10 seconds of searching didn’t reveal a Dreamcast Thread so here’s one. I’m on track to play every single console in this apartment in a single year wow! Pulling out my dreamcast I both do not have any of the games I want to play and am having so much nostalgia. I have ordered a DreamShell which seems to be the cheapest easiest way to dump VMU saves and an absolutely terrible way to play isos (in a converted format with horrible stuttering.)
Tonight the family is gone so I got to play Dead or Alive 2 which I bought here for nothing. After this post I’m gonna load up Slave Zero, finally.
What got me to make the thread though was one of my VMUs (only 26 years old, as it is the one I have marked as 1) kills the controller it is plugged into. This seems to be a thing that happens.
all i know is that me and my friends would spend whole afternoons playing it (because that’s how long a 4 player game of it takes) in 2002, and for years afterwards would reminisce about how good it was.
i even played through single player mode to unlock all the characters and stages for multiplayer. it is unfortunately a game that absolutely needs three human opponents to be good
we tried a mario party game on gamecube as a substitute, but it just wasn’t as good.
My sister and I played a lot of 2 player Sonic Shuffle and had a pretty good time. I think even then we knew it was kind of a b-game, but it had its charms.
I also just put up a little write up of Crazy Taxi on my web site. I’ll be doing more Dreamcast games during the month.
Cheap plug out of the way, the Dreamcast still rules. Granted, as time has gone on, re-releases have made some of its must-play catalogue obsolete, like Phantasy Star Online, Sonic Adventure 1 (thanks to mods making the PC port not dogshit and also adding in most if not all of the extra DLC challenges), and all of Capcom’s fighting games, but what remains is still timeless. You got stuff like Jet Set Radio (specifically De La Jet Set Radio), Record of Lodoss War, Maken X, D2, Fire Pro Wrestling D, the 2k sports games, and Seventh Cross Evolution, just to name some examples. It still has arguably the best version of Soul Reaver, despite the excellent remaster that came out last year.
It was a cool system that had a lot of experimental stuff on it that the world of games is sorely lacking in today. On the downside, the controller kind of sucked and the disc laser could be less finicky.
Always wanted one but never got one. A shame I missed out. Loved House of the dead 2 at the playdium on John Street. Feel bad for my dad as he had to hangout while i played it all afternoon for my birthday about twenty five years ago.
the capcom and snk fighting game ports aren’t totally obsolete, as there’s a lot of extra stuff that’s still dreamcast exclusive, the biggest examples being playable onslaught in marvel vs capcom, and the weird little puzzle game in king of fighters 2001.
there’s also translation patches for the dreamcast versions of capcom vs snk 1 and 2, which are must-plays if you’re a big lore/character interaction fan for those characters. there’s literally thousands of win quotes for every character beating every other character, as well as special win quotes for certain characters being on teams together, none of which were in the official english versions.
it’s still got the only home version of giga wing 2, which is crazy, considering how easy it is to get the first. there’s still no other port of cannon spike either, right? and it’s the only version of gunbird 2 with morrigan as a playable character.
more than many consoles, the dreamcast has a strong identity. to a lot of people who owned one at the time, it really meant something: if you owned a dreamcast, you probably liked a certain kind of game, a certain kind of aesthetic, etc.
it’s so intertwined with (a western teenager at the time’s idea of) akihabara and otaku culture at the turn of the century, it’s the first console where arcade perfect (or better!) ports were the norm, and didn’t require special add-ons like the saturn (and no-one i knew owned a saturn until after the dreamcast had revived our childhood love for sega anyway).
yet more good dreamcast exclusives in 2025: virtua fighter 3tb, fighting vipers 2, doki doki idol star seeker, treasure strike
should we also talk about naomi and atomiswave games itt?
