Dreamcast Homebrew Website Relaunched

Wraggster writes "Those who have never visited the DC Homebrew site, devoted to homebrew games and demos for the Sega Dreamcast, should be aware that it's just received an official relaunch, including over 230 pages of downloads of demos, games, ports, multimedia, and some great help pages too. New features for the site include a developer spotlight and homebrew spotlight - it's a resource well worth checking out." With titles like the great-looking Alice Dreams, there's some interesting material coming out of the unofficial Dreamcast coding scene of late.

Open hardware

[Qwaniton]

This is truly a great thing. The Dreamcast really is the Apple II of consoles. Hobbyist hacking is truly a lost art.

The Dreamcast is a geek's dream come true :)

[MC Negro]

When the Dreamcast first came out, I abhorred it for a number of reasons, such as lackluster 1st party games, poor 3rd party support and just a general disdain for Sega's marketing (their track record isn't so hot in that department). But right now, I'm loving the Dreamcast :-)

Right about now, the Dreamcast is somewhat prematurely in its "glory day". While most Dreamcast games sucked to no end, it had many decent PC ports (Quake III, Unreal Tournament) and a handful of other good games. Generally, you can find these games in the bargain bin at GameStop for $5-$15, usually new. The Dreamcast's current online pricepoint [ebay.com] is often less than a new GBA game, and usually is bundled with some games. Frankly, if you're a cheap gamer who doesn't have a lot of time, the Dreamcast is the way to go.

But the main appeal of the Dreamcast to me is the "geek" community that's brought Linux [m17n.org], BSD [wri.com] and most of the APIs [gamesurge.com] that they connonate (Hell, you can even use Windows APIs [gamesurge.com] for the built in Windows CE ROM). This is great for people like me who want to get their feet wet with basic game development for consoles, but don't have time to learn a hacked-up graphics API, or for someone who just is looking for a fun weekend project [linuxdevices.com]. It makes me happy to see that the Dreamcast homebrew community is still alive and kicking, and I'm hoping that this kind of thing will continue for a while.

The retail stores emphasized the wrong games

[veritron]

So many of the PS2/GC's eventual best games were ported from Dreamcast:

Grandia II
Skies of Arcadia
Ikaruga
Rez
Guilty Gear X
Marvel vs. Capcom 2

All were on the Dreamcast first. They played better on the Dreamcast than they did on the PS2 as well.

Other games, like Street Fighter III: First Strike, haven't been ported yet - but that got mixed reviews when it came out anyway.

Still, if you liked fighting games, this system was utterly godlike. With titles like SOUL CALIBER and Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves and Virtua Fighter 3 and Capcom vs. SNK (and 2 as well) and Dead or Alive 2 and the million King of the Fighters games and Last Blade 2, if anything it surpasses the Neo Geo in fighting game awesomeness.

I never bought a Dreamcast while it was in its prime though. I'm guessing it's probably because I kept seeing crap on the shelves like Power Stone 2 (which was actually an OK game) that I'd never heard of, and that scared me away.