Happy 11th Birthday Sega Dreamcast

Happy 11th Birthday to the Sega Dreamcast!

I have so many great memories of this system. From a rampaging Orca destroying the wooden docks just behind Sonic the Hedgehog as he races to safety at top speed, to Ryo Hazuki beating the tar out of 70 Mad Angels goons in a warehouse to rescue Nozomi, this system and the titles that came out for it were filled with amazing gaming moments.

Remember scrambling for Power Stones so you could transform into a Super Saiyan Expy and launch an enormous golden energy ball at your opponents, level-grinding online with your friends so you can afford new weapons for your Newman Ranger, weaving wildly through traffic so you could get that annoying customer out of the backseat of your Crazy Taxi, or Mareg sacrificing himself so that the rest of your party could escape the Moon of Valmar?

Remember your Bleem! boot disk?

Yeah, me neither.

Dreamcast is without a doubt my favorite system. It’s controller was the first to introduce the dual-trigger setup. The browser and online capabilities were impressive, considering it was the first to offer them. I loved getting Holiday themed DLC for Sonic Adventure. And the VMU was an amazing idea, one that I’m still waiting for other systems to implement.

The relationship between the PS3 and PSP is coming close to it. The PokéWalker from SoulSilver and HeartGold has the right idea, but considering that the DS is also portable system, it left me wondering if it was really necessary.

But I digress. The Dreamcast was phenomenal, especially considering the train wreck of a system it had to follow. I was disappointed when Sega decided to stop making systems. The hardware was solid, the software was beautiful.

A Dreamcast 2 (or even a Dreamcast Slim) and a decent marketing campaign (seriously, did you ever see a commercial for Skies of Arcadia?) would’ve made Sega a major competitor in the console market again.

And despite being 11 years old, apparently people are still developing games for it. Suddenly, I really feel like dusting mine off and playing it this weekend. I’ve still got my VMU, but I might need to borrow a controller from Kassim.

-JD

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