, this one online.

Today is the start of a make-or-break season for Sega, the videogame company whose year-old Dreamcast videogame console becomes the first to let its players take on opponents online, a year before its competitors.

While such capabilities have long been part of some complex, high-end PC games, it's never been done with any videogame console, which are designed to be plug-and-play simple.

The move represents Sega's best chance to survive against graphically powerful game machines coming in the next year from giants Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

``We're reinventing this box,'' said Sega of America vice president Charles Bellfield. ``This is content that you couldn't get on any other machine.''

He's right, at least for another year or two.

Sony rolls out its PlayStation 2 in late October, and both Nintendo's GameCube (whose details were finally announced about a week ago) and Microsoft's X Box won't arrive here until fall 2001. And none of those beefy opponents has said exactly when they'll line up a network that connects owners of their machines to opponents around the country.

``They're all kind of waiting for a couple of years, building the infrastructure,'' said Tom Russo, editor in chief of Next Gen magazine, a electronic gaming publication. ``I'm of the opinion that it will be a big deal when it comes, but they have to build it first.''

Sega's competition is basically waiting for the full flowering of the very fast connections made possible with broadband networks such as cable modems and DSL phone lines.

But the networks needed to provide homes with broadband are only being rolled out now, slowly, in most neighborhoods around the country. Betting on broadband gaming this year is a bad idea, because it just isn't ready yet for most American households. So Sega's competitors have decided to wait.

Not Sega, which rolls out a videogame network that allows fast and fun gameplay even at a standard, and relatively slow, 56-Kbps connection.

Consider this the next salvo in what Bellfield called ``the battle for the living room.'' If Sega is going to remain in at least a moderate number of American living rooms, it has to deliver on the promise of Sega.Net.

It's too soon to tell how the company has done. Though the company has shown off the network in recent days, it hasn't been available for home trials. But the demonstrations were promising.

Sega built its own network out of the bones of Heat.Net, the PC-oriented online gaming service it had been running. The resulting Sega.Net is separate from but able to connect to the main Internet.

The network has been further tweaked to allow for quick reactions even with so-called fast-twitch titles such as sports and fighting games, and also will handle some top PC games online, said Lynn McConnell, Sega.Net's chief technical officer.

Sega's first networked game is the NFL2K1 football game (more than 800,000 copies were sold of the original NFL2K last year), which also is being released today.

With NFL2K1, Sega designed the game to dodge delays by reducing the information that needs to be swapped across the network between opponents, McConnell said. The result leaves room for players to type taunts to each other during the game.

A recent preview showing of NFL2K1 was impressive, as a San Francisco opponent took on one in a Woodland Hills hotel room, with no obvious delays, and excellent 60-frames-per-second video.

The game itself has been tweaked and updated from last year's terrific debut, with new juke and jump moves, the inclusion of all teams' playbooks, and the addition of about 500 more motion-captured player moves.

And the network makes possible a realistic ``franchise'' mode, where regular online updates of roster moves and injuries affect the team a player builds and guides over an entire season.

But the football game isn't the network's only title, or won't be very soon. In all, Sega plans to release another 30 Dreamcast games this year, all but one of them Web-enabled, Bellfield said.

One interesting title, due at year's end, is Phantasy Star Online, the newest version of a classic role-playing game. In this version, translation software will allow players from the United States to talk with and play against people from, say, Scandinavia or Asia who don't speak the same language.

Sega expects to add about 15 top PC games a month to the service, until 150 PC titles are available, McConnell said. By November, Sega.Net also will host an array of parlor and card games for casual gamers.

``I think the idea is a great one,'' Russo said. ``I think that people that do decide to go for it will probably be happy with it. Once you get on with their service, for people who are really looking for a multiplayer gaming service, I think it'll be good. For the traditional console games, being able to play other people around the country, I think that'll be the biggest draw.''

Sega is also offering several deals on its machines, cutting the Dreamcast price to $149 Sept. 1, and giving Sega.Net subscribers a free keyboard when they sign up.

Any current Dreamcast owner will get 50 hours of free online play, then can subscribe to the service for $21.95 a month, Bellfield said. Other deals, such as signing up for 18 months of service, essentially give away the Dreamcast in exchange for the subscription.

``It's in Sega's best interest to get as many networked games out there this holiday season as they can if they want to make this thing fly,'' Russo said. ``Sony's got a lot of muscle. We're doing a PlayStation 2 feature and we know of 200 games in the works for that system.''

The question now is, will Sega score a touchdown with its latest venture, or it will it be sacked by the Fearsome Threesome lined up against it? Not even Dennis Miller knows that answer.

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(1 -- cover -- color) Net gain

Sega kicks off new era in console video games

(2-- 3) Sega's first networked game, NFL2K1, presents realistic graphics, multiple gameplays and moves, and interactive features to connect players across the Web.