At the "Sega Unleashed" press event this afternoon, Yuji Naka himself talked about the new GameCube version of Phantasy Star Online v2.0. The game was ported from Dreamcast in only one month, an incredible feat considering the Dreamcast runs on modified Windows CE software and GameCube runs on Linux. Yuji-san, like many other GameCube developers, highly praises the ease of development on the platform.

Phantasy Star Online v2.0 GameCube is more than a port. As of right now, the look is identical to the Dreamcast version. That will likely change, but not much considering the new information they showed to the lucky press that got to attend the meeting in their booth, which is closed to the general e3 public.

The big news is that Phantasy Star Online v2.0 GameCube will have offline multiplayer. Yuji-san showed a four player split screen mode running on the GameCube hardware. The system runs four separate character's screens simultaneously flawlessly. The GameCube easily reproduces the power of the Dreamcast game fourfold.

As far as what else there is for the port, there are still a lot of extras to be added that hasn't been added. With one month to port, and an estimated release date of sometime in 2002, there is still a lot of things they can put in the GameCube version of this game.