I didn’t get a Dreamcast when it was a current console, but I did play on my friend’s machine. We played a load of HOTD2 and Zombie Revenge together.
When I got et go from my games QA job back in 2001/2002, the entire QA team was made redundant. On my way out of the office, I scooped up a debug PS2 and a Dreamcast, went down to Gamestation and bought a load of DC games for not very much money. I got Cannon Spike for £10, and that now goes for £300+.
I have come to truly love the DC. I have two of them, a disc drive machine and a GDEMU machine. I enjoy the oddities like Typing of the Date, the wonderful fighting game conversions, and the weird single player games like Blue Stinger and Rent A Hero.
The DC really symbolises a specific era of games; late 90s imports, local multiplayer games, and a breathless sense of naive wonder from Sega. Maybe they could make games like this and succeed?
The only thing I don’t like about the Dreamcast is how the dpad tears your thumb up doing hadouken motions.
The Dreamcast is the main console that reminds me of how many sweet systems & games I’ve owned over the years and parted ways with. Though only somewhat regrettably, as I never had enough money or space back then to just hold onto stuff that wasn’t actively being used.
About five years after getting to play my older cousin’s launch day Dreamcast and reveling in its glory; I traded my Gamecube to my friend for his NES edition GBA SP, then later traded in that SP at a local shop for a Dreamcast, Shenmue, MvC2, and Third Strike. I don’t even think I had that Dreamcast for a full year before trading it in for something else. And I regret that.
So while I have many fond memories of the DC, I don’t feel like I experienced it properly during its actual life. More so second-hand via my cousin, and a kind of sad end of life run with it back when aging systems weren’t cherished, and were thought of as just old rather than retro (at least in my sphere).
I’m gonna say; I don’t think Illbleed is all that good. I love Blue Stinger and wanted to love Illbleed but I tried it recently and didn’t like it.
It all seems rather fussy and stilted. You keep burning through your detection meter to avoid invisible danger. If you miss something or run out of detection meter, you take damage and feel like you’ve failed a not very fun challange.
Am I missing something? People really love to talk about how cool Illbleed is but I’m not seeing it. I would love to!
it’s funny, because i was waiting for the dreamcast, bought it at launch, (prior to and after it, i always wait until a console is close to the end of its life before buying it), had a subscription to the official dreamcast magazine, and all that and… i also don’t feel like i experiencd it properly during its actual life.
i’m going to say something wild and connect far-flung things (i just want to let it be known i’m being a weirdo): people wouldn’t be so into jesus if he had died of old age. the fact the dreamcast came to an abrupt end after a short life of seemingly doing everything right is half the reason people are so fond of it.
Illbleed is one of those games I think is cool to think about, and which has really interesting vibes, but is no good to actually play. It’s cool in every way except actually playing it. So if I ever said illbleed is good, that’s what I meant!
Here’s a graph for that. Possibly blasphemous, might delete later. Probably adaptable to different life cycles, e.g., too short in a console life cycle isn’t enough to build nostalgia, whereas if a console managed to persist forever it would have the interest of a God-Queen.
Dreamcast has the best disc drive sounds. You really know some stuff is bein accessed. PS2 and beyond who even knows what good a disc is doing, maybe it’s just an unlock for the game running from some hidden recess within the machine.
My Dreamcast memmories. I imported a japanese system around the japanese launch. It was either from Tronix of NCS I don’t remember
which. I think it was about $700 with VF3tb. Also I got Sonic Adventure and Pen Pen Tricelon in the next shipment. It was so amazing of a jump at the time. We would just sit and watch game attract modes and replays. (People would just sit in my apartment and watch SoulCalibur for hours) I ran an EB at that time and would bring in my system and demo it for customers to fuel US preorders ahead of the US launch.
My wife who is not often a gamer, at the time she had here own dreamcast just to play crazy taxi, and some puzzle games. We played alot 2 player Virtua Tennis, House of the dead 2, typing of the dead, and dance dance revolition. She’s fell out of gaming since then so this is a special memory to me.
I was a big player of the Fire Pro Wrestling Series of games and one of the coolest times in gaming was The Dreamcast release of Fire Pro
Wrestling D. why? Well DLC was not common at this time. The developer was posting to their website a monthly poll asking users what moves did we want added to the game. The content that was voted winner was then made for the game and release to download to VMU updating the game. How? Some gamers in japan would get the data from the vote and link to it on messageboards. I had a vmu what connected to the PC with a parallel cable!?!
Dreamcast was so fun for some reason I think I got more accesories and gadgets for it than any other console in my life.
-dreamcast gun controllers
-dreamcast keyboard
-vmu to pc
-Vga Box
-neo geo pocket to dreamcast connection cable
-rumble pack
-Maraca Controllers
-DDR Dance Mat
-extension cables
-dreamcast mouse
-ascii fight pad
-fishing controller
-etc.
I spent most of my dreamcast time playing sega/capcom/snk arcade ports, along with Tokyo Extreme Racer, RE Code Veronica,Fire Pro D etc.
As you look over the dreamcast library, its got a pretty good mix of genres. Seems like more character action games and FPS are some of the only things missing. If they had EA and Square develop for it, there could have been a big change also Namco if they did more like that Soul Calibur port OMG.
took my kid to the game shop yesterday to think about getting a dreamcast–decided not to because i’m a tightwad–but my kid said, “whoa, the dreamcast looks cool” and it made me a proud papa.
Like others here, the Dreamcast was also the first console I got with my own money on or around launch and Sonic Adventure was the first game I followed online while it was being developed and pored over Japanese media as it was coming out.
My folks brought me to Costco to get one of those bundles they used to do in the enormous, clam shell packaging with the console, a game and a controller. It came with Crazy Taxi and we popped over to Target to nab Sonic Adventure on the way home.
That first night was a huge family event, which was really special because my folks were never very much into video games to any extent to be excited about them. The kids played Sonic Adventure for a bit, then we all took turns playing Crazy Taxi. We all thought the graphics looked “so real!!!”. They were definitely really good at the time.
I went down the Dreamcast Internet rabbit hole with a raspberry pi a couple years ago and seeing all this hype about it makes me want to hook it all up again and get one of those fancy new VMUs.
