that’s right, next monday marks the 25th anniversary of the dreamcast’s US launch, and i think this place could use blue skies now more than ever. emulation or OG hardware, let’s celebrate some dreamcast goodness! the excellent fan translation scene literally just gave us birdcage of horrors, a dreamcast horror movie, which is really cool. we’ve been absolutely spoiled in recent years (especially PSX & saturn scenes) and i remain hopeful we’ll yet see segagaga one day
for my part, i have one GDEMU setup, and one modded for region/etc to play, and am using the latter for some pretty ambitious stuff this year!
dreamshell 4.0 - finally getting into this, always wanted to be able to mess with VMU stuff/download saves off the net, as well as revisit lost DLC (samba de amigo!) and timed event stuff, like the launch event that went down in sonic adventure 1 and i somehow managed to miss at the time. feels like a perfect time to finally check it out on monday!
dreampi - one of you kind era folks sold me a pi a while back (thanks again!) and i’m finally using it & some tools to get my DC back online for event, as well as play other online stuff (PSO!). dreamcast live has everything you’ll need here; it was refreshing to find out that no, you don’t have to shell out a ton of $ for a broadband adapter, and it’s possibly more limiting if you do
all this and a VMU2 to mess with!
so yeah, with spooky season coming around, i’m gonna finally be playing through the DC port of dino crisis, possibly trying iblleed or D2 again. how are y’all looking to celebrate?
The Dreamcast was the first game system I asked for and got from my parents. Past systems (Playstation, Sega Genesis) I had no choice in. They would appear one Christmas unasked for but quite welcome. The Dreamcast was both asked for and welcome, with Sonic Adventure along for the ride.
I was in high school and perpetually short of money. Still, during the year and couple of months between me getting the Dreamcast and Sega discontinuing it, I accumulated a small but precious store of games.
Skies of Arcadia, which I think was a birthday gift, was beautiful! I played lovingly through it, and it remains a favorite. I changed out my first VMU battery for Pinta’s Quest.
Grandia II was one of my best ever game deals, bought on clearance for $5. I then bought a strategy guide for $1 because a bookstore clerk mistook it for a magazine in an incredible deal.
Soul Calibur was the last fighting game series I took seriously enough to learn characters and combos. Sophitia was my main, though I loved cycling through the characters and seeing what I could do. Love the weapons fighting in the game.
I bought Maken X not knowing what I was in for but liking it. I remember reading the instructions in French, leaning on a semester of conjugations and basic verb knowledge.
I tried and failed to like the Dragonriders of Pern game. I read Dragonflight the year before because I had a crush on a girl who read them, and she moved away the month after I started the books. Then I read all the books. This game was a bigger disappointment than losing contact with my crush.
I bought, loved, tired of, and traded in Crazy Taxi II (my only ever trade-in) over a period of a couple of weeks. It’s the closest to a one-night stand I’ve had with a game. To this day, I can’t explain why I liked it so much initially or why I was suddenly done.
Finally, I would scrounge together just enough money to buy Sonic Adventure 2 on release day. I played the heck out of it and had some very high powered Chao, though I never quite got every trophy.
Unless my memory of the timeline has been muddled, Sonic Adventure 2 was my final Dreamcast purchase, though I would stare at the Euro package of Shenmue 2, the Record of Lodoss War game, and a few other titles for months in Prufrockian indecision until they disappeared from the shelves. Maybe I used that money instead to buy Final Fantasy X or Legaia 2: Duel Saga. I don’t know.
Learning about the Dreamcast since feels like reading alternate playthroughs of the Dreamcast age. Games I’d never played (like Power Stone) or seen but thought “Nah” (like Seaman) fill out the context and the possibilities for that brief period. I am still envious of real-life friends who got to play Phantasy Star Online. I still dream of what another two years of Dreamcast would have been like.
The Dreamcast was too good for this world. I miss the Dreamcast every day. But in a way, it’s some comfort that it didn’t live long enough to see what a mess humanity has made of the only planet we call home.
My dad was a games journalist at the time and we got a free Japanese Dreamcast well before launch so that he could play through Evolution: The World of Sacred Device. He could not and cannot speak or read Japanese, so I’m nto sure why that happened. Then we got an American Dreamcast a little later. Not sure if that one was free or not but it was cool.
I don’t know what my rankings would be like now, but these are the ten games I most associate with Dreamcast and I loved them all as a boy:
Sonic Adventure
Jet Grind (sic) Radio
Shenmue
Skies of Arcadia
Grandia II
Power Stone 2
Chu Chu Rocket
Street Fighter Alpha 3
Virtua Tennis
Soul Calibur
I have quite a bit of love for the Dreamcast! I got a Japanese console (my first import console!) before the US launch, mostly to play the confusingly titled port of KoF '98, King of Fighters Dream Match 1999. I was living in Baltimore and I was pretty heavily into fighting games at the time since a bunch of my local friends also played. But more than anything else, the Dreamcast was the system that got me into STGs in a big way-- I had played some on the Saturn, but I didn’t start devouring them until the DC.
This thread got me thinking about the Capcom Taisen Fan Disc that came as a preorder bonus for Capcom vs SNK 2 for the DC, and all of the headaches involved in transferring VMU data between PC and a VMU in the pre-flash drive era…
(Actually, now that I think about it, the fan disc was I believe a DC disc that let you save ‘complete’ save files to your VMU-- as opposed to the earlier fix which was downloading a save file from gamefaqs or some other site and transferring it via a third party cable to your VMU. Somebody else here must have a better memory than I do about this?)
The Dreamcast was the first console that I tracked before it came out and bought on launch day with my own money. The second and last time I did that was the PS2 though lol. Of those two I sure do have 100x more good memories of the Dreamcast launch and early days.
i’m not sure what the punchline should be because i’m pretty checked out wrt mainstream gaming, but imagine something emblematic of the worst aspects of videogames in recent years
I bought a Dreamcast second hand around 2010, and the stores just did not have the library to keep up with it. I had Sonic Adventure, Code Veronica, that Sonic Mario Party game, and Phantasy Star Online. I didn’t realize the internet wouldn’t be built in. (I was like 13). Needless to say I did not get much out of my Dreamcast.
Nevertheless! It saved fighting games in such a big way and for that I am eternally grateful to it. I don’t know what that community looks like without Dreamcast MVC2.
mann i have the mic now and everything, i really gotta give that one a go someday - watched a bit of my roommate getting saddest by leonard nimoy back then and…it was something
Though it makes perfect sense and is of course a true thing that happens, the idea of somebody having a parent who was a game journalist, who then grew up to be an adult as well and have resultant memories of the dreamcast, has made me feel quite a real connection with the passage of time.
Anyhoo I bought a dreamcast at launch, also the first console I’d ever done that with, maybe the last? I might have gotten a DS pretty close to launch. My stepmother’s coworker was going to Japan in a time (christmas) that happened to coincide with the recent launch and I just gave them all my money from working for a few months and they came back with that dreamcast. I didn’t realize what a big ask it was to get this huge thing back in their luggage. I also got sonic adventure, pen pen tri-icelon, and I think seventh cross which I played maybe once.
I had a launch-ish dreamcast that came with a pillow and a clock. I eventually sold or lost those, and I also somehow lost my launch japanese dreamcast (whoops!) but I’ve got maybe 200 dreamcast games here to this day, so it definitely made a lasting impact.
9/9/99 is a day I remember what I did, because I walked to the store after school to pick up Final Fantasy VIII, and that game ended up being special to me in a way that no other game is. It helped me get through a very hard time in my life that started a few days later.
I could never convince my parents to buy two consoles, so I was a big ol’ playstation kid around the time of the Saturn and the Dreamcast. I’ve only played a handful of Dreamcast games in my life so far, but I’m sure I’ll get around to more eventually.
The two Dreamcast games I think I’ve played the most are Crazy Taxi (I played the Steam version first, but it is better with that Offspring song) and Maken X which is a game somebody told me was cool once and they were super right about that.
I almost went with the dreamcast versions of Resident Evil 2 and 3 when I played them earlier this year. But I went with the PS1 versions only for the simple reason that Redream crashes my Anbernic if I leave it running idle.
The Dreamcast felt rather revelatory at the time. It was the first realy look at what a post-PS1 console world looked like. Sure, PC games and arcade games had been looking that good for a year or two before the system came out, but it was truly the very first time that it felt like a home console could compete on the level. Not only that, but it was the first time 3D on a console truly looked modern: good textures, lots of color and detail, models that looked detailed AND moved fluidly at steady frame rates. I realize it was inevitable and technology was going to converge on that point within the next year or two, but the Dreamcast was really the point at which I was able to say, “yes, this isn’t just a hint of the future, it IS the future.”
finally got my dreamcast back online! dreamcast now is a cool service for stuff like that screenshot, and what’s also awesome is when you set it to dial into the address they tell you, games with “official” web pages (sadly now long gone) have mock ones up with extras like strategies, VMU downloads and even a DC-only PSO forum! it’s so cool
speaking of, the patch for private servers in PSO is super easy - on my GDEMU, you just place it correctly, run it once & from then on, you’re golden. it’s really neat but i need to check the schedule & not just go on my weird late night hours to see empty lobbies, haha
so far my only failure was in hoping the more modern browsers would allow me to post here & elsewhere from said dreamcast…it was clearly built in a netscape era long before frames and uh, lots of stuff i imagine. closest i get to here is a text only google search, but it’s still neat!
tonight’s anniversary plans:
sonic adventure 1 9/9/99 launch event that i’d missed back then
sonic adventure 2 green hill zone playthrough that i was not able to earn in the decades since then
prolly more solo PSO, might bounce around to typing of the dead, cosmic smash & finally see if i can make some carazzy money (YA YA YA YA YAHHHH)
Got one on 9-9-99. Love fighting games and Sega’s arcade games so it was a no brainer! Dreamcast was the last time the graphics on a next generation console felt like a true paradigm shift. SoulCalibur absolutely floored me.
The Dreamcast gave me my favorite game of all-time, Skies of Arcadia, a game that captures my imagination and the spirit of romanticism like no other. It alongside the NAOMI hardware is the peak of video game aethetics and is absolutely beautiful to me. All the Dreamcast games have aged so well visually because of their bright colors and “blue sky, good vibes” looks, while a lot games from the next two generations of consoles don’t hold up well because of their washed out, dull color palletes.
Haha wow this is very similar to my experience of 9/9/99 and the following days/weeks/months/years.
I’ll add that I worked at EB Games once the Dreamcast’s price had cratered, and I used my sweet, sweet employee discount to get Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Marvel vs Capcom 2, and plenty of other stuff. I still smell that weird food court odour when I cast my mind back to those dreamlike days.
The Dreamcast wasn’t the console I spent the most time with, not by a long shot. But boy I loved the time I did spend with it.
he absolutely didn’t & i love him
but as a huge fan of sega bass fishing, they could’ve made his fishing stuff more fun than they did. whenever i replay SA1, i always wanna love his segments more than i do
I got my Dreamcast at a value village in probably 2009. It was so dirty and beat up I had to rescue it, take it home and nurse it back to health. It remains with me to this day. ꩜
September 9, 1999 was a Thursday so I was probably in class with my weird English teacher who would tell us about what it was like teaching in Japan and read to us from his unpublished novel about a Buddhist Elvis. We had the same French teacher assigned to us from Grade 7 except she had to leave for most of the year, and her substitue was this really cute strict librarian type in her twenties with big front teeth and glasses who wore hairbands in her long black hair and these slinky maxi dresses every day and omg oui madame
My father is the one who originally told me about Sega’s new console, only he got the name wrong and called it The Dream Machine. I knew two people in my class who were Sega fans, Teri and Joel, and they were both cool. I think Joel picked up a DC but only because he already would get like every console including the Virtual Boy.
i was thinking of hitting my favorite game shop to see if they had a dreamcast i could pick up for this auspicious day, but events happened. but, i’m wearing my dreamcast shirt, so i’ve paid some respect.
oui madame