I don't really get the love the Dreamcast gets. Hardly a week goes by were somebody that was in Diapars in 1999 is all like "COME ON SEGA MAKE THE DREAMCAST 2" which 1. will NEVER happen and 2. As we probably know a 2 in Sega naming schemes means a hardware redesign not a new system. Now granted, I have 3 dreamcasts 2 works 1 not working that I need to figure out so it IS working again. Anyways long story short I picked up Jet Set Radio and Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 on PSN this weekend during a flash sale. JSR has a few enhacments, you can GASP MOVE THE CAMERA NOW. But the Sonic games eeeeeeeh, the older the get the worse they feel. Dare I say The Sonic Levels in Adventure 1 are better than Adventure 2. So this got me thinking about the Dreamcast as a whole I probably have around 60 games for it between US and Japanese games, some Japanese games I can't get to load, and then I have lord knows how many burned. So I have a good cross section of what the system can do. I'm having a real hard time right now thinking of Dreamcast games that play as well now as they did when they released. The Controller doesn't help with that clunky D-pad and thumb tearing analog stick. I just use a PS2 Controller through an adapter for a good chunk of these games. The only games off the time of my head that I enjoy as much then as I used to are JSR, Crazy Taxi 1 and 2, Hydro Thunder, and all the shmups/fighters. Maybe Pen Pen which got no love then and gets no love now. Duper Magnetic Neo is flawed but decent. Beyond that I'm drawing blanks. What say all of you, is the Dreamcast library aging worse than N64,Saturn, PS1, and some PS2 games?
BUT... BUT CITY ESCAPE!!! Dat song is epic!!!! In all seriousness, I only have Sonic Adventure 2 for my Dreamcast. I can't really say if the whole library is aging but I can say that Sonic Adventure 2 can be difficult sometimes, and I notice this the more I play it. The controls were terrible at certain spots but most of the time the controls work great. Then again, I'm using an official PAL Dreamcast controller (my Dreamcast is an American one; dat blue swirl). I'm still stuck at the Knuckles part where you fight the giant ghost. How do you get past it? Speaking of the Knuckles levels, I actually like them. They are quite fun. The game's soundtrack is amazing, even 14 years later. It definitely has a late 90s/early 2000s vibe to it. How can one not like "Escape From The City ...For City Escape", Sonic's theme, Knuckles' theme, and Eggman's theme. The Chao Garden's theme was awesome too.
We all love rolling around at the Speed of sound, with places to go and following our window. I don't know what lies ahead..... I really like Advnture 1's Ice level and Casino. Later levels in Adventure 2 I'm just cursing out whatever system I'm playing it on. Especially Rouge and Knuckles. Knuckles stages in Adventure though...........ARGH!
Shenmue, ECCO, JSR, ChuChuRocket, the best console version of THPS2, even Sonic Adventure is the best 3D Sonic game IMO. That doesn't age. Gameplay doesn't age. I must say I like the DC dpad, perfect for THPS2 I think. Never been a fan of any analog stick though.
I thought it was "rollin around at the speed of sound. got places to go, gotta follow my rainbow"? I just listened to it on iTunes with the volume cranked up on my old surround sound system and it definitely sounds like "rollin around at the speed of sound. got places to go, gotta follow my rainbow". I haven't played SA1 farther than the Xbox 360 demo. I want to get it for my Dreamcast but before I do that, I need another VMU. The Sega Potato just doesn't hold enough memory. I would get one of those larger memory cards, but then I couldn't use those extra VMU features. I can say that SA2 looked amazing on my old Gateway VGA CRT monitor and it looks ok on my VGA LCD monitor. I have a cheap retro-bit VGA box that I will be modding for RGB SCART and 480p RGB SCART (using a sync combiner). I will definitely be installing OzOne's HDMI mod board when it comes out. No more crappy VGA boxes!
3D games always age badly. Besides, some say the best Sonic game was CD, and none have ever come close to reaching its height since then. We'll still play Marvel vs Capcom, but Toy Commander? Eh... not so much.
I still play Phantasy Star online through Sylverant with my DC sometimes, still great fun. As far as aging games go, I found Grandia 2 to be sub-par(especially since I heard it was the second best rpg on the system, right behind Skies of Arcadia - speaking of which, Arcadia still looks and plays great to this day). I find the Dreamcast to be more of a multiplayer platform, though. Tony Hawk, Star Wars Pod Racing, Typing of the Dead, Quake Arena, (if you want a bad game) sonic shuffle, Power Stone 1 + 2, and the fighting games never aged to me.
Definitely not. Nothing in gaming has aged worse than the PS1's 3D games. The 3D on the N64 isn't a ton better, and the Saturn actually aged rather well because it had so many 2D games which still look great. Older PS2 games are far eclipsed by stuff from later on the same system. Actually I notice that cel-shaded 3D games seem to age a lot better (the original Wind Waker still looks pretty darn good). I actually still do play Toy Commander from time to time, and it has aged pretty well too (cel-shaded).
I age my games in a charred oak barrel so maybe I get better results than others but I feel DC games have "aged" well. My general feeling is that 3D games that keep the graphics simple, and end up looking sort of cartoon like, age better than games that tried for realism with textures that looked bad then and worse now. This always put the DC, and even the N64 near the top of the list. The DC basically taking full advantage of what TV's at the time could display makes it all that much better. A lot of DC games were just done well. For example, compare DoA on the DC and xbox. Even something like toy commander is a stupid simple game that doesn't even look good but still fun to play. Sonic isn't the greatest but it's not bad.
I'm going to agree with FG and say SA1 is the best 3D Sonic game. It's still in my top 5 favorite games, despite whatever issues the game has. Gotta cite nostalgia as one of the main reasons why. There's really no other way to defend but to say I fell in love with it when it first came out and have played the hell out of it ever since. Power Stone 1 and 2 will indeed never age poorly. I personally liked Heavy Metal Geomatrix a lot, but I'm in the minority. House of the Dead II, while not being as good as the arcade version of I, is still extremely fun. I play it with a joystick, as for some reason I'm one of the few people who actually enjoy playing light gun games with or without the gun. Both THPS games are the definitive versions of those games IMO. Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense for the DC is also the definitive version of that game. I'm going to further the sentiment that old 3D PS1 games are the worst. Maybe we should start pin-pointing the games that haven't aged well on the DC, as I haven't really seen any on here so far. Then again I really don't think there are that many.
The DC had a lot of lazy PS1 ports (including like every game Infogrames made for it), those didn't look great then and aged as well as you'd expect a lazy PS1 port to.
Say what you will about alot of those PS1 games, but I STILL love Jumping flash and toshinden. Of the 3d games on the Saturn, Panzer Dragoon Zwei has aged amazingly well as has Nights. I can't think of anything on the Dreamcast that has the charm of Nights. Crazy Taxi will never get old. Outtrigger is showing it's age. What would be amazing on any other system is very difficult to control on he Dreamcast without a keyboard and mouse
Crazy Taxi is amazing! I have it on XBLA and it's a lot of fun. I will definitely get it for the Dreamcast along with yet another Sega Potato. I need three VMUs just for 3 or 4 games, assuming SA1 is anything like SAA2 and will take up the whole VMU. If a DC game works better with mouse and keyboard, porting it to the PS3 and/or Steam would be ideal since they support mouse and keyboard (Steam is on PC/Mac/Linux so it obviously has to support mouse and keyboard). For other consoles, making an adapter that let's you use the original DC mouse and keyboard on select games would be great.
I won't buy the re releases of Crazy Taxi simply becuase the soundtrack is everything and the re release doesn't have the soundtrack. Nothing like driving around like a manaic with this blasting
The Offspring is one of my favorite bands, has been since I was in middle school I believe. Bad Religion is also pretty great. Only negative thing about the soundtrack is that it's way too damn short. Four songs, two from each artist? What does the re-release have as the soundtrack?
Generic music that doesn't even attempt to recreate Bad Religion or the Offspring. One thing about the first party games on the Dreamcast that has aged well is the music. Sonic Adventure 2, Jet Set Radio, MSR, Crazy Taxi, those are still some of the best soundtracks ever. I am forever greatful to JSR for turning me on to Jurassic 5 the rap group that along with the Roots showed me rappers still use word play and not braggadocio.
Crazy Taxi really is not the same without the soundtrack, which is kinda funny since the BR songs on it are from one of their weakest albums. At least the PC version makes it easy to put the real soundtrack back in. Still can't believe the only other port of the Power Stone games was for the PSP. Who the hell was behind that decision?
Vanishing Point was probably one of nicest improvements to a next gen platform. I wish I could say the same for V82nd Offense, sure the graphics are better and frame rate is beautiful. However the sounds are bugged, probably was a bug that didn't make it within the timeframe of release. Graphics will always age, that's why we get new hardware - I liked SEGA's style, you could look at a game by them and tell it's by SEGA... Mainly the AM2/3 games anyway.
I disagree, because there's some games with graphics that don't seem to age: the art in LucasArts' adventure games comes to mind. Especially if you compare the "improved" graphics in the Monkey Island remakes to the beautiful pixel art of the originals...there's really no comparison, the new graphics look like they were rejected by Dreamworks for being too ugly.
