| Product: |
Dreamcast in general (DC) |
| Date: |
08/11/00 (15 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: A HUGE range of quality titles, good price, GOOD Official Magazine
Disadvantages: Games may dry up in the face of PS2/XBox/Gamecube
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Sega once so proudly ruled the roost of home console gaming, a platform they were sharing with Nintendo.
Along came a massive young upstart named Sony though, and the empire they had built was torn apart by the PlayStation. The Saturn fell with surprising ease, and the Nintendo 64 (perhaps the best console of the three in terms of sheer quality) is still going today with the shadow of Gamecube waiting to take it's place in 2002.
Sega recovered enough to launch Dreamcast at the back end of 1999. After being somewhat sceptical about whether it could ever succeed, knowing that PlayStation2 would wipe out all the competition when it finally arrived, my brother and I forked out the cash and bought one anyway.
Of the titles we got to accompany it (Virtua Fighter 3 and Sonic Adventure), only Sonic remains. The launch lineup was very promising.
The game that made us realise it was a good purchase was Soul Calibur - a game which oozes class and is easily the best beat 'em up ever made. As the months have gone by, and a series of triple-A titles have added themselves to an ever-growing list, it's become quite easy to see that only EA Sports fans have a reason for not owning this console. We now have 15 games and every single one of them still gets played, anything up to a year after initial purchase.
The DC looks like having an excellent Christmas (even in the face of the PS2 launch) with games such as F355, Metropolis Street Racer, Quake III, Half Life and Shenmue. It certainly doesn't suffer from the quantity over quality problems that will plague other consoles in the future - every title that is coming out looks like it may be worth buying. The Internet functions of the Dreamcast haven't really been fully exploited yet (with the exception of the ridiculous Chu Chu Rocket) - but when they are? Ouch.
In the end, the Dreamcast is the best console I've ever owned - I&
#39;ve had Game Boys, Megadrives, the SNES, the N64, the PSX and I have two PCs. But of them all, the Dreamcast is far and away the one with the most quality titles and the one which gets played the most. With a few more Internet-ready games on the market, and a half decent RPG (we're getting three from Japan soon) and a good licensed football game to fill the void we have without FIFA, there could be no possible reason for anyone to miss out on Dreamcast, other than a ridiculous console bias which results in only one thing: They're missing out on some of the best games ever, on the greatest console ever.
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