When you have a map called "Tower City", its easy to see why it was canceled, however, if they had any sense at all, they would have removed the damn thing and sold it with 1 less map or substitute it altogether with something else. It was going to be a revolutionary game, complete with voice chat over Sega.net, and everything, would have felt just as good as playing a game on Xbox Live in every way really. I am just glad it made its way to fellow Dreamcast enthusiasts, we all know these games deserve to be played, not collecting dust and getting potential disc rot in the subsequent years since they were pressed.
There is no way they would have pulled that off at that stage of the dreamcast. Too many people were still on dial up & the dreamcast had already been discontinued. Saying 911 was an excuse is unfair, it was just the last straw. They would have already been tight on making a profit on the game. It's a miracle it even survived the dreamcast being cancelled. To then go back and spend more money at that point, when the developers would have been working on something (hopefully) more profitable would have been a risk too far.
If there was no way in pulling it off then why did they make it? Also the BBa was a very popular bit of kit in Japan so at least here it would have worked fine. In fact. playing a DC online with a BBA wasn't much difference to XBOX live we have now. Yakumo
In fairness, I doubt Sega really thought the game would inspire people to start crashing more things into skyscrapers. It just that, in context, it probably seemed like the sensitive thing to do. I don't agree with the decision to cancel the game of course, but such acts of blind corporate 'responsibility' are hardly an uncommon occurrence in any industry. Hell, look at Disaster Report 4 for the Wii.
Exactly, back then the BBA cost only $50 USD new, so it was redily available for those that still had their Dreamcast, so yes, they could have had the Seaman mic bundled with it and working voice chat. I also believe Alien Front Online had working voice chat if I remember correctly. Some are working to reverse engineer the server for the game so we can eventually play it online again, we just have to wait and see if they can get it back online like they did with PSO private servers. :dance:
Alien Front Online had working voice chat with the 56K modem. PA was set to come out just a few months after AFO, so it probably would have been the same deal, no BBA needed. I looked around, but couldn't find anything current about trying to do a private server for PA. What I heard before is that with PSO, people were able to cache and investigate the dial-into-the-server process before the official servers went offline, and this allowed them to create the bootdisc/modifications and new server that DC PSO dials into. No one did this for any of the other online sega games (Daytona USA, Outtrigger, Propeller Arena) before they went offline, and it's virtually impossible to make a workable server without any data on the dial-into-the-server process.
Alien Front online had the IP of the server hardcoded into the game iirc, so unless you patch the game itself - good luck
The 9/11 excuse got me a bit pissed, when the source of Simcity got changed in the last second . Because one of the disasters is an air plane is ramming into a building, seriously. It is a bit far-fetched, when you know. The game was made long before the horrible stuff happened at 9/11
