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Today's Best Dreamcast Games
Retrogaming with racketboy has up an interesting feature, a piece intended to discuss the best and most relevant Dreamcast games available today. Not intended as a 'top ten list', his goal is to suggest titles that will resonate with gamers of today who are likely to own other consoles. By suggesting titles that haven't been topped by further works, or that may have been the basis for other popular games, he's hoping that today's gamers will still stop and play the classics once in a while. From the article: "Not only is the gameplay in Jet Grind Radio compelling and unique, but the audio and visual qualities stand up extremely well to today's standards. First of all, the graphical style hits you like a brick in the face (in a good way) with its well-executed cel-shaded models and landscapes. Jet Grind Radio was one of the pioneering games in the cel-shading movement before mainstream games like Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker made it popular for cartoon/anime-style games. The Jet Grind Radio soundtrack is also one of the most popular gaming lineups of all time featuring an array of eclectic songs combining the musical genres of J-pop, Trip-hop, Hip-hop and Electronica. This is one game that is not done justice on TV speakers -- you should definitely try to hook up some decent speakers in order to experience it at its best."
...and it wants its radically innovative, visually outstanding, amazingly fun videogames back. ;-)
Circumcision is child abuse.
For proving that a good game, RPG even, can be founded entirely on graphics alone. Despite the dungeon crawl yawn-a-thons, the way too high encounter rate on the overworld, the insanely long airship battles, and a battle system where it is not possible to die once you can buy Riselem crystals or have Lunar Light, the gorgeous world somehow makes you forget about all the shortcomings and make the game good.
Powerstone 2 is a fun, frenetic game. Seriously, if you like Smash Brothers, you'll love this game.
Just ignore the Island of Penises they used for the title screen.
[o]_O
Sony whipped the console market into such a frenzy over the PS2 that by the time it was released, the Dreamcast was pretty much dead in the water. Even though the PS2 was arguably an inferior unit (and most early games sure demonstrate this), EVERYONE wanted Sony.
:)
Rampant piracy also had something to do with it, although not as much as people think. It was still mostly us "geeks" doing it - you couldn't just burn any old Dreamcast game with your $59.99 CD burner, you needed special software (or a boot CD) which wasn't free, etc. Sega lost our dollars for sure, but the common person (who is still 95%+ of the market) just abandoned ship and went with the latest Sony offering.
The Dreamcast was an amazing machine with an incredible lineup, that lost out to such gaming gems as a crappy Snowboarding game. Once Sony took all the "good" sports franchises, that was it - although again, the Dreamcast was pretty much toast long before this, it still played into it. No EA == dead console these days.
Plus, a gaming market that for 25 years had not cared about backwards compatibility, suddenly wanted to play their 5 year old games again. Whether this was a true shift in the gaming demographic, or just more marketing hype, I leave as an exercise for the reader
Lastly, there was the small thing about getting a free DVD player with the console that definitely swayed a lot of people - although oddly enough, most people still ended up with a stand-alone unit because the PS2 was notoriously awful as a DVD player.
Again, see subject line.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.