The Dreamcast Thread: It’s 9/9/99 Somewhere

[Octopus Prime]

Oh Hi! I’m Octo!

Lately in the TT Discord there’s been lots of Dreamcast chatter, and so I decided to make a thread for it so it would have a greater sense of permanency!

And it worked! Because here you are, reading it!

I love it when a plan comes together!

Anyway, I’d been hankerin’ to dig my own DC out of mothballs and play it recently so I ordered a replacement controller (the default controller is… an ergonomic nightmare, and the StrikerDC is shaped like a normal shaped controller), and an HDMI converter as the only tv I have with an AV Jack is… awful, and any signal degradation would be offset by merit of the screen not being a 15 year old crap-brand TV

Anyway; Dreamcast, eh?

 

[Patrick]

What a great system!

My favorite DC games:

Soul Calibur
Skies of Arcadia
Shenmue
Imported Shenmue II
Crazy Taxi
Crazy Taxi 2
Jet Grind Radio
Street Fighter III: Third Strike
Worms World Party
Star Wars: Episode 1: Jedi Power Battles

It had a short life, but it shone bright in that time. I still want Skies of Arcadia to be ported to a modern system.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I would love to de-yellow mine but I lack the patience or the proficiency to do so. I may get a shell for it to hide the nicotine-colouring

 

[ArugulaZ]

Something fun about the Dreamcast (or at least a Dreamcast with a GD-EMU in it) is that it can run the lion's share of games designed for the Atomiswave arcade machine. Not all of these games are great... in fact, more than a handful of them are the exact opposite of great. Demolish Fist is Die Hard Arcade, but with 1/10th the charm and ten times the jank. Then there's the Family Entertainment games, which are... well, just look at this. My apologies for subjecting your ears to that.

Nevertheless, it's pretty nifty to finally have a home version of Dolphin Blue, a high-resolution aquatic riff on Metal Slug, along with the quite competent King of Fighters XI and a few oddball fighting games you're not likely to find on other formats. It's like peering into an alternate universe where Sega said "damn the torpedoes" and stuck it out with the Dreamcast for a couple more years.

And oh yeah, you can use homebrew software to customize your VMU, decorating it with your own artwork. That's pretty fun.

 

[Violentvixen]

I did the Hollywood video rental of the system and kept the system on for the course of the rental to beat Sonic's route in Sonic Adventure. I'm sure I played a little of each of the other character's paths but can't remember.

I had a level 99 (or whatever the top level is) Chao named Callbox that wiped out everything and it was glorious. The VMU was amazing.

Dreamcast might have been my most social system, odd as that sounds. I brought it to school almost every day my senior year and the other seniors and I would hook it up and play it. Marvel vs Capcom 2 was required daily, then I would beat Chaos in Sonic Adventure a lot because it was one of the coolest bosses people had seen. "You need more rings!" was written in my yearbook by several people. We also got super into Pen-Pen Tri-Icelon for some reason I still don't understand. Hydro Thunder was a hit too and at least one of my classmates bought a Dreamcast just so she could play that at home.

One of my friends had a new fancy computer with a CD burner and would randomly find pirated DC games, burn them and bring them in. The majority of the file names were in Japanese which none of us spoke, and thankfully I had the sense to at least screen the games at home before bringing them into school. Although in retrospect out of the 50+ she made only I don't really remember any being truly inappropriate.

I also loved and still love how that controller felt. Fight me.

 

[muteKi]

I like the controller more than most. Just wish that stick was concave.

 

[ArugulaZ]

MDK2 is a game that feels maybe a little too far ahead of the curve for its own good. I want to like it, but the control actively interferes with your enjoyment, and the level design is suspect... it's either too claustrophobic or so spacious that you're not really sure how to make progress. Developers didn't nail the kind of sprawling 3D action-adventure game that MDK2 wants to be until late in that console generation. It's like how Jet Force Gemini tries to be the game that Ratchet and Clank eventually becomes.

 

[Voncaster]

I bought a new Dreamcast from Best Buy for $50 on some Black Friday after it was announced that SEGA was ceasing production and no new games would be made for the system.

I will say I love how sturdy and compact the Dreamcast feels. The top disc loader has some heft and does not feel cheap.

Some DC highlights for me:

The Dreamcast was my gateway to the Resident Evil series. I played Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 on DC as my first RE games. Shortly after playing these games on Dreamcast, I played REmake on Gamecube. To this day the original trilogy of RE games remains my favorite games in the series.

The Dreamcast was my gateway to the House of the Dead series. My friend and I played House of the Dead II co-op a ton on Dreamcast. I think its my favorite Dreamcast game. We could get to the final boss but could never beat him. The same friend picked up Typing of the Dead (a mod of House of the Dead II) with 2x Dreamcast keyboards. My brother, who is a fast typer, destroyed that game and we finally saw the ending G!

Star Wars Racer looked and played much better on DC than on N64. It also had Wacky Races which I will contend is the best Kart Racer outside of Mario Kart. I think Wacky Races is very solid and fun to play in co-op mode.

The Dreamcast also had a nice port of Gauntlet Legends. My House of the Dead friend and I played through Gauntlet IV on Genesis. Its one of our favorite co-op games. Consequently we were stoked to play a new arcade Gauntlet game at home. It did not disappoint. Very fun and faithful to the original Gauntlet.

We also enjoyed the known classics: Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, Power Stone and Power Stone 2.

My guess is that I traded in my DC for GC or Wii at some point. But I do have very fond memories of the DC. It had a relatively short life but it burned bright in its time!

 

[muteKi]

Honestly while my DC collection is not as large as I'd like, it really is Power Stone and the sequel that are the most obvious lacking entries in it (not having these on Switch is about as absurd as the lack of a VB Wario Land remake on 3DS, frankly), though stuff like Cannon Spike, Blue Stinger, and Illbleed all come to mind as obvious gaps as well.

 

[Violentvixen]

I started looking into MODE and GDEmu and discovered that they only work with certain revision numbers, and then found out that my Dreamcast doesn't have a revision number or even the standard model number, because it turns out mine is the same demo unit I saw when I was nine, meaning that I've only ever seen one Dreamcast in my life, and it's been the same Dreamcast every time. I think that's pretty cool.

That is so freaking cool.

 

[muteKi]

I'm somewhat curious about getting an ODE for mine, but I'm worried about the reports I've seen of it having some slight oddities with voltage compared to the original drive.

 

[chud_666]

What a great system!

My favorite DC games:

Soul Calibur
Skies of Arcadia
Shenmue
Imported Shenmue II
Crazy Taxi
Crazy Taxi 2
Jet Grind Radio
Street Fighter III: Third Strike
Worms World Party
Star Wars: Episode 1: Jedi Power Battles

It had a short life, but it shone bright in that time. I still want Skies of Arcadia to be ported to a modern system.

CAPCOM ON DC
Cap v SNK is GOD TIER
Third Strike is best playing, but ugly ass backgrounds make DOUBLE IMPACT a must have as well

Also MAKEN X IS COOL

 

[CaptBlasto]

I have very fond memories of the Dreamcast, as my favorite RPG, Grandia II, is on it. I remember getting the demo discs from the Official Dreamcast Magazine and trying out demos as well as an updated web browser to go online. One of them had a special Christmas level of Toy Commander that was only present on that demo disc, so that was a nice treat. The Dreamcast ended up getting a second wind in my college days when I found out that copy protection was non-existent and I could try out all the hard to find games I missed when they were released.

If you get the chance, there is a fully complete unreleased game by the name of Propeller Arena that you can find floating around the internet. I remember it being pretty fun, and its a shame it was scrapped due to the September 11th attacks.

 

[Ludendorkk]

Pour one out for the extremely brief period of time the Dreamcast appeared as the "desirable console" in rap videos

Also;

 

[ArugulaZ]

I remember when Bubba Sparxxx was talking about that generation of game consoles on MTV in... oh, 2001 or 2002. He showed a Dreamcast, rudely dismissed it, and nearly threw it over his shoulder. To this day, whenever I play Def Jam: Fight for New York, I make him the first guy I sink my fist into as Xzibit. (Well, him or Bless.)

 

[muteKi]

Someone's developing a new VMU. Meant to be a 4x memory card that does in fact have a screen and is also able to store the system's complete minigame library. I'm not sure why it's designed to be limited to 4 main memory pages if it's supposed to have that much memory for storing minigames, since any of them that have effects in the games they come from (Pinta's Quest, Chao Adventure, etc.) would need to be in those pages. I'd rather have 8 pages, since that's not going to lose much more than 4 minigames and you're getting twice the amount of useful storage for saving games or the minigames you actually use to interact with the main games.

Like the way a normal VMU works is it has 256 KB of memory. Half of that is reserved for (exactly one) minigame. Games will write starting from the non-game end of the memory and continue onward, and while not every game will fill up the 128K of space, most of the ones you'd actually want to play will, because it doesn't take a lot to fill up that space.

That said, there was some reserved space on the VMUs that you can free up to give you an extra 40 blocks of storage, and I'm definitely glad I did so for mine.

Examples of some things that can take up a lot of space that aren't VMU games:
- Virtua Striker replays
- Sonic Adventure 2 DLC kart courses
- Various 2K sports character or season data
- Sonic Adventure 1 events