Happy birthday, Dreamcast! Sega's iconic and final console turns 25 this month.
Anniversary
The Dreamcast is now 25 years old in the US, after its memorable release date of 9/9/99!
Europe has another month to go (it released on 14 October 1999), and Japan already beat the world to the anniversary by almost a year (27 November 1998).
Share your thoughts, memories, favorite games, or anything else related to the Dreamcast here. You can reminisce about how cool Sonic Adventure was, how groundbreaking Shenmue was, or how unsettling Seaman was.
Play Along
I am taking a month out of my regular gaming habits (mostly smaller indie Steam stuff) to play different Dreamcast games through September in honor of the anniversary. If anyone wants to join me in that, I’d love the company!
Every so often I’ll post a comment to this topic with thoughts on what I’m playing. Feel free to post yours as well!
If anyone needs a place to get started, we have a topic with some game recommendations.
I’ll be emulating them on my Steam Deck through RetroDECK (which uses the Flycast core for RetroArch). I’ve already tested out a bunch of games, and performance and compatibility seem to be really good.
There are no points for this (it’s purely for fun), but if there were, anyone playing on original hardware would get bonus ones!
Playing: Metropolis Street Racer
I’m a huge Bizarre Creations fan (loved Fur Fighters, Geometry Wars, and especially Blur), so this has always been on my list to try, but I haven’t ever picked it up.
The game is known for its “kudos” system which gives you additional points for driving style (basically just drifting). This was revolutionary at the time, but so many modern games have added point systems for driving style that it feels dated and limited by current standards.
What still feels really fresh, however, is that the game lets you set your own challenge level for each map. If you’re doing a hot lap time trial, for example, you manually set the time that you want to beat — down to the tenth of a second. The tighter the time you set and beat, the more points you get. Lose, however, and you risk losing the points you gained on that map. It gives the whole game a very nice self-directed push and pull. You can technically make the game as easy or as hard as you like, but it tries to incentivize you finding your own “sweet spot.”
This is a really cool system and one that, honestly, I kind of wish more racing games stole. It’s fun to set your own goals and then try to beat them, rather than just having a rigid goal set by the game itself (or just flat easy/medium/hard difficulty settings).
I didn’t love the game’s handling model, but as I kept playing I realized that’s because the first car is just pretty bad. A common problem with old racing games is starting you out with the worst possible car. It makes progression feel good, but it also means your beginning time with the game is the least fun you’ll have with it and makes people very likely to bounce off entirely.
The environments look great by Dreamcast standards — full 3D renderings of real-world locales. My problem is that things are almost too detailed. I’m playing at native resolution which can make some stuff genuinely hard to distinguish. I tried cranking up the resolution as a QoL upgrade, but that messed up save states for me, so I reset it back to regular. (I consider save states an essential QoL feature for a lot of older games — way moreso than higher resolution).
Verdict? Liking it so far!
Continuing? Yes, but I likely won’t finish it though: the game has 250(!) different events to complete in total.
MSR is great. I play it with the payed version of redream.io, so it gets high detail, which helps a lot with the corners, since everything is much sharper. Do I cheat by saving the whole dreamcast state after good laps during a championship? Maaaaybe :)
(Also, a "fair" cheat is that some races have unlimited time, so you can go back and forth over the same strech of road getting a ton of Kudos. That works with the "have one lap < Nseconds", which is easy to do, and then the other laps are free to mess around. This helps to skip part of the early game.)
Yeah, you’re not going to finish MSR, lol. I have tried so many times over the years but it becomes such a slog to save up enough kudos to unlock the next tier.
I love the way the cars handle (until they collide with something). I love that the maps are all actual locations, IIRC the devs went to all three cities and exhaustively photographed and mapped everything out; it’s a little like racing through an early effort at a Google Maps style digital city scan. I even like (some of) the famously atrocious soundtrack. All things considered, it’s a good game. Just tedious.
Oh man the Dreamcast - I got it late in its lifecycle, little after Christmas 2000. I wanted one before but it was never deemed "Christmas worthy" (my parents were big on quantity over quality and cheap). So I had some money saved up from mowing lawns, walking dogs, allowances, various small tasks and I walked down to the mall to EB Games where they were having a sale to try and get rid of the old stock. I think the discontinuation rumours were already flying around or maybe this was when Sega desperately wanted to try and make a little bit of money. Anyway, it was 99$ for the console, Jet Set Radio, controller, memory card, and rumble pak. And what a blast I had!
I wound up getting a second hand VMU a bit later and also discovered you could just... burn the games. No mods like my PSX, just a simple CD burner and an ISO (which I had to go to school and use the T1 connection there to surreptitiously download to an old laptop because we only had dial up at home). There I discovered games that I still replay like PSO (offline), Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia, etc. It remains one of my favourite consoles to this day and I even have a trash find 32" CRT when I want to relive those moments with it.
Also now that I'm older and somewhat more knowledgeable, I've started a reverse engineering/porting project on the VMU. I always thought it would be cool to have a replacement that could be Arduino/ESP32 based or something and function as a VMU with an OLED but also do other things like wifi/Bluetooth sync, larger capacity, custom games, etc. It's been on the back burner for a bit and really more of a learning experience, but I've been enjoying getting to play with the Dreamcast some more. Happy 25th birthday!
Check out the VM2 if you haven't already: https://www.dreammods.net/store/p6/VM2.html
I've seen this before in my research and while it's a beautiful piece of hardware, it's all closed source unfortunately and I'm a big proponent of open source hardware :/ I also would like to implement wireless for head to head gaming/transfers as the original method of connecting two VMUs was just cumbersome.
Apropos, as I just got a handheld capable of emulating Dreamcast very well. I only have 3 games on it currently, because I'm completely unfamiliar with the library.
I was well deep into PC gaming at the time, but some friends of mine had them and I occasionally played them, but don't recall any particular games standing out to me at the time. I think they both had Crazy Taxi, which I never found terribly engaging.
My one memory is using a Dreamcast to make a post on a forum I was apart of at the time and that's about it, but I am looking forward to trying out some of the library and checking out some of the lesser known or weirder entries if anyone has any suggestions.
Currently have:
Sonic Adventure
Shenmue
Resident Evil: Code Veronica
Not lesser known, but Jet Set Radio is a big one to check out. Ecco the Dolphin is a bit more obscure? Really depends on what you're looking for.
Playing: Headhunter
This was compared mostly unfavorably to Metal Gear Solid at the time that it came out. I can understand why, as there are some similarities (namely the existence of VR missions and some nods to stealthy gameplay), but it’s a very different game.
World-building is done mostly through FMV featuring real actors giving news broadcasts. The premise of the game is that the US has fallen into a sort of capitalist dystopia. Committing crimes means you risk sacrificing your organs for donation, and there’s an entire bounty market for criminals, where worse crimes will yield higher bounties. Headhunters go after these people to collect the bounties and harvest their organs.
It’s a dark premise that’s played with a slight bit of campy sneer but mostly straight.
Gameplay-wise, it’s split between third-person shooting sequences and motorcycle driving sequences.
The shooting feels decent. Camera and aiming limitations are present (as was the case in many early 3D titles), but there’s a lock-on button that’s very generous.
Driving felt awful to me at first until I figured out what was going on. The game designers were clearly trying to take advantage of the Dreamcast’s analogue triggers (an innovation at the time). Pulling the trigger all the way down makes your character attempt to wheelie and pull his front tire up, which sacrifices your ability to turn. You have to do half-pulls or more delicate pulls if you want to maintain good control.
I’ve played through the protracted intro to the game and one mission so far. The mission felt like a third-person shooter made with the sensibilities of a point-and-click adventure.
Here’s what I mean: after killing the enemies, the rest of the level was about finding a cascading list of items to let me access different parts of the environment. For example, I had to find a battery that powered a lift, which moved an obstacle out of the way so that I could pick up a carwash token underneath, which then let me access the carwash.
That let me pick up a locker key that let me open a locker which had a cord which I could use on an electrical box that had a burnt out wire. That powered a car lift which let me lower a car that had a fire extinguisher in it, which I could then use to put out a nearby fire, which gave me access to a crowbar, which let me take the boards off a nearby door so that I could access the final area and complete the mission.
It’s, uh, pretty clunky, but I’m choosing to see all this as the game being deliberately campy, which means I’m not too critical of it (and actually kind of fond of it in some ways). We’ll see how it develops from here.
Verdict? Some mixed feelings, but ultimately I’m liking it so far.
Continuing? Yes. I want to see if other missions are as unnecessarily convoluted as the first.
Sonic Adventure 2
That is peak modern Sonic in my mind! I absolutely loved the grind racing. I would bring friends over to race. Bless them for playing with me even though I always won lol
This makes me feel so old. I got my first Dreamcast day one. I can’t count how many hours I sunk into Phantasy Star Online and Unreal Tournament with my fancy dial up modem.
Today is the actual 25th anniversary of the Dreamcast in the US. Happy Birthday, Dreamcast!
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