Dreamcast Links

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.  

Dreamcast Retrospective Day 9: Sonic Adventure

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.  

But back then they were magical.  

Scratch that.  The Dreamcast is special.

Dreamcast Retrospective Day 8: Soulcalibur

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.

Dreamcast Retrospective Day 7: Ooga Booga

Despite the Dreamcast’s relative obscurity in the gaming world, there are a good number of its titles that have become fairly well known, many of which have already been featured in this retrospective.

This is not one of them.

Ooga Booga may not have the popularity of Crazy Taxi or Space Channel 5 or Jet Grind Radio, but it definitely has the fun to compete with the best of its better-known peers.

It belongs on that special list of games, and every true gamer possesses such a list, that I can claim to have heard of and adore but nobody else has any idea what I’m talking about. 

Ooga Booga is a simple title and, as the name subtly hints, is not a serious one.  It is a relatively straightforward action game that, because of its simplicity, still manages to retain its charm and fun factor to this day.

You played as the Kahuna, or witch doctor, of one of four charming tribes: Hottie, Hoodoo, Fatty, or Twitchy.  The goal was to compete on mysterious island arenas for the favor of the Volcano Goddess by battling the other tribes.  Each tribe has their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as a special ability.  Other weapons at your disposal include shrunken heads, which can be collected from all around the levels and thrown at your opponents, and spell tokens, which you can pick up to use spells such as mines, fireballs, lightening, tornadoes, and meteors, among others.  You can also catch one of the creatures of the island, either a boar or a bird, and run around on it and attack other players.  Finally, you can claim Tikis using shrunken heads as payment and they will act as automatic turrets, attacking enemy tribes whenever they come near.

It is simple, arcade-style fun, and incredibly addictive.  There are even multiple match types to change things up.  Most time will be spent in Smakahuna, which is a free-for-all match type where each tribe competes for points earned by attacking other players.  In Rodeo mode you can only score points by attacking enemies while riding an animal, and in the wonderful Boar Polo mode, you ride on boars and play what is essentially a very bizarre game of soccer, using the boars to push a giant ball down the arena, around obstacles, and into the opponent’s goal. 

By playing the single player Tribal Trial mode you could unlock not only expected game content like spells and creatures, but also new Kahunas, stages, and other wacky fun things.  Or you could just use the cheat codes, which were awesome and numerous.  The unlockable characters were simply awesome.  You could play as Death, Disco Dude, a Leprechaun, a Pirate, and more, all of which had plenty of charm and personality.  There were also multiple decorative masks you could unlock for each character.

Like so many titles on the Dreamcast and so many aspects of the hardware itself, Ooga Booga was ahead of its time.  It came too late in the Dreamcast’s life cycle to catch on with anything even approaching a large audience and, let’s face it, the game is a little too weird to be tremendously popular anyway.

But the game is a great example of a terrifically addictive party game that is a blast when you get a bunch of friends together to play it.  It would be a truly perfect fit in the modern gaming landscape as a downloadable title on Xbox Live Marketplace or PlayStation Network, or even on the Wii, complete with a few modern conveniences and online play with a nice broadband connection.  I doubt there’s anywhere close to enough demand for such a remake to actually happen, but that doesn’t mean I can’t keep the dream alive.

The game did include online play that was a lot of fun in its day.  It wouldn’t exactly have given Xbox Live a run for its money, but but it was still fun, and better than anything else at the time.

As it stands, it might feel a little dated, but I can almost guarantee that if you get a group of people together to play this game and go into it with an open mind, then you’ll still end up having a blast. 

Dreamcast Retrospective Day 6: The Internet Experience

A recurring theme of this Dreamcast retrospective is that Sega’s ill-fated console was, in more ways than one, ahead of its time.

Nothing demonstrates this more aptly than the console’s attempts at Internet integration.

Yes, the Dreamcast connected to the Internet, a fact that is easy to forget when online connections are taken for granted among today’s hardware.  Hell, even portable hardware can go online now.

But back in 1999 things were quite different.

No other console had really tried to make the Internet a vital part of its strategy before.  There were perhaps nibbles at it here or there, but nothing significant.  With the Dreamcast, Sega saw the future of gaming and attempted to be the one to start the revolution.

Given what they had to work with, I’d say they did an admirable job.

There’s only so much you can expect out of a console that only comes equipped with a 56k modem.  How quaint that now seems.  Still, Sega made good on its inclusion.  Slow as dialup access may be, it was still a bold move to pack a modem of any sort in with the console at the time.

The Dreamcast was no Xbox Live, but it outdid Sony’s console until perhaps the PS2’s later years and blew Nintendo’s GameCube out of the water, plain and simple.

Not bad for an “outdated” console that launched in the dark ages of the 1900s. 

The list of games that featured online play is pretty impressive.  All number of genres are covered.

NFL and NBA 2K1 and 2K2.

Bomberman Online.

Chu Chu Rocket.

Phantasy Star Online.

Worms World Party.

Alien Front Online.

Ooga Booga.

Quake III Arena.

Daytona USA.

And a number of others.

You have sports, multiplayer RPGs, racing games, action games, puzzle games and more all covered. 

Ok, so it was a little clunky, it was dialup, there was lag, etc., etc. 

This was 1999!  Cut them a little slack.

Ok, so the Internet thing started to reek a bit of desperation when Sega started giving their consoles away for free when you subscribed to their online service, SegaNet, but it’s hard to blame Sega for doing whatever they could to get their consoles into people’s hands by that point.

I would not particularly look forward to going back to the Dreamcast’s online services today, but at the time they were revolutionary.  It was also yet another sign that Sega was simply too far ahead of the curve for its own good.  You couldn’t accuse them of that for their other consoles, part of their reoccurring problems with hardware, but with the Dreamcast they finally did really get it right.

Sadly, it just wasn’t enough.

People didn’t trust Sega enough by that point.  Their game was over.

It didn’t help that the PS2 loomed on the horizon, adding yet another bullet point to the long list of areas where Sega missed its timing.  Its graphics were revolutionary for the brief period they held the spotlight until the PS2 came out, but with Sony’s box on the horizon, they couldn’t generate the sales necessary to support the console.

I love my PS2, don’t get me wrong.  It was a true gem of a console in its own way.  But the PS2 wasn’t the console that I went online with for the first time. 

I remember it well.  First I had to fish through the piles of demo discs I had looking for the latest version of the Dreamcast web browser.  Then I’d pop it in and wait for it to load.  The soothing sounds of the screeching modem soon followed and, shortly thereafter, I was surfing the Internet on my television through my Dreamcast.

Yes it was slow.  Yes it was awkward.  Yes it was quaint.

But damnit, it was cool at the time!  It made my Dreamcast seem more important than just a lousy game console, even if I didn’t use the feature much.  In another example of Sega hinting at being ahead of the curve, it gave me a glimpse into the future of gaming, where consoles really are more like little computers and media machines than the dedicated game players they used to be.

I suppose it’s yet another example of a great memory I have of my wonderful days with the Dreamcast of an experience that wouldn’t really hold up today. 

But that’s what makes the Dreamcast even more special to me and the many other fans it has to this day.  It was a period in history that cannot be replicated.  It gave us memories that, for one reason or another, will never quite be matched.  Even if it may seem quaint today, it was glorious then and it shall forever remain glorious in our minds. 

I certainly wouldn’t want to have to go through it again, but some part of me still misses that special screeching noise of the Dreamcast’s little modem hogging my phone line.