I Need Some Advice About My Next Gaming Console :)

[C B Felterbush]

I believe Shenmue had the largest budget for any videogame in history. Be Sure to get Shenmue 2 it is a must as well.

If you like RPG's I would say Grandia 2 and Skies of Arcadia are 1st choices.
I hear mention of Ikaruga if that is your flavor I would suggest Border Down, Marz Matrix is also great. There are so many more great shooters I have played probably every game on Dreamcast that one could consider great. I think one of the best Games, and best series in general are the Sakura Wars games. If you cant read japanese Kayama Has some very good translations. Give them a shot. Also Red Dog is a great Multiplayer game if you want to own some of your friends on the DC

 

[White Demon]

So many great games on Dreamcast but must have games imo are Soulcaliber, Rez, Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, Marvel vs capcom 1 and 2, Powerstone, Shenmue and Jet Set Radio.

Did someone mention awesome Dreamcast games?

Daytona USA 2001
Shenmue 1+2 (MUST HAVE)
Sega Rally 2
Powerstone 1+2 (MUST HAVE)
Marvel vs Capcom 1+2
Chu Chu Rocket
Crazy Taxi (MUST HAVE) + Crazy Taxi 2 (not as good as 1, but still a good game)
Sonic Adventure (not 2 coz it's a bit shit)
Tech Romancer (MUST HAVE if you love Capcom fighters)
REZ (MUST HAVE)
Phantasy Star Online (can't go online anymore, but the offline mode is still pretty good)
Virtua Fighter 3TB
Space Channel 5 & Space Channel 5 part 2 (MUST HAVE)
Bangai-O
Ikaruga (MUST HAVE if you love 2D shooters)
Samba De Amigo (MUST HAVE - and make sure to get some maraca controllers too)
DDR 2nd Mix & DDR Club Mix (get'em if you love Bemani)
Ecco the Dolphin (not a personal fave of mine, but many people love it)
Ferrari 355 Challenge (MUST HAVE)
Dead Or Alive 2 (MUST HAVE)
Jet Grind Radio (MUST HAVE)
Grandia 2
Le Mans 24 Hour
Metropolis Street Racer (MUST HAVE)
Soul Calibur (MUST HAVE)
Virtua Tennis 1+2
Get Bass (the fishing rod controller is really good)

Get Half Life and Propellor Arena if you can too, they're both must haves as well, but those are only available on the internet since they were never released commercially.

And then of course there's the world of homebrew to explore

Those are just my personal favs. I'm sure others can list their own.

And if you've got access to a VGA monitor, get a VGA Box too. The display is marvellous.

 

[Chip]

Indeed it's really incredible what the Dreamcast already could do, considering the year it first hit the market. I can't understand why it died so fast, Sega's marketing must've been really bad

It wasn't that Sega's marketing was bad so much as Sony's was better.Basically, right before the DC launched, Sony started hyping the PS2, and they hyped hard. The PS2 was claiming to be a lot more powerful than the DC (which turned out to be true) and had a DVD drive built in. That combined with Wii-like shortages for the first several months (including the holiday season) for the DC, and too many people just decided to wait. By the time the 2000 holiday season came around, there was the PS2, being all better and stuff.

Sega never had a chance. It's shame, because the DC really is a great system with some very good games. I guess the one up side to its failure is that you can get them for next to nothing on ebay now

For more about the history of the system, I highly recommend this series of videos from G4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3NfgF08EQE

 

[ashdjones]

QUOTE

The VMU is insane, download the ISO of VMU games/saves, it is really cool, and even has a VMU emulator built in. It is called a "potatoe" processor I think, and you can dev for it.

Mine came with crazy taxi as well, I think I tried to play it once.



Yeah i'm a big fan of the old VMU. I bought a cool box from Hong Kong that allows you to transfer files to and from it using a the bundled windows program. It only has a serial connector and it's slightly slow, definately slower than over the Dreamcast, but it also runs completely independantly from a computer using batteries allowing you to clone any VMU.

I had this crazy idea of making a supercomputer using hundreds of daisy chained VMU, or make an orchestra of some kind (the reason for the box was to write a boot-strap program that I would flash on one VMU then use it to clone that VMU a hundred times or whatever. Theoretically, the bootstrap code would allow code insertion into every VMU over the daisy-chain network without having to do it manually).

Probably wouldn't have worked because: The cost of all those units would have been substantial, the power requirements would have been huge I think (not going to do hundreds of pounds of batteries every time, plus I planned to run them in high-speed mode which sucks them dry fast), i'm not sure if could have gotten them to communicate with each other via any of the pins (don't remember finding any machine code instructions which would enable this). There are other issues like I think like varying clock speeds which screw up timing and so-forth, plus the hassle and expense of building that many edge-connectors (I figured out how to do it cheaply with carboard but then realised it would probably catch on fire!).

I reckon it's still possible though! One of those things to do before I die.