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Cast Off Your Dream: Soulcalibur

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Did the soul burn better at home than the arcade? We take a slice out of day 4 at our look of Dreamcast games to find out.

Following behind Sonic Adventure, Soulcalibur is the second best-selling game on the Dreamcast. A launch title, the game featured improved graphics, sound, and new modes over the arcade port. A launch title, it was the one game that sold consistently throughout the console’s lifespan.

Soul_Calibur_DC There were a couple of innovative features put into this fighting game. The player had a wider range of movement that gave the gamer a sense of real 3D. It also allowed players to “buffer” their moves.  You could basically plan out an attack while performing a defense, for instance.

The best feature I like was the ability for the winning player to keep performing moves on their opponent after they were K.O.’d. Being able to taunt with repeated kicks to the other person on the couch is a nice touch.

The game received near perfect scores and is considered by some to be one of the greatest games of all time. I wouldn’t take it that far, but it is one of best fighting games I’ve played (and I’m not a big fan of fighting games).

It’s spawned a slew of sequels but none have really attained to the status of the original title. If you’re itching to play it can be found on Xbox Live Arcade but a huge drawback is the lack of online play. There was a little HD updating and some basic leaderboards, but it’s not been well received because of this. However, being one of the most prolific titles on the Dreamcast it can still be found rather easily.

Nightmare was awesome. “Nightmare was seriously wounded, but the soul still burns.”

Cast Off Your Dream: Jet Grind Radio

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Day 3 in our look at excellent Dreamcast games has all to do with a game of tag—with innovation.

When most gamers think cel-shading the first game that comes to mind is Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. However, Jet Grind Radio (Jet Set Radio sans North America) had that beat (pun intended) by almost four years. The visuals pioneered the use of cel-shaded graphics using a colorful pallet and a color style and that’s been rarely seen in games since.

img_8 You play as a character named Beat who must perform stunts across a J-Pop city and recruit a gang of people to help him in his quest to “tag” the city with graffiti. Once an area is conquered and tagged, the rival gang would secede the area over to Beat. While all this is going on, the player has to escape rival gangs and the city’s police. Although the controls were simplistic the first few hours of the gameplay were brutal to most gamers. Once that learning curve was over it was smooth sailing. A lot of joy was had in performing a fluid motion of tricks.

 

Featuring a wide range of music from J-Pop, hip hop, dance, and a sprinkle of futuristic jazz there was an ever changing variety of up-tempo tunes to listen to. The metallic sound effects seemed to match the look and style of play.

It seems as if Jet Grind Radio was to go the way of the Dreamcast—innovative and way ahead of its time. Like most of the titles we’ve featured it’s achieved a cult status. However—and here may be some good news—Sega  has recently renewed some legal rights to the game and it’s been rumored that the game may show up on XBLA or PSN.

This game can be easily found online at an affordable price. Definitely one to add to a collection.

Cast Off Your Dream: Crazy Taxi

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Hey, hey, hey! It’s time to make some crazy money? Are ya ready? Here we go! It’s day 2 of our homage to the Dreamcast.

Released almost right after the launch of the Dreamcast console, developer Hitmaker had a hit on their hands with Crazy Taxi.

Who’d ever thought driving a taxi would be a blast? This game is all about style. Basically you pick up fares and get your customer to their destination as fast as possible. The catch? They tip you better the crazier you drive. This is a game all about stunts. The more you perform, the better your reward. The trade off is that you still have to deliver your fare in a certain period of time. This was an ingenious way to get you to memorize the layout of the city.

 

In regards to the city, this was one of the first games to have prominent in-game advertising. You’ll make deliveries to Pizza Huts (think about that one), Tower Records (uh, I guess the advertising didn’t work), Levi’s stores, and a couple of other restaurant and clothing stores.

Featuring unprecedented graphics for it’s time, this is one of those early titles where gamers preferred the console port to the arcade. See, arcades were where you went for the power. However, the Dreamcast delivered that with Crazy Taxi.

With lightning fast gameplay, excellent audio, and a great soundtrack featuring songs by Bad Religion and The Offspring, Crazy Taxi went on to become one of the few surefire hits on the Dreamcast. It spawned a sequel for the console that added a few twists on the gameplay and had a different soundtrack, but it didn’t really achieve the notoriety of the first.

It’s the original title that most gamers prefer. Because of it’s status, it’s one of the easier games to find on the system, but it can also be found on every other major system at that time.

If it was an XBLA or PSN title it would be a best-seller.

Cast Off Your Dream: Rez

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I kick off day 1 remembering Dreamcast games that were the most fun to play. Some may not have been critically acclaimed or best sellers, but hey, this is my list. Enjoy it.

Um…yeah. Rez.

rez_2_2 Back in 2002 I had come across a game for my PlayStation 2 called Rez. Its weird main character and trippy visuals instantly turned me off. Little did I know at the time that it was also available for the Dreamcast.

Fast-forward to 2008 and this little game shows up on Xbox Live Arcade with widescreen support and HD visuals for $10. By this time I had been full of Geometry Wars, Lumines and games like Warning Forever. Trippy visuals were ok. Plus, a certain somebody who specializes in obscure games would not stop raving about the original. I figured why not.

Absolutely amazing—and mesmerizing. I’ll be honest and say I’ve never played the Dreamcast version of Rez, but if this was close in 2001-2002 to the same game I played in 2008, then this game was completely ahead of it’s time.

Rez is a rail shooter where the main character floats in a form of cyberspace. He then locks on targets—up to eight at a time I believe and fires away. It gets to be a little harder than it sounds.

Rez_ingame Speaking of, the sound is key to this game. The music and effects pulse in rhythm to the shots and what is happening on screen. The PS2 version of the game came with a device called the Trance Vibrator. It would pulse in conjunction with the game. It was meant to be put in a pocket or sat on, but, well, this is a family-friendly site. I’ll stop there.

As a result of playing the game many people described having a form of synesthesia, basically crazy reactions to the game whether by sight, sound, or touch.

Because of it’s cult status, the Dreamcast version is incredibly hard to find. Well, that and it only had a Japanese and European release on the console. However, this is one of the few games that appeared on the system that can be revisited at an affordable price and enhanced for current generation game play.

You can even use up to four Xbox 360 controllers as trance vibrators.

Let Kurt Be Kurt

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It’s appears that the attorney for Courtney Love and two former Nirvana band members are calling for Kurt Cobain’s likeness in Guitar Hero 5 to be used only for his songs. They’re sighting a “breach of likeness.” After LOL’ing on that comment, I’d have to agree with them. It’s kind of creepy seeing Cobain sing “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.”

Eidos: There’s A Pirate In My Belfry

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Batman: Arkham Asylum is a great game. It’s an excellent game. You should be playing it. It’s good enough to pay for. Apparently that wasn’t the case for one gamer who made the following post on an Eidos forum:

"Hi!
I’ve got a problem when it’s time to use Batman’s glide in the game. When I hold , like it’s said to jump from one platform to another, Batman tries to open his wings again and again instead of gliding. So he fels down in a poisoning gas. If somebody could tel me, what should I do there."

There were two initial problems with this. One, it was for help on the PC version of the game. It had not been released yet. Two, it’s not a glitch. From an admin on the forum who replied to the original poster:

"The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free.

It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code."

Uh, snap?

Look forward to seeing a lot more of these wonderful conversations as more publishers adopt this style of copy protection.

Source: Afterdawn.

Cast Off Your Dream

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On September 9, 1999 I was was sitting at my workstation waiting for the sky to fall. Alarmists were predicting the pre-curser to the Y2K fiasco. It was my task to make sure all the clocks in the office computers would function properly. Planes were supposed to fall out of the sky. Nothing happened.

I had spent most of my high school and college working in the electronics department at the local Wal-Mart, and I was there for quite a few console releases. The Nintendo 64 was the last. I was a huge PC gamer at the time (a game a paycheck) and I couldn’t understand all the fuss over the last console—the Nintnedo 64. People came in at midnight to get it.

On 9/9/99 I had been married a month and was a year and a half removed from Wal-Mart. One of my old wedding buddies was still employed there. We (I still feel a part of the “family”—they were that good with loyalty) were the best store in the district. Sold the most goods. Made the most profit.

I remember my friend telling me that they sold one Dreamcast. One.

So began the rise and fall of the critically acclaimed Sega Dreamcast, a system that almost killed a company and eventually became a cult console.

I didn’t own one until I saw a used system on eBay used in 2004. By then the console had already been proclaimed a failure and I was buying it just to experiment, but more importantly to play a rare imported game that I came across that had become sort of a cult classic itself. I was a closet shmup fan, and I had spent more on the game than the system itself. Ikaruga was and is one of the best games I’ve ever played.

Over the course of the next year I came across Crazy Taxi, a Sonic game here or there, Soul Calibur (I still burn to play that one—not the sequels), and Ready 2 Rumble. After a year of play, in a state of confusion I sold the system and the games on eBay for a profit. I kept Ikaruga.

In April of this year the website Thinkgeek came across of a supply of new, unopened systems, and they were selling them for $100. I didn’t wait. Since then I’ve toyed with the idea of making a MAME cabinet using the console or at least an Ikaruga arcade cabinet.

The Dreamcast is now officially ten years old and it still has a little bit of life in it. With over 660 games it does see a few new releases a year although most of them are homebrew or done by an independent developer. Systems can still be had for a price and there is a relatively large underground market for games.

I have in my possession what I to believe to be seven of the most influential games on the system, and starting tomorrow and over the course of the next seven days I’ll be giving a little review of each one.

Do you have any favorite games on the system that you miss? My life with the console is short-lived and maybe some of you have married the system. What’s your Dreamcast story?

Update:

We Are ODST

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With all the crap I spouted about the Halo being franchised being milked and stale a few days back, I’ll succumb to this awesomeness. Point. Halo. RSS readers come to the site or check the comments for the video.