There are a lot of thing’s people look back on and with the help of nostalgia everything seem’s rose tinted. As a soon to be 24 year old when I look back at my life there are a few thing’s I remember, playing football for perhaps every day up until I was 18, wasting hours and hours playing Sonic 3 on the Mega Drive, watching Cartoon Network and finally, but most importantly, playing the Dreamcast. That’s right ladies and gentleman, it may shock you but I am indeed a fanboy, not just any old fanboy, a SEGA fanboy. Don’t let anyone else tell you they don’t exist anymore. Were still here, waiting hoping and praying for that Dreamcast 2 release (Maybe SEGA should start buying lottery tickets?) and kick Microsoft, Sony and Nin-ten-don’t right back to the curb! Yeah go SEEEEEGGGAAAAA!
Until that day arrives though we can happily reminisce on one of the shortest but without a doubt greatest console of this and any generation so far. Sure your Playstation 3 can play Blu-Rays, the Xbox 360 has got some sort of Halo online thing and the Wii has, err well..waggle I guess? But did they have a controller with a damn screen in the middle?! No, no they don’t. While the Dreamcast was at the time the fastest selling launch ever it never really sold much more once people got a whiff that the Playstation 2 could sell DVD’s. But let’s not dwell on what went wrong, let’s celebrate the life span of THE greatest console of all time, the SEGA Dreamcast.
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| This still looks real to me... |
In America we had the iconic launch date of 9/9/99, probably the most brilliant idea for a launch date of all time and with 375,000 sold the Dreamcast got off to a flyer. The Dreamcast itself was the first console to ship with a modem, meaning online gaming for the first time ever for consoles. The slogan ‘only 6 billion players’ may have been slightly exaggerated but you got the point. The controller itself while not special at the time, you can see in both the HD console’s now that they both have their roots in the Dreamcast controller. Especially Microsoft’s 360, it’s almost an exact copy. Oh and how on earth can we forget the VMU, Visual Memory Unit, arguably the star of the show in terms of hardware. This little beauty enabled you to take the game away from the console. In Sonic Adventure it enabled you to raise your Tamigotchi like Chao animal by going on an adventure with it and playing mini-games. Not many games used the VMU but it was quite handy also at saving your game, I mean, this is in the day’s your average Joe thought a hard drive was some sort of sexual innuendo.
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| Still to this day, nothing comes close to beating it |
As you can see from just reading the small paragraph above here, Dreamcast made a heck of a lot of innovation’s both at the time and one’s that caught on in this generation. But Sega’s new baby isn’t done yet with the party tricks, within it’s short two year life span the Dreamcast had the best amount of triple A title’s released in such a short life span. Right from launch the Dreamcast was kicking with Sonic Adventure, the first ever Sonic game in 3D. While trying to ignore the fact you were looking at a giant blue hedgehog on two feet and wearing sneakers, the graphics looked real at the time. Sonic Adventure was the first Dreamcast game I put into the console and just watching the intro stunned me. Within a couple of years I had gone from blocky Mario 64 to watching water stream out of buildings and some sort of Chaos monster destroy an entire city, and it looked so beautiful.
The second game I got with the Dreamcast is still to this day without doubt the greatest fighting game of all time, Soul Calibur. As amazing as Sonic Adventure was, this looked better and at the time was the best looking game ever made. Luckily, we also got the best fighting game to go along with the graphics. For me, most fighting games disappoint when I’m left with Arcade Mode and VS Mode in the main menu. Soul Calibur of course had these, but it also had Mission BAttle Mode. A gameplay mechanic that sent your character across the world fighting against enemies but in different situations. I remember one stage where both you and your opponent are being poisoned while slowly sinking into the sand. Nothing like this had been done before, let’s remember again that this innovation in fighting game’s, was started with the Dreamcast. Just to add a little personal touch as to how good Soul Calibur was, I spent the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000 playing Mission Battle as Kilik, yes I missed the New Year's party, well worth it.
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| To this day Power Stone is way too crazy for me, but I want more! |
The launch line up also included Power Stone, a great arcade fighting game that allows four fighters at once with an environment that can act as safety and as a weapon depending on what you choose. It was a great game from Capcom and while later in the life of the console we did get a Power Stone 2, fans are still clambering for a sequel to this day, another franchise that has unfortunately died with the Dreamcast. There was also the crazy horror game Blue Stinger, which had possibly the worst voice acting of all time it's still a hit on YouTube because of it. It seemed a bit like Jurassic Park meets Resident Evil. There were a few other games of note, NFL 2K, Penguin racing game PenPen, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing and Fast and the Furious inspired Tokyo Xtreme Racer.
While the promise from the start of the Dreamcast was for online gaming, here in Europe for whatever reason we got this a couple of months late which was a real shame. So what did Sega do to make it up for all of us early European adopters? They gave us Chu Chu Rocket for free! Yes, a £40 game given to us for absolutely nothing! Not only that, Chu Chu Rocket is the only console puzzle game I’ve ever liked, possibly because it involved Cat’s, Mice and spaceship’s but that’s a story for another day....
Anyway, here end’s part one of the Dreamcast’s early life, in part two I will introduce arguably the killer game and killer of the console plus will look at all the niche title’s that Sega gave us, some of which we will never see a sequel for. Here’s a clue for one of the titles - Talking Fish....until next time, Ciao!
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