At least Sega seem to be taking Naomi seriously, with quality titles such as House of the Dead 2 and Crazy Taxi already showing the true colours of their Dreamcast hardware. But despite this renewed commitment to home gaming, the company isn't about to give up on the high-end machines that have become their signature.

In the pipeline are coin-ops based on a 'Super Naomi' board that will use four Naomi chipsets in parallel to provide staggering power. The first title to use this set-up, Ferrari 355, will use three independent screens to provide a wrap-around effect for the player. 'Let's see those buggers at home get three tellies together', you can almost hear the designers thinking.

But regardless of what strides the coin-op industry can take to maintain its technical upper hand, the more worrying issue faced by arcade companies is that for years its designers have been running out of bankable ideas - and perhaps more accurately, have been hesitant to try out new ones. Hence the endlessly recycled formulas of driving, shooting and fighting games that still clog up arcades to this day. By comparison, the home market has almost seen a renaissance in videogame design recently with titles like Metal Gear Solid, Zelda and Half-Life setting a deeper, more ambitious agenda for videogaming as an entertainment form.

So how can the coin-op designers compete? Where are the new directions for the arcade game? Not in adding complex storylines and deep gameplay, it would seem. In today's fairground-style arcades, attention spans are considered shorter than that of a forgetful goldfish, so the hot money is on getting people to try new machines, not to keep them playing. Since most videogame genres that fit this mould have been exhausted already, it's no wonder than new avenues are being explored beyond the usual lunch-ejecting hydraulics we're already well sick of.