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Games Entertainment

Dreamcast Tribute Revisits Cult Console, Games 76

Posted by simoniker from the everything-in-black-and-white dept.
Buster Chan writes "NTSC-uk has begun their two-week long tribute to the almighty Sega Dreamcast, including an editorial recounting favorite memories of Sega's final (so far) hardware, as writers 'give their views of one of the most prolific consoles of recent times', the first 128-bit console. They also run new reviews revisiting Cosmic Smash, checking out Get Bass, and analyzing the very Japanese Tokyo Bus Guide." Although it was so long ago we can barely remember, what were your favorite Dreamcast titles?
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Dreamcast Tribute Revisits Cult Console, Games More

Dreamcast Tribute Revisits Cult Console, Games

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  • soulcalibur bizzzz so many hours, so much fun
    • SoulCalibur -- yeah -- especially the mission mode. No matter what mode you're playing, you'll be surprised by new move animations for months.

  • I loved the dreamcast (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shione ( 666388 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @10:50PM (#9004115) Journal
    What makes me sadder is that to this day the dreamcast is the only current gen console that has an official arcade stick. It came with internet browsing software, and everywhere dreamcasts were sold you could pick up an official keyboard and mouse as well which helped immensely in fps games... The Dreamcast was well ahead of its time. *sniff*

    My favourites DC games are:

    Illbleed
    Powerstone 2
    Grandia 2
    Le Mans
    Record of Lodoss Wars
    Looney Tunes Space Race >_>
    Rival Schools 2
    and of course Soul Calibur

    • Suchi this! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You can still buy one [amazon.com], and at 50 bucks for a new one and 30 or so odd for a used it is hard to go wrong. In silicon valley 30 dollars doesn't even pay for the sushi.

  • Ikaruga (Score:4, Informative)

    by OutRigged ( 573843 ) <rage AT outrigged DOT com> on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @10:51PM (#9004120) Homepage
    While there were many, many good games for the Dreamcast, the one that stands out in my opinion is Ikaruga. In my opinion, it's one of the best verticle shooter games ever created.
    • Bangai-O.

      Now THAT is a GAME.

      From my FAQ for it on GameFAQs:
      Bangai-O! What a great game! The level exploration and enemy generators
      of Gauntlet combined with the action of Smash TV, all in a veneer of
      Metroid with a touch of the control of Joust...sounds like a mess but
      it's brilliant. A 2D game where level design really really matters,
      that throws hoards and hoards of enemies at you and gives you the
      hardware you need to take it all on...plus, a huge heap of Japanese
      weirdness.
    • If you think Ikaruga was good, Dreamcast Japan released the defining verticle shooter just this year. The game is called PSYVARIAR 2. After playing it for a few hours, you can't help but see beautifully-colored fireworks whenever you close your eyes. Very trippy.

  • Typing of the Dead (Score:3, Informative)

    by lambent ( 234167 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @11:00PM (#9004155)
    Typing of the Dead ... the greatest game ever! (okay, not really)

    truly awesome game ... separates the men from the boys (and the afternoon I played it, women/girls, too). A group of maybe four of us beat it in a few hours, no real challenge. The fun part was finding the special endings (including when the main boss plummets to his death, only to miraculously bungee jump back onto the roof-top where the previous battle just took place, and then burps in your face).

    Man, did i suffer some RSI that day.

    Linkage: here [game-revolution.com]

    Truly, the best part was the tongue-in-cheek engrish phrases you were forced to spell out. Which i think is a valid design choice ... try to force the players to laugh so hard they lose.

  • Metropolis (Score:3, Informative)

    by almaon ( 252555 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @11:00PM (#9004156)
    Metropolis Street Racing

    One of the few games I felt that I had grossly underpaid. I love that game, it took racing games to a new level. Superb graphics, courses mapped out to block-by-block sections of real life cities. Awesome stuff.

    Tho it lacked the upgrade and hotrod aspects of Gran Turismo it excelled in breaking the static driving game formula. Style, overall speed, top speed, number of passes, one on ones. Made it less monotounous than simply going track after track (tho there were hundreds of different tracks).

    The AI was pretty weak but was very challenging none-the-less.

    The realtime day and night was a nice plus too. If it was nightime in London and daytime where you really live (that is if you set your dreamcast clock correctly) it'd be night in the game, vice versa. Some rewards were only available during certain hours of the day. Made it interesting.

    The sound was unique too, had radio stations (course Rad Racer had that) but it felt like you were really listening to the radio with commercials and DJ babble. Also when you went through tunnels the radio would cut out and you'd get static till you exited. Stations also reflected the country you were racing in.

    This game later became Project Gotham and the superb PGR2. But it lost much of it's whistles in favor for flashier graphics. If you find this game it's worth the 5$ you'll see priced on it. Knowing how good it was after I played it, I would have gladly paid over $100 for it.
    • MSR -- if you can get through it -- has unlockable vehicles such as a lawnmower, busses, and a taxicab. Also, there are unlockable "free roam" modes for the different districts where the games' over two-hundred tracks are located. I'm personally addicted to METROPLIS STREET RACING. Too bad the game was released without enough advertising to show everyone that it's WAAAY better than many PS2 racers.

  • PSO (Score:4, Interesting)

    by XellDx ( 737289 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @11:03PM (#9004173)
    The Original. You know. The first 400 hours of the other's that came out.
    I miss that game so much. Maybe it's becuase I played it for the last 6 months before I went to college and had to give it up, and thus have attached this horrible nostalgia to it which rose colors everything. Maybe its becuase I actually made real life friends thanks to that game. Maybe its becuase I remember playing with friends from the GIA before that message board died.
    The game was simple in execution and design, the learning Curve for PSO was well within even the casual gamers spectre of grasp. There was no 'how do I wipe my ass' comments, since the lower level functions where easy like that.

    The story didn't try hard either, but did enough so that you felt connected. You're on a planet because the only you left died, the colonists ahead of you are dead, kick the aliens ass's. Wash.Rinse.Repeat.

    What made you come back where the varying diffuculties, the rare items that dropped maybe once a week, the feeling of glee when that next level lets you kick the shit out of an enemy that whooped your ass before, the comradory of playing with friends.
    Oh god dammit. Now I'll have to play the gamecube version again.

  • My favorites. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Powerstone (And Powerstone 2): It was a strangely viewed fighter with interactive objects. When you collected 3 powerstones which appeared randomly on the map, your character would morph into a super character, capable of doing awesome attacks.

    Seaman: Not exactly fun, but was interesting. You raised a fish that would talk to you, it was rude (Dialog was written by the folks at Jellyvision, famous for You Don't Know Jack) and funny. Of course, you could talk back with the included microphone, and it underst
    • I think I'll start a new SEAMAN. There's something special about raising that guy. You can't put into words the intangible knowledge, and the life-lessons, you learn from SEAMAN. The act of raising a SEAMAN is full of beautifully-executed metaphor. After raising Seaman, I was able to keep goldfish alive for a whole three weeks!

  • Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ronfar ( 52216 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2004 @11:13PM (#9004216) Journal
    Sega's final (so far) hardware,
    I want to make prediction here, and I hope I'm wrong. I predict that not only will there be no post-Dreamcast SEGA consoles, but that in the future SEGA will be much like Atari, a trendy brand name used by a more successful video game company. Basically, I haven't liked where they are heading, and predictions that they would be in great shape as a third party for soul-destroying behemoth Sony (and not-very-nice-but-still-better-than-Sony Microsoft) haven't materialized. In fact, SEGA's exit from the console industry has simply made the console industry a grayer, more depressing place with no gains for the average gamer.

    Well, back to searching for a mint-condition copy of Splatterhouse 3 for SEGA Genesis, a game I stupidly sold during the golden age of gaming, not realizing that the good times wouldn't last forever.

    SEGA!

    • Re:Prediction (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I hope you're prediction is wrong, but here are some counter-arguments to go against it, at any rate.

      I don't think that Sega is in nearly the same position that Atari was when they went under and subsequentially transitioned to a trendy (and craptacular) brand name publisher.
      Unlike Atari, Sega has a lot of very solid franchises. The last few Sonic games have very much missed the bar, sadly, but we still have House of the Dead, Virtua Fighter, Phantasy Star, Shining Force, Eternal Arcadia (which should be
    • I don't really keep up with the game world. Can you explain why you feel that Sony is even more evil than Microsoft?
      • in my opinion, sony is just as bad, but probably worse than microsoft.

        Just think about it, 2 out of every 3 playstation2s that shipped came broken. Why? they are a POS. Inferior hardware made out of the cheapest pieces sony could through together and still be semi-competive with. At least Microsoft put out quality hardware.

        If Sony had a stronger foothold in the PC world you would hate them with a passion as I do:p
  • Shenmue II. Of course, I had to import it from Europe which meant using the annoying boot disk, but it had full Japanese voice acting w/ decent subtitles, so it kicked ass.
    • If you're going to mention Shenmue II (which I found droll), you should also mention Rez!

      Rez was another game that was released in all markets except the US.

      BTW, the only reason that Shenmue II wasn't released in the states was a deal with MS. They wanted to make it an exclusive Xbox game.

      • I never found a copy of I for my Dreamcast, but I have II for the X-Box, and it's not bad. Awful voice acting though. Will the franchise be allowed to run to story completion? ( sting music ) I sure hope so.

  • But I'm a sucker for shmups. And I'm lovin' Tumiki Fighters :x

  • I couldn't resist (Score:4, Informative)

    by Oriumpor ( 446718 ) on Thursday April 29, 2004 @12:05AM (#9004405) Homepage Journal
    The gord speaks the truth [actsofgord.com] about the dreamcast 128bit myth

    • That's not even true. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ayanami Rei ( 621112 ) <rayanami@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Thursday April 29, 2004 @01:31AM (#9004700) Journal
      The SHA-4 (well, SH7750) which powers the Dreamcast is _very much_ a 32-bit architecture. 32-bit memory/IO addresses, 32-bit words, 32-bit FPU, 32-bit aligned. However it can dispatch 2 integer instructions simultaneously (like the pentium), while chewing on up to 2 FPU ops as well. This is how 32 + 32 + 32 + 32 = 128 bits is claimed.

      Nothing could be further from the truth. Still, the architecture is very nice and allows for high throughput without needing a lot of cache, deep pipelines, or high clock speed.
      • True. But then my AthlonXP is 32-bit as well. Strangely enough, that doesn't stop it being rather faster than a 386.

        What I think Gord was trying to get at was the fact that certain idiots tended to regard 'bit' as some sort of performance indicator, and so if the Dreamcast was a better machine than the N64 that meant it had to have more of them, in some way.

        But then its no different to the arguments between AMD and Intel about whether or not a 2600+ that runs at 2GHz in reality (give or take 100MHz or so
    • The Hitachi SH4 is classified as a 32 bit CPU, however, it has an 128 bit floating point bus and 64 bit data bus. The PowerVR2DC "Highlander" graphics chip has a 128 bit memory interface. The console is no less "128 bit" than the XBox or Gamecube would be.
  • * Resident evil 2 (or is it 3?) formatting a non-VMU memory cards if it finds one (two different types of memory cards, one launched later and not backwards compatible - nice going)

    * Games like Skies of Arcadia letting you know hidden items are near by making the VMU beep and the rumble thing rumble - again, both lost on some players.

    * Sega explaining they don't need to perform any usability testing since any usability issues (like using the SAME TRIGGER BUTTON to spray paint AND center the camera in Jet

  • Brilliant (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jetfuel ( 755102 ) on Thursday April 29, 2004 @12:33AM (#9004509) Homepage
    Only Sakura Taisen, the epic mech-strategy/love-sim could make me write something like this: A very long essay about my experiences with Dreamcast and Sakura Taisen [metalbat.com]

    Later I discovered the deliciously immersive Shenmue I & II; the final disc of II might be the most beautiful gaming I've ever had.

    Games like these and other quirky and original titles are what makes DC my favorite console. At first I was turned off by the WinCE logo and the non-fighter-friendly controller, but once I realized the intoxicating level of creativity going on with this system, I was in love with it.
  • Something about that crazy Maraca controller. Of course it was a pain in the ass to find but damn it was fun.
    • Oh yes. This is one of my favorite games of all time. I've been through several pairs of maracas I've played this so much.
    • best... game... evah.

      The only video game you can pull out at a family gathering, and guarantee that *everybody* from grandma to the kids will be hooked within minutes. Pure genius.

      (until somebody takes out a ceiling light with over-enthusiastic high-shakes that is...)

    • I still keep meaning to buy one of those so I can really enjoy Samba De Amigo. Lik-Sang still has the EMS brand controllers for $29.
  • this game should be on every console,
    excellent multiplayer. shenmue was also
    pretty slick.
    • Chu Chu Rocket kicks ass. There's a "clone" of it for Linux called "mures" but it's just not the same. The Dreamcast version had style. Boy, I miss that. Even though I got my ass handed to me online.
    • The GameBoy Advance version has kept me company in many a lonely extended bathroom visits. The inclusion of User created puzzles from the DC version was brilliant and has provided a lot of hours of entertainment.

  • Samba de Amigo! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by snooo53 ( 663796 ) on Thursday April 29, 2004 @01:19AM (#9004663) Journal
    I have to say that the music genre games Space Channel 5, Samba de Amigo, and Samba de Amigo 2000 were some of my favorites (among others like Parappa and Jet set radio).

    Why? They are absolutely hillarious and fun to play. There's just something about a game in which you can't help but move to the beat. Who in the world would've dreamed up a game in which you shake maracas like an idiot to the beat of hit latino songs with psychedelic colors starring a monkey and dancing cucumbers with sombreros (as far as I can tell- who knows)? The Sonic team that's who! Or Space channel 5 in which you are a cute girl reporter in the future fighting aliens who, guess what, make everyone dance!

    Sega really had something going with it's music genre, it's too bad the console was so short-lived.

  • Rez.... REZ... REEEEZZZZZ! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Rez is awesome.

    What a game.

    Damn I hope they make another one.

    For those interested, go check out Lionheads latest Minter project, Unity.

    Awesome stuff
  • Skies of Arcadia: a engrossing cartoon style rpg, with overtones of Miyazaki's 'Castle in the Sky' and 'Nausicaa' along with WW1/WW2 type sea battles of giant iron juggernauts with quite a bit of buckling your swash thrown in :-) .... absolutely TONS of mini-games and side-quests to undertake, great use of the DC peripherals (mini visual VMU games, rumble pack use in-game, etc). A classic.

    Metropolis Street Racer: Excellent racing game featuring real streets and scenery of cities across the world. Good phys
    • Skies is one of the greatest RPGs I've ever played, and truly shows that modern RPG games can still be fun. It's a bit cliche in many respects, but I've not played another RPG that was nearly as good since Xenogears or the old SNES games like FF IV/VI and Chrono Trigger.

      I liked MSR, but it didn't hook me as much as Test Drive LeMans did. Infogrames Melbourne House are some talented programmers that really managed to squeeze a hell of a lot out of the Dreamcast (and they claim that they had plenty of room
  • ecco _ defender of the future best game ever bar none !
    Played if from begining to end and I have never found any other game that gives such a feeling of emersion and mood.
    Music 10/10
    graphics 10/10
    game play 10/10
    Only thing it did not have (and did not need) was replayerbility.
    I remember bringing it to work over xmas with a VGA box and showing some shmuck who had brought in his playstation2 and ssx
    He was blown away, i thought he might bin his ps2 then and there !
    of and the controls were very intuitive as well

  • Emu (Score:1)

    by mwvdlee ( 775178 )
    The dreamcast can emulate the PS1 at full speed yet was released long before. Dreamcast was probably the best machine of them all, technically speaking.
  • I remember picking up my Dreamcast the day it came out. I'm an avid Sega fanboy (yes, I was the kid with the SMS, GG, Genesis/32x/SCD, and Saturn), so I couldn't wait for it. Best games?

    Soul Calibur (blew the arcade version away)
    NFL2K (the first "beautiful" sports game, led to what is now a great line of 'ESPN' branded games)
    Ikaruga (the hardest goddamned game I've ever played)
    Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (arcade perfect)
    Rez (a beautiful, amazing experience)
    Jet Set/Grind Radio (cell shading done right)
    Crazy

  • Some reason i always decide to pick up consoles when they are on their way out. Did it with saturn, just to own one for 30bux for nostalgic value, and then DC when it it 40. Id have to say my favorite games for it were most definetly: Rez - I dunno what it is about this game, its just so addicting to me. Just really entertaining music/shooter game Tennis 2k- This still reigns as my all time favorite tennis sim, nothing can beat it, tried topspin on the xbox and it just doesnt have the same feel Rival Schoo
  • Still have my Dreamcast in my entertainment center, and it still gets a lot of play (although admittedly not so much since I started playing FFXI, but that's another story entirely!).
    • Soul Calibur
    • Bangai-O
    • Skies of Arcadia

    There's a few other titles too, but those three are the reason it's still hooked up (Even though the GC serves up SC2, and Skies could be replaced with Skies: Legends (why bother rebuying?), there is no replacement for the cheese and fun that is Bangai-O.)

  • Best. Console. Ever. (Score:3, Informative)

    by wandazulu ( 265281 ) on Thursday April 29, 2004 @06:58AM (#9005767)
    The first time I saw Soul Calibur I literally missed my mouth and spilled my drink a la Airplane! Crazy Taxi was an early and more gentle GTA. I left Ecco on the screen as background "art" at a party that had some kids at it...they went nuts moving the dolphin around the screen (and the graphics caused a lot of the adults to beg for turns too). Playing Shenmue inspired me enough to take a trip to Japan (though I didn't get to the area Shenmue takes place in).

    This console was my introduction to Lik-Sang as I bought the ethernet adapter, two DC-2-PS2 adapters so I could use a mouse/keyboard with the webbrowser. Hell, I even bought the soundtrack to Jet Set Radio.

    I could go on and on about great moments I've had with this console. It "felt" right...I never had a problem with the controller as some people did, and even played Tetris on the memory unit (thanks Marcus!)

    To me, this was the first console that got everything right; great graphics, great controller (to me), and an online community through the console itself (modem then ethernet). Though I have an Xbox, it feels like a bit of a warmed over Dreamcast and I still think the graphics on the DC are better than the PS2 (my opinion based on games I've seen).

  • Yup. (Score:1)

    by Gangis ( 310282 )
    Definitely Skies of Arcadia. That was one of the most memorable RPGs I've ever played, and I'm right now working on Skies of Arcadia Legends for the Gamecube. Another memorable game is PSO; it was my first MMORPG (Although I wouldn't consider it 'massive', it only supported 4 players per game.)
  • Everybody understands why and how Sega collapsed from a videogame power house to a purely software development company. Why can't Sega learn from its mistakes, get some capital together, and make a new video game console. From this thread, it seems everybody loved their dreamcast and would go out and by a new reincarnation of it. Why can't Sega hire competent managers and marketing people! They have innovative, creative programmers and engineers. Come on Sega, get your shit together!
    • Until they can start developing decent games again for other people's hardware, they don't need to be wasting their time with their own.
      I mean, really, the Dreamcast games directly from Sega were awesome, everyone loved them. But once they became 3rd party, they realized people would pay for rehashed crap... so they gave people what they'd pay for. Granted, some of the ports from Dreamcast were cool and helped spread the awesome games around, but really... Sega hasn't made a decent unique (non-port) game in
    • Why make a reincarnation? If they re-release the Dreamcast console, and re-release the hits, and release new titles, there is a fanbase who would buy everything. The only thing they should do better next time is advertising. People have gotta know the talents of our favourite system.
  • Capcom released an arcade-perfect port of Street Fighter Zero (Alpha) 3 in Japan. Back before boot discs, I used swap tricks to play the game for hours on end. I even bought Ascii's Saturn-style controller to play the game with. The Dreamcast was a fighting gamer's dream, with Soul Calibur, Street Fighter, Rival Schools 2, and all of those SNK games. It's a shame that Sega mucked the whole thing up...
  • Unlike my Saturn, which is still lives in my living room, I can only think of two reasons to drag the DC out of storage:

    Power Stone 2 and Chu Chu Rocket

    Of course, once it is out, games like Tech Romancer (Kikai-o), Virtua Tennis, and the fishing games get played.

    Don't get me wrong, the DC had many more entertaing games... it's just that they've been re-released on other consoles and slightly improved. PSO, Crazy Taxi, MSR, NFL2K, and Skies of Arcadia have all had updates on other (newer) consoles. Even
  • The number of memorable gaming experiences I've had with the Dreamcast are so numerous they are hard to count. I still remember visiting a friend who had a DC, playing an import copy of Jet Set Radio and deciding pretty much right then that I had to buy one. But in addition to that revolutionary game there were so many others:

    Virtual-On OT is giant robots fighting by Sega! How can you go wrong with this... you can't! The RPG selection was pretty thin but with Skies of Arcadia and Grandia II the quality
    • I didn't think it was possible for a 2D Sprite-based game to lag a 128bit machine until I played Bangai-O. Wow, the number of enemies/bullets/missles/explosions onscreen at once is astounding. The incredible difficulty has kept me from finishing the game though.
      A GBA sequel/port of this would be awesome.. but granted, it'd have to be toned down quite a bit.
  • There are a lot of people out there who think that the Dreamcast is the best console ever made, and that Sega's inability to market was what killed it off. I'm not one of those people.

    All the same, Soul Calibur is easily the best fighting game I've ever played, and Virtua Tennis is one of the best sports games. Rez is an artistic-yet-fun shooter (though I think there's a superior version on the PS2), and Skies of Arcadia probably would've been good if I'd bothered playing it for very long. Too bad the D
    • The other good games were indeed buried under Sega's lack of foresight; they left off a few key features for the system (DVD capability would have been nice, though at that point it probably would have killed the system's pricing; also, not offering a bundle deal for broadband/any online game wasn't the smartest move either) and treated 3rd parties worse than Nintendo ever did (or so I've heard). There were a few decent ideas for games that, for one reason or another, were executed so poorly that they're a
      • Oh, and just out of curiosity, how is the PS2 version of Rez superior?

        I believe that Mike Robinson (you know who I'm talking about) told me that the PS2 version had superior graphics and/or sound. Mike's pretty sensitive to those things, though, so it's probably something I wouldn't notice.

        Oh, and of course there's the crappiness of the DC controller (and the angelic design of the Dual Shock) to consider.

        Rob
  • I bought my Dreamcast the day the PS2 came out. I walked into my fave store, fought my way past screaming children to get to the counter and said to the guy, "I'm the only person who's going to say this all day, but I'd like to buy a Dreamcast." I will never regret it - I got the "sports" model, so it's all sexy black and it still sees regular use.

    Favorites:
    • Shenmue (aka DeskDrawerCheck3000), for being the most immersive experience I'd had yet, and a good fighting game to boot. Plus, how can I turn do

  • New Games (Score:2, Informative)

    by Buster Chan ( 755016 )
    In Japan new games are still released for Dreamcast every month. A lot of them are playable even if you don't speak Japanese. Some of the more recent releases that I'd recommend are: Border Down (2003), Psyvariar 2 (2004), Puyo Puyo Fever (2004), and Shikigami No Shiro 2 (2004). Dreamcast should resurrect in North America so that these great games, and others, can find the fans they deserve.

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