Anyone own one of these?
I always felt it was a bit of an under appreciated console. It had a horrible controller, but the games looked fantastic and it really had a pretty good selection.
What were your favorites? I liked Skies of Arcadia, personally.
Can you believe it was 10 years ago?
I own a Dreamcast. One of my favorite consoles. I don’t own many games for it, but I love the ones I have.
-Demolition Racer
-Marvel vs. Capcom 2
-Street Fighter: 3rd Strike
-Soul Calibur
-Phantasy Star
-Jet Grind Radio
-Unreal Tournament
I remember NFL2K being amazing for it at the time.
Ah, the Dreamcast. How long it took me to forgive Sony for winning that round of the console war, and how far Sega has fallen since. I treasure my Dreamcast, and have a fine selection of titles for it including:
Skies of Arcadia
Ikaruga
Jet Grind Radio
Crazy Taxi (Still one of my most played of all time.)
Soul Calibur
Capcom vs SNK 2
Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram (It’s an import. I got my system modded practically for this game alone. 
)
ChuChu Rocket (How this one hasn’t come back as an XBLA game or something, I’ll never know.)
Various SNK fighting games. (Last Blade 2, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, some others.)
I’m sure there are lot of others I’m forgetting right now.
Ten years, huh? Now I feel old. =/
I still have my Dreamcast in a box in the closet. It was one of the best consoles of all time, and was very under appreciated.
Tons of great 2d fighters including the SNK games, Street Fighter 3 and Marvel vs. Capcom 2. (If only the d-pad hadn’t been designed by a sadist…)
It was the only place to play the original Soul Calibur. (Besides arcades of course. :D)
Skies of Arcadia was one of the greatest RPG’s of all time.
I LOVED the Shenmue games and it still pisses me off that we’ll never see a proper resolution to that series. (I imported the European version of the second game at the time because I didn’t own the original Xbox.)
Other great games:
Jet Grind Radio
Crazy Taxi 1 and 2
Ikaruga
Power Stone
I never had a Dreamcast, but I just came across Nine Dreamcast Games In Need Of Resurrection on the Game Informer site, and thought I’d share.
Yeah, I loved my poor little Dreamcast. It really got ruined by Sony constantly saying “the PS2 is JUST around the corner!”
Skies of Arcadia was the last JRPG I’ve ever liked. Grew out of the genre but the infectious sense of adventure is just so strong in skies that I loved it despite the weaknesses of the genre.
Jet Grind Radio is probably my favorite game, aesthetically, of all time. JSRF was great too, but of course that was XBOX.
Soul Calibur was the last fighting game I really got into (hmm, a trend is forming). Pretty much a perfect game.
Looking back, the Dreamcast was probably the last console I was fully invested in. Tastes change, I suppose. I eventually got a PS2, then an Xbox, then a Gamecube - but my interests were shifting. I think Everquest and Counter:Strike made it inevitable I would end up on the PC as a primary gaming platform.
But yeah, the Dreamcast was great.
I bought a Dreamcast solely to play Typing of the Dead. Best $35 I ever spent.
Dollar for dollar, this has to be one of the greatest systems ever. Technologically it was leaps and bounds ahead of the PSX, and the niche that it occupied (almost but not quite past fun 'n simple arcade gaming, not quite powerful enough for witheringly complicated sports games and RPGs) made almost the entire library an absolute blast. The variety, too, was impressive. Mindless button mashers? Got 'em. Cute little puzzlers? Got 'em. The first really good arcade conversions? Got 'em. Party games? Got 'em. Fairly deep but not hopelessly complicated sports? Got 'em. Quriky, underrated fighting games? Got 'em. No huge franchises, nothing forbidden, a little of everything. And near the end, the bargains were downright incredible, with some used games going for as low as $1. The NES was never that good.
Another thing I really appreciated was how refreshingly free of pretension this system was as a whole. Sega knew that the really hardcore players would ignore it entirely, and there would never be any kind of flap over what was “cheap” or “unfair” or “unbalanced” or whatever. Rapid fire, cool. Gameshark, cool. Various saving/loading tricks to gain an edge, hey, whatever floats your boat. Unlike some modern games which seemingly do everything possible to suppress anything even marginally fun (I’m looking at you, Dynasty Warriors Gundam), Sega realized that in the grand scheme of things, video games really aren’t that critical, and the Dreamcast less so.
I own a PS2. Two, in fact (one’s an import), not even including the ones I don’t own anymore. By any measure, it’s been an overwhelming success. I’ve bought and rented more games for this system than any other. It’s a phenomenal system. I love it. And yet, I still wouldn’t give up my Dreamcast for anything. Still nothing that can replace it, and I doubt there ever will be.
I also love the Dreamcast, though it was by no means perfect. The thing was loud as hell (and annoying–at least the 360 sounds like a jet engine constantly, the DreamCast ‘clicked’ at random intervals) and the controller was pretty terrible. A too-loose analog stick, squeaky triggers lacking good amount of resistance, a cord coming out the bottom of the controller, and hand grips that forced your hands outward? Who the hell thought that was a good idea? Oh, and the controller had a bloody WINDOW! (yes, I know its purpose–I still find it funny).
Despite all this, the system hosted some fantastic games, with my favorites being Crazy Taxi, Chu Chu Rocket, Samba De Amigo, and Jet Grind Radio. I much preferred it to the PS2.
RIP DC.
My Dreamcast is sitting in friend’s closet. Good games, good graphics, good gameplay. One thing about all Sega consoles I’ve ever owned, they’ll last forever. My first Playstation overheated constantly and I had to buy the fan cooled base to put it on. Nothing like that would have gotten by the Sega designers.
It was supposed to be leaps and bounds of the PSX; it was a next-gen system. It’s a shame, really, that the Dreamcast was doomed by the failure of the Saturn, which was itself killed off by the early launch of the Dreamcast.
Generally the Dreamcast is regarded by the industry as a contemporary of the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube. By 1999 Sega already saw the Saturn as a failure and another year or two on the shelves wouldn’t have mattered much. They were trying to get a jump on the next generation by beating Sony and Nintendo to the market.
By all accounts, it may have very well have worked. The Dreamcast had a remarkable launch in America, (not so much in Japan from what I understand), and it did really well in the two years it was in production, but Sony was trying to undercut Sega’s newly gained momentum by constantly touting the technical specs of the PS2, which was still a year away. I don’t blame Sony in the least for what was essentially a successful marketing tactic.
The thing of it was Sega had a winner on its hands and most everyone at the time seemed to agree. Stopping production of the system had been widely rumored but it still seemed to catch people off guard. The question of course is, “was it a premature decision?” The Dreamcast had a lot of good years left in when it died, but I think a lot of people must have seriously underestimated just how badly the Saturn had bombed if Sega’s incurred debt was such that it managed to bring down the Dreamcast as well, a full two years later.
It wasn’t just the Saturn; it was partly the fact that Sega was making a habit of releasing new systems and then dumping them (32X, Mega/Sega CD), too.
Also, the Dreamcast was essentially a US market console; Japanese gamers were perfectly happy with the Saturn, but Sega of America kept whining that it wasn’t competitive. Unfortunately, Sega had already pissed off half its retailers in the US by leaving them out of the loop on the surprise launch of the Saturn, and lots of them refused to carry Sega products again.
There were a bunch of problems with the Saturn- its best games were never released outside Japan, for one; its hardware was way more expensive than the PSX and N64’s, for another. That meant when they got two years in and Sony and Nintendo did the $100 Christmas price drop, Sega couldn’t afford to follow suit.
The problem Sega had was that instead of plugging along with the Saturn, they invested money they didn’t have in designing a shiny new system. Japanese gamers had already bought Saturns, and Western gamers hadn’t. So when the Saturn came out, instead of being uncompetitive in the US and competitive in Japan, they were uncompetitive in Japan and competitive in the US. When all you do is build consoles, you can’t afford to do that.