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By Contributing Writer Rob Pecknold Sega. The mere mention of that word brings tingles to the spines of hardcore gamers worldwide, and with good reason. With such US and worldwide failures as the Saturn, the 32X, and the Sega CD, many people (including myself) are surprised that Sega has lasted this long without a successful system. In fact, Sega's last great system was the Genesis, and even that didn’t beat the Super Nintendo in terms worldwide sales. So over the last few years, Sega’s lifeblood has been the arcades. But with arcade attendance at an all-time low and with Japan's economy faltering, Sega needed something to bring themselves back into prosperity and profitability. And to hardcore gamers, the answer was more likely to be a new arcade game than a new system. But Sega has delivered the latter in a way only I can understand. Why? Because I own the darn thing! Heh heh heh... Well, this article will dig deep into the proverbial Dreamcast pit and examine the system in the all the ways that won't result in converting to a currently undiscovered sexual orientation. I will not be giving you a history of Sega, and I will not explain the company's past failures and successes, but I will report on and critique the Dreamcast. So, without further adieu... Many of you may know of a place called http://www.therage.com. The friendly folks there were nice enough to provide me with a Dreamcast for free! All they asked for in return was my credit card number. Isn’t that nice of them... (looks at $500 bill on credit card statement)... d'oh! After waiting much longer than I would have liked to, my Dreamcast finally arrived with a Virtual Memory System (VMS), Sonic Adventure, Sega Rally 2, and an extra controller. I later bought Virtua Fighter 3 Team Battle and Get Bass as well. For the first few days I owned it, I played the Dreamcast practically non-stop. The first thing I noticed out of the box is the extremely small size of the console, and the absolutely gargantuan controllers. Believe it or not, the system is only slightly larger than the controller. Sega's systems haven't always had the most encouraging software lineups in the world, that’s for sure. It was only towards the end of the Saturn's life cycle... crap. I’ve wired my keyboard to shock me when I start to talk about Sega systems of old. Anyway, to be honest, I didn’t have any doubts about the Dreamcast’s software lineup. HA! You thought I would say I DID have doubts about it... shows how much you know about crappy writing cliches. Bear with me, folks, it's late, and they haven’t slipped any food through the little slot in my door for some time now. Sonic was always my favorite game mascot, no matter how many times they made a crappy TV show or "Edutainment" game about him. So buying Sonic was a no brainer. I loved Sega Rally in the arcades, so I picked that up, too. Now, I’m not going to tell you that nothing can prepare you for Sonic and Sega Rally’s graphics, because something can. Go to the arcades, play the game with the best graphics there, and then imagine graphics several times better than those. Even though Sega used a fairly off the shelf processor and a graphics chip that was originally just a variation of a PC chip for the Dreamcast hardware, the system’s first generation games fare better than almost all arcade boards. Sonic Adventure shows this best, with some textures that are actually pictures from South America, and all the effects in the Dreamcast... special effects... book. But hey, Blast Radius had great graphics, too, and look where it is: in many pieces at the bottom of my dumpster. In a surprise turn of events, I will now publish an interview I conducted with Sonic the Hedgehog during one of my recent visits to Japan: ROB: Sonic, I have played your new game, and it's quite fun. How do you think Japanese Dreamcast owners will react to it? Sonic was never that popular in Japan. SONIC: Game? Listen, kid, some guy named Yuki Naka is giving me 45 bucks an hour and giving me somewhere to sleep to wear this goofy suit, so don’t be asking me no questions about any games. ROB: Hmm. So underneath that suit, you’re some fat redneck trying to pay the bills? "SONIC": Correct.. ROB: Thank you for your time. Hey, I said I would print the interview, I didn’t say if it would be credible or not. Although, on the other hand, I don’t know how credible an interview with a real five foot tall blue hedgehog would be. But Sonic Adventure honestly is an enjoyable game. Just the sheer speed of the game’s levels is enough to astound the player, and these levels are insanely detailed. Here is a shopping list I found in Sega’s garbage bin of things that appear in just the first level of Sonic Adventure: * PHOTO REALISTIC SAND AND FOOTPRINTS * MOVIE-QUALITY WATER AND WAVE TEXTURES * TRUE TO LIFE LOOKING AQUATIC LIFE * BREAKNECK SPEED * DYNAMIC WAVE ALGORITHMS If you’re not excited by now, to quote that crazy little girl from the Pepsi ads, "Check yo pulse, you juz might be dead." But I hate that little girl. She’s not even a cute little pinch-her-cheeks-she’s-so- adorable little girl. Anyway, this article is not about Pepsi, so let’s get on with it. To sum things up, Sonic Adventure really is the beginning of the future of gaming. In Japan, the only reason the Dreamcast sold moderately well was because of the release of Virtua Fighter 3 Team Battle (VF3tb), one of the most popular fighting games in Japanese arcade history. When I picked up my Dreamcast, I was sure to snag a copy of VF3tb to find out what all the fuss was about. I was never a fan of Virtua Fighter, because of the speed (too slow) and the price (one dollar and fifty cents at my local arcade). But this version was supposed to play much faster than the arcade Virtua Fighters, so I thought "Why not?" All I can say now is "Why???" Quite frankly, I’m surprised this game didn’t HURT early Dreamcast sales in Japan, because quite frankly, I think it sucks. Plain and simple. Oh sure, you VF fanatics say, once you get into it, it's the greatest game of all time. While it has amazing, and I mean AMAZING, graphics, the gameplay is much too unexciting for it to be a worthy purchase. It’s sort of fun with a group of people, but the single-player game gets old in a hurry. And why did they put "tb" on the end of VF3? Almost every other good 3D fighting game already has a team battle mode, but they don’t stick it on the end of their games' titles. Why, if Tekken 3 did what VF3tb did, it would be called Tekken3tb2pbmtmlocsefmsctm, or Tekken 3 team battle, 2 player, ball mode, theater mode, lots of characters, secret endings, force mode, secret characters, training mode. Enough complaining about Vitua Fighter. I also picked up Sega Rally 2, Genki’s second Dreamcast coding effort. I feel so sorry for those guys. First, they’re stuck programming the atrocious VF3tb with unfinished development kits, and then they get insulted when the game suffers from slowdown and has graphics worse than than the arcade version's. Then they work 24 hour days trying to get a crappy PC port of Sega Rally 2 into playable condition. Again, there are noticeable frame rate drops in this game, and Genki is scoffed at. I think we should be praising those rascally Japanese Genki guys for having the guts to take on either project. But in the end, Sega Rally 2 is a fun game and a heck of a lot better than VF3tb, while still not being too exciting. The Dreamcast will rock even more than it already does if Sega of America works hard to improve VF3tb and Sega Rally 2 for the American market. The fourth game I got was a fishing game called Get Bass, which was surpisingly worth the money. I used to only buy fishing games so I could burn them, or possibly go fishing with them on the hook, but I actually play and enjoy Get Bass. It comes with a special controller- a motion sensing fishing rod. You cast it back the controller, your character casts it back. You cast, your character casts. You have to pull up when a fish bites your lure or it will get away, just like in real life. It also has two force feedback motors, one in the handle and one in the reel. This game is so cool that I find myself acting differently in everyday life as a result of playing it. I actually watch Bass Fishing on TNN now. You should’ve seen the catch that Don O’Reyrus brought in yesterday. It was a whopper of a biggie! Heh heh heh... must... revert... back... to... non... hick... mode... I hope you can see that is really worth your time, money, and sanity to buy a Dreamcast. In fact, I like it so much that I sold my PlayStation to buy Dreamcast games and some stock in Sega. So if you can't wait until the Dreamcast's American release on September 9 and you've got some cash to spare, I say go for it and import a Dreamcast now. The underlying question here is, "Does the Dreamcast live up to the hype?" Based on the games I've played so far, I would have to say that the answer to this question is a loud and confident, "YES!" You can e-mail Rob at rob@mastergamer.com
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