I ran across a number of different Dreamcast articles online whilst in the midst of my own recent Dreamcast nostalgia. I thought I'd pass some of them along and share the joy.
Gamasutra posted a fascinating seven-page article entitled "The Rise And Fall Of The Dremcast," which is exactly that. Well worth a read for any Dreamcast fan.
Peter Moore, one of the key executives at Sega during the early days of the Dreamcast, posted his thoughts on the little white console, its impact, and his experiences working at Sega. He provides a very interesting inside perspective.
Giant Bomb did nine of their always entertaining Quick Look videos over notable or entertaining Dreamcast titles in celebration of the anniversary. ChuChu Rocket, Crazy Taxi, Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, Samba de Amigo, Typing of the Dead, Virtua Tennis, and Power Stone 2 are all given a run through. Typing of the Dead is embedded below. You're highly advised to check out the rest in the link above.
Giant Bomb also found this wickedly disturbing ChuChu Rocket commercial. Watch it at your own peril.
Not every memorable moment in Dreamcast history is a positive one. This cursed title was the warning sign that signaled Sonic’s descent into madness. This should have been the clue that the poor blue mascot was destined to star in countless odes to suckitude in the years to come, one relentless dose of terrible after the next, until there was nearly nothing left of the hedgehog we knew and loved.
All of that doesn’t mean Sonic Adventure wasn’t totally badass at the time, though.
Personally I was too excited by its spectacular jump into 3D-O-Vision at first to really notice its flaws. They took a while to sink in, but sink in they eventually did.
I’ll never forgive it for those damn Knuckles levels.
Curse the repetition. CURSE IT!!!
Before the truth reached my young brain, however, this little clunker managed to worm its way into my fond memories before I knew any better.
The moment I knew that this game was going to be the most awesome thing ever created was when I first saw the trailer, and later the demo, that featured Sonic running down a dock as a whale chased after him, destroying everything in its path.
A freakin’ whale! Sweet!
I felt more sheer anticipation for this game than it deserved by a long shot, waited for it more anxiously and with more innocent excitement than just about anything else I can remember that didn’t have Zelda in the title, but until the horrible truth finally sunk in, it delivered.
The graphics were truly better than anything I had seen before. The sense of speed in Sonic’s levels was truly addicting. The worlds I got to race through and explore were new and exciting. Finally conquering the rest of the game and reaching that glorious point where the cheesy 80s metal that I love so very much for some reason blared and I got to transform into fucking Super Sonic and beat the crap out of the boss put an embarrassingly large smile on my face.
And those little Chaos were just so damn cute.
For a short, wonderful time, Sonic Adventure was glorious.
It’s possible that Sonic Adventure’s failings helped transform me into the jaded creature that now types these nostalgic words. My childhood excitement for the Dreamcast, what it represented, and the unique games I could play with it was eventually betrayed by poor business decisions and a Sega that was losing its grip.
It sure was one hell of a ride, though.
The Dreamcast gave me some of the most radical, unique, and memorable gaming experiences I’ve played to this day. My innocent excitement over Sonic Adventure; my sheer addiction to Crazy Taxi and the love of The Offspring that it spawned; my long-awaited conquering of Grandia II and the ever elusive JRPG genre it represented; my fascination with the enveloping yet insidiously boring world of Shenmue; my time spent playing Jet Grind Radio by myself and with friends and loving the sheer creative spark that radiated from it, not matched by many other games even to this day; all of these are memories I truly cherish.
But the short-lived system soon began to falter. Its popularity wasn’t enough to save Sega from its troubled past. Its utterly unique games didn’t draw the audience necessary to dig it out of the hole it had dug for itself.
The creative spark that had once defined Sega, that had once enthralled a generation of gamers, that had once captured so many hearts and imaginations and developed a strong rivalry with boring old Nintendo, would quickly fade with the Dreamcast’s passing.
The great saga of Shenmue remains unfinished. Sonic Adventure II, along with every Sonic game that followed, was utterly forgettable at best. Crazy Taxi 2 and 3 both sucked. Sega soon devolved into just another publisher of mediocre action games and forgettable sequels, with that oh-so-rare diamond in the rough coming out of nowhere and reminding of what once was.
Without its own console, its own piece of hardware to call home, Sega just couldn’t take the risks it used to. It couldn’t afford to be the company we once loved. The safety net had been taken away and its built-in audience had disappeared, forcing the accountants to take over and move it into that dreadful hell of “play it safe” game development.
Sonic Adventure may have been the death knell of a great company, but I yearn for those troubled days. They were the last of the great ones for Sega, and some of the last for my youthful enthusiasm.
It is true enough that my jaded nature may have come more from age than from any betrayal by Sega, but it is hard for me not to want to pin the blame.
The PlayStation 2 just wasn’t the same; the GameCube not as magical; the Xbox, by comparison, a faceless computer.
The Dreamcast was special.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime culmination of circumstances that could never be recreated, but that offered one of the greatest concentrations of unique titles ever to be seen. It is all too true that some of them, like many things in our memories, do not hold up well when revisited today.
Despite the fact that I recently spent an ungodly sum of money on the best arcade stick on the market, I haven’t always liked fighting games.
In fact, I used to hate them.
Until quite recently, my relationship with them was very casual. Street Fighter IV marked only the second fighting game I’ve spent any notable amount of time with, and BlazBlue only the third. These two might have been enough to spur me into buying the aforementioned hulking arcade stick, but they don’t give me a lot of history with the genre.
There has been one fighting game series, however, that I’ve always adored. One series that has always stood above all the rest for me. One series that has kept calling me back and provided countless hours of entertainment over the years, playing against friends and the computer alike. One series that has challenged me to learn its every nuance when other fighting games simply bored me, frustrated me, or turned me away.
That series, of course, is the Soulcalibur series, and the first game launched along with the Dreamcast on 9/9/99.
I didn’t even like fighting games at the time. To this day I’m still not entirely sure what convinced me that trying out this particular fighting game was such a good idea. I hadn’t played it at anybody else’s house or tried a demo.
I had simply read a review in my beloved Electronic Gaming Monthly calling it, and I’m paraphrasing here, I freaking awesome game and I decided to give it a shot.
One thing that hasn’t changed about my gaming habits over the years is that I’ve never been much for spur-of-the-moment purchases. I do my research before handing over my money. I might have read reviews and seen screenshots beforehand with Soulcalibur, but this was about as close as I ever come to buying a game on a whim.
Boy am I glad I did.
Right away I realized that this game was somehow different from other fighting games. Or at least it felt that way to me.
I could pick up the controller and with amazingly little effort be doing really cool moves. In a short amount of time I felt like I actually had a hang of the fighting system; I felt like I actually sort of knew what I was doing. The default difficulty was even reasonable enough that I didn’t have to drastically dial it down just to survive.
It was my kind of fighting game.
I’ve never liked gaming experiences that are “realistic”. To this day I don’t like to play Madden as I’d rather be playing Mario Tennis. I don’t like to play Gran Turismo as I’d rather be playing Burnout. And I don’t like to play Virtua Fighter because I’d rather be playing Soulcalibur.
Something about the fantastical weapons-based fighting system managed to grab my attention where detail-oriented fighters with a realistic bent, such as Virtua Fighter, could never grab me for any length of time.
The original Soulcalibur is still one of the best entries in the series. The graphics have since been surpassed, but it’s hard to believe how good they still look. I don’t think any other game since has instilled in me quite the same amount of awe in me that seeing Soulcalibur running on the Dreamcast for the first time did. As much of a last stand as the Dreamcast was for traditional arcade titles in many ways (see Crazy Taxi, Daytona USA, Ooga Booga, and many others), it also signaled the beginning of the switch to console dominance. The Dreamcast version of Soulcalibur looked much better than the already highly-acclaimed arcade version and had a better feature set to boot.
Soulcalibur’s experience as a single player game was only rivaled by that of Soulcalibur II, but the original was definitely more memorable. The series has yet to do better than the Weapon Master mode for single player fun and the first game nailed the balance between difficulty and fun, while still throwing in a crazy amount of unlockable items.
The character creation mode of the newer games is great and I applaud their willingness to try new things with the single player experience, but the original game’s feature set is still, in some ways at least, the best. It may lack some of the bells and whistles and newer characters I’ve come to love, but it’s still damn fun.
Unimportant little extras abound and really add to the overall experience. There was tons of cool artwork to unlock. There was a mode where you could rearrange the characters in the opening sequence, a totally pointless but fantastic addition. There were modes that have since disappeared from the more recent installments for no explicable reason, like some of the team battle modes. It was a truly astounding package.
The newer games may have improved upon it in many ways, but no Soulcalibur game since has brought as much wonder to the table at once as the original.
I have this terrific game, this game I picked up from out of nowhere, this game that launched right along with the Dreamcast on day one, this game that has spawned a love of the series and fighting games in general to thank for many happy memories playing this game by myself and in countless heated matches with my friends.
…
Oh, and no announcer in any other Soulcalibur game can ever top the performance given by the guy in the first game. I don’t know why. It’s just the honest truth. Live with it.
Screw Gran Turismo. Get Forza out of my face. I want a bunch of stupidly fast boats speeding recklessly through totally insane courses that have no basis in reality whatsoever and are way, way cooler because of it.
Hydro Thunder may have been ported to other consoles later on, but I still strongly associate it with my beloved Dreamcast. Not only were its graphics closer to the arcade version than any other port, but the release date for this little racing gem was none other than 9/9/99.
This game was one of the cherished few that I brought home with me on launch day and played the crap out of, because that’s what you do with launch games on a new system.
And this was a game deserving of my time.
Like Crazy Taxi, this is a game born out of a true arcade heritage. In fact, the first time I played Hydro Thunder wasn’t even on the Dreamcast, it was on a true, honest-to-god arcade machine at a real, existing, miraculously-still-surviving arcade. It had a big plastic seat that you sat down in, speakers placed right behind your ears for maximum immersion, a large grippy steering wheel, and a spiffy throttle thingy that was a lot of fun to use.
This is why I lament the loss of arcades. Sure plastic peripherals seem to be all the rage nowadays, and I admit I’d rather play Guitar Hero than Guitar Freaks, but there’s nothing quite like experiencing a game like Hydro Thunder in a true arcade cabinet with the sound cranked up and a big ol’ piece of tape over one of the broken “Insert Coin” slots.
All the more impressive, then, that the Dreamcast version of Hydro Thunder so wonderfully captured the feeling of its bigger arcade counterpart.
This was a fairly no-frills game, but you don’t need any frills with a game like this. There was no needless career mode to stretch out the game pointlessly. There was no abundance of modes that are not actually any fun.
There’s just a bunch of tracks and a bunch of boats. You race on the tracks and unlock more tracks and boats until it gets too hard and you have to keep trying over and over again until you finally do unlock everything but then you keep going back because it’s so damn fun.
Throw in a multiplayer mode and you’re set.
There were some truly wild courses in this game. Sure you had your typical tropical island and icy courses. But what other racing game lets you race through the Greek Isles, plow through some Chinese city in mid-festival, speed through the canals of Venice, venture through a post-apocalyptic flooded New York, and navigate down the Nile and into an Egyptian tomb, all in the same game?
The graphics were absolutely stunning at the time and really helped justify my purchase of a Dreamcast. It was a real showcase game for the system’s abilities. Sure it doesn’t look all that stunning today, but what game of this era does? I think it at least manages not to look like utter crap, which considering how some games from the era look these days is pretty impressive.
While the graphics may be a bit of a rough ride, the gameplay holds up just fine. The sheer thrill of racing from checkpoint to checkpoint, always just on the verge of running out of time, finding elusive secret paths, and collecting boost meter extensions along the way to keep yourself going as insanely fast as possible by mashing that boost button at every possible opportunity just doesn’t get old.
I’ve dabbled in Nintendo’s Wave Race series before and, while I usually enjoy them, they’ve never been more than a passing fancy. Their highfalutin wave physics are fun and all, but, go figure, racing at high speeds on actual waves is really freakin’ hard.
Give me something like Hydro Thunder any day. It remains one of my favorite arcade-style racing games.
Sadly, this is a genre not seen in its pure form very often these days. With even Burnout going open world and games everywhere, the racing genre included, getting more and more complex, the simple thrill of this genre is surprisingly hard to find. Kart racing games are the only reliable source of this kind of fun anymore and, while they’re plenty fun in their own way, they’re just not the same.
I actually haven’t played any of the other “Thunder” racing titles, but maybe I should seek them out just to see if they still hold up since there are so few modern equivalents.
It really is a shame Hydro Thunder hasn’t gotten a proper modern sequel. It really could be fantastic.
As it stands, though, Hydro Thunder remains a standout Dreamcast launch title that remains fun to this day. I’m still glad that I chose it to go along with my Dreamcast on the Day of Nines all those years ago.
Thu, September 10, 2009 at 10:53 PM 
