So in the spirit of Valentine’s Day (yes I know it's long passed by now), I thought it would be fitting to talk about my most beloved system the Sega Dreamcast. It was the short lived little engine that could, which unfortunately became Sega’s swan song as a console manufacturer. Allow me if you will to take a trip down memory lane and reminisce about the good ol' days.
To set the tone for this little love letter we need to go back to my days in junior high. Picture if you will your typical lunch room setting, now enter the video game / nerd table. Everyone is trading stories of what you had read in X gaming magazine, or if you were the strange kid at the table, what you read on the internet. Growing up my focus had always been on Nintendo systems until a would be salesman converted me to the church of Sega. You see unbeknownst to literally everyone in our little circle was the fact that the father of one of our friends worked for the Sega Corporation.
As a 13 year old your very existence is to one up your buddies, and nothing quite says I'm cooler than you like “oh yeah my dad makes video games, just thought you should know.” As if that statement wasn’t groundbreaking enough, he then dropped the big one on us. He explained how Sega loaned him a Dreamcast a good two weeks before the now infamous 9/9/99 launch. How it was even delivered to his house at night by two guys wearing suits. Now before we proclaimed him our leader and carried him around the hallways Rudy style, the skeptics got their questions out, “show us some proof” we demanded. Believe it or not the kid had Polaroids to back up his entire story! One of him and his father smiling with Dreamcast controllers, the other a Dreamcast in a metal briefcase! Looking back the whole thing screamed viral marketing, “now son, you tell your friends how much fun you had with the Dreamcast okay?” but dammit it worked! I made it my mission to get my hands on a Dreamcast at all costs.
Unfortunately my parents weren’t as enthusiastic over the future of gaming as I was. I’m sure many of you out there have heard this dreaded statement from your parents growing up, “what’s wrong with the system you already have?” If anyone out there worked you’re way out of this one, I tip my hat to you, you’re a legend. For the rest of us that meant a big fat NO and you walked away with your tail between your legs. I needed a source of income to purchase the Dreamcast and I needed it quick. I had already run though my birthday cash and Christmas was too far off to ask Santa. So I did the honorable thing and decided to get into the homework business (shhh don’t tell anyone!). Writing essays, letting kids copy off me, did I mention I won student of the month twice that year? In no time I had amassed quite the fortune, okay it was more like $300 but that’s like a couple grand when you’re a kid! The purchase was made, the Dreamcast was finally mine.
Visually the system was a beast and personally I can’t think of a bigger graphical leap in my lifetime. One day I’m playing Turok 64 (fog everywhere!), next it’s Sonic the Hedgehog running away from a giant Orca. In short, it blew my mind. For the younger ones out there let me explain it this way, remember when Keanu dodged the bullet in the Matrix? Well that was the Dreamcast in a nutshell.
In terms of titles, the Dreamcast walked the line of offering serious hardcore games and offbeat avant-garde titles. The open world masterpiece that is Shenmue, talking to your pet fish in Seaman, oh and a trippy rhythm game that came with a vibrator (there is a joke somewhere in there). Okay maybe the vibrator isn’t a good example but you get the picture. Sega was pushing the boundaries of what we considered to be gaming at the time. The crowning glory of the Dreamcast though had to be it's arcade ports. Games like Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Power Stone, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Virtua Tennis, Silent Scope etc etc. On top of that the system had an insane amount of crazy peripherals to mess around with too. You had the VMU, light gun, the Seaman microphone, maracas, the fishing controller, dance pads, and the keyboard and mouse! Speaking of that keyboard and mouse, if you could convince your parents to tie up your phone line for an hour or two, you could play your Dreamcast online!
Of course we all know the Dreamcast wasn’t meant to be as Sega would shift their focus from hardware development to strictly software. Yet here I am 15 years later asking myself why am I still enamored with this bygone system? I have fond memories of my Nintendo 64, Gamecube, SNES, but I haven’t played any of those systems in years, nor do I plan to. My Dreamcast on the other hand has always had a place under my television and it always will. I think it has to do more with the fact that it's demise came while it was at its height. It's strange to say and honestly I can’t think of another system that had such a cruel fate. We didn’t see its decline via dwindling sales or less games being released, one day it all just ended. I guess over time in my mind (and probably many others) the Dreamcast has developed this mythos to it. The so called last bastion of true gaming and if it wasn’t for you meddling kids and your PS2 things would have been different! Regardless of it all, I'll always connect the Dreamcast to a time when my life was much simpler and carefree; after all isn’t that what nostalgia is supposed to invoke?
"30XX is one of the best roguelikes out there, combining the tight platforming action of the Mega Man X series with the challenge and randomization that roguelike fans crave. Batterystaple Games has done lots of refinement through updates since 30XX first appeared on Steam Early access a few years ago. The latest such update adds a new character for free, one who combines the best attributes of the two existing characters. Also, the Steam version is on sale, making it a great time to travel to the distant year of 30XX!" says Co-Optimus.
"Hammerwatch II's journey to Xbox has been long and perilous. After first launching on Steam in the fall of 2023, the game finally turned up on PlayStation 5 last December. Since then, Xbox gamers who enjoyed the original Hammerwatch and the sublime Heroes of Hammerwatch have been anxiously awaiting their turn at the long-promised sequel. At last, the wait is nearly over because Hammerwatch II will hit Xbox and PlayStation 4 on April 23," says Co-Optimus.
Joe 'Three Sheets' Neate (Executive Producer): "As I’m sure you can imagine, when it comes to Sea of Thieves my days are full of numbers. Development costs, active servers, days until the next update… Sometimes, though, a truly extraordinary number stands out – a number like 40 million, which I’m incredibly pleased to say is the number of pirates who’ve now set sail in Sea of Thieves!"
Garrr... more people to walk the plank and send to Davey Jones locker.
would have been funny to release this on talk like a pirate day.
40 million have set sail...that's great. How many are sailing now? Monthly active users....when it actually matters. How many people purchased the game is another important number.
You don't get numbers like that from MS mouth pieces, they just like to say stuff like "this game was looked at 129 million time, the biggest amount of people browsing a game of this genre on xbox gamepass ever in the last 3 weeks compared to before gamepass was out (small print only 2 million bothered playing longer than 20 seconds and only 100 people are playing it concurrently)
It's all smoke and mirrors
There are usually around 10,000 concurrent users on Steam not counting Xbox or PS but really it doesn't matter as long as there are enough people on the servers to play which there always were and will be for a long time now with the PS players coming on board. Same goes for how many people bought it and how many are on GP, we aren't the accountants of these console companies so why would we care?
Reporting on MAU stats is very misleading. Other companies publish units sold, MS cannot or will not due to Game Pass. We all know that their prior startegies have not panned out so now they have to actually sell games on other consoles. In any case, SoT is doing impressive preorders on PS5 and will very likely motivate Satya to release more games other than the four indicated games on their competitor's consoles. Take note Phil is radio silent....
40 Mil across Stream, Windows 10, and Xbox. Healthy numbers for sure, but when PC is the biggest platform, I expected more. It’ll be interesting to see how it does on PlayStation. Very well could be double that player count in 6 months with PS too. It’s crazy for developers to skip the most popular platform, not sure why they’d want to, but they must have had their rea$ons.
Everything about this system blew my mind:
- The fact that I was interacting with players in PSO shocked me that I kept typing "Hey guys, I'm playing with real people around the world."
- That I could take a VMU with me, search for items and gold and then upload it back to Skies of Arcadia
- Wishing to go back home to check up on Seaman's evolution
and many, many more. Not a single console came close to having an emotional impact on me like the Dreamcast.
Godspeed into the night, you magnificent bastard '_'7
i own 3 dreamcast consoles and still play on them every now and then. the dreamcast did alot more than the consoles out at the time and had alot of cool features that it started that is the norm now in consoles today. like online console gaming, using a screen on your controller to interact with the game (that can be taken out as a mini-handheld that was also used as the memory card aka the VMU except the VMU part isnt done by other consoles of today except the using a screen concept), using a mic to speak with others as you play online, able to use your console to go on the web.
the dreamcast was a real step forward in innovation to consoles in the gaming community and industry. the dreamcast should of been on top with what it was capable of doing. i love the dreamcast and to me is the best console made from its time. all the other consoles had nothing other than ps2 just having a dvd player that which pretty much had nothing to do with gaming or interacted with it.
Dreamcast was truly spectacular when it came out it had so many good fun colorfull games and cool features like playing PS1 games with slighty better graphics.
http://youtu.be/5-tQX-XZhX0