Lessons from the past - The Bear and Badger

Diluted Dante

The original is a finicky bugger, but Future has held up much better.

The Dreamcast is one of my fav consoles of all time. The only time I had an issue with the pad was on Tomb Raider.

Playing host to Shenmue would forgive any crime though.

Escape

Brooks wrote:

JSR hasnee aged well. Controls, mainly.

GoldenEye's frame-rate, mainly.

equinox_code

As someone who actually owned Shenmue, i can vouch for it being rubbish. It was rubbish back then, it will be rubbish now, and it was definitely rubbish on that day.

Vela

May a black car take all your sailors.

Spoiler:

Moot_Geeza

Shenmue was a chicken terrine starter compared to the turkey-with-all-the-trimmings feast that was Shenmue II. I was a huge fan of both, but the building section near the end of the sequel was immense. The Raid/Judge Dredd - pah. All that fuss about you can go anywhere and open any drawer etc from the OTT previews for the original though - iirc you could only really do that in a handful of houses other than the Hazuki residence.

Whatever you think of the game, it looks pretty special for something that's nearly fifteen years old (and this intro is still great):

The DC games I hold dearest are Shenmue II, Super Magnetic Neo, Ecco: Defender of the Future, Quake III (online), Skies of Arcadia and Chu Chu Rocket.

Elmlea

adkm1979 wrote:

Journey isn't fun. Two brief bits are. The rest is shit. JSR is fucking awful.

I didn't even get to one of the fun bits.

Brooks

Shenmue was expensive pish but I'd play a third one for some reason.

davyK

I have Shemue 1& 2 for DC. However I got as far as the 1st arcade in no.1 and then lost interest after spending all my money in there. However that is no reflection on the game itself as the narrative-led, adventure-style game leaves me cold.

WorKid

Man I loved my DC.

Skies Of Arcadia and Headhunter still bring back lovely memories. Plus everything what Mark said.

Moot_Geeza

Headhunter was good actually, I tend to forget about that (although adkm's point about most DC games being ported elsewhere is true for that too). It's probably aged terribly, but I do remember it having a very satisfying shotgun.

I probably missed a handful of decent PAL DC games, but as I worked in Game at the time, chances are I owned or played most of the good ones. Red Dog always looked OK, probably should have given that a go. Toy Commander too, I only played the demo.

optimark_prime

The point about most of the games being available for 'better' systems is true of virtually every old console these days though.

I can play SNES F-Zero in 60hz mode on my Wii U.

At the time, the Dreamcast was an amazing console, with some wonderful games.

Bear in mind, all the games mentioned were released in a two year lifespan!

Moot_Geeza

True, but it wasn't long at all between the Dreamcast releases and those PS2 ports, so it's different from say, SNES to GBA (or SNES games on Wii U). I loved my Dreamcast, but half of your list would have been available to me elsewhere, within a year or so, if I'd been more patient/less obsessed with Sega.

Not that I'd go back and do things differently if I could, it's just that nowadays I'd be more inclined to wait, which wouldn't bad a bad choice financially.

NB: Most of the PS2 ports were inferior to the originals though, or at least the PAL versions were.

optimark_prime

The speed of the ports were largely due to SEGA giving up on Dreamcast.

Just imagine if it'd been around a year or so longer, Jet Set Radio Future, Super Monkey Ball and Panzer Dragoon Orta would probably all been DC games too.

Moot_Geeza

Yep. I would have played the first two more if they were on Sega hardware too, I have to admit. It took me ages, but I got right near the end of Future (I enjoyed it, I just rarely played it), and after I'd beaten the insane final boss on Orta I never touched that again either. In contrast, I played through the Japanese and PAL versions of JSR, got 100% on everything in Panzer Zwei and completed Saga twice (and the first disk at least double that).

I don't think it would have been possible for me to play Monkey Ball any more than I did though; I was obsessed.

beano

I came up with soundcloud in 1999, I called it 21cbeats - it was supposed to be, well soundcloud and myspace for artists before it.

Besides that, I'd go back only 3 years and would've moved to Japan after the Tsunami and would've set up that localisation firm for western enterprise software.

Too late now.

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