TEXAN*s SEGA enthusiast thread - past and future hardware choices

[PARANOiA]

It's obvious why the Dreamcast bombed. The PS2 shipped with 50% more untapped potentials, and the Dreamcast lacked the ability to synthesize emotion.

The sad fact is I agree with this quote - at least in the public's perception and swallowing of Sony's PR. So many people I knew didn't buy a DC because of how the PS2 would be so powerful it would blow it away since it could launch nukes, etc.

Having said that, I sold a lot of people on getting Dreamcasts based on the amazing games it had. Powerstone, MvC2, Zombie's Revenge, Chu Chu Rocket and so many others as party games just had people so damn keen to get into gaming - even those that didn't dig games too much.

 

[Nesh]

The sad fact is I agree with this quote - at least in the public's perception and swallowing of Sony's PR. So many people I knew didn't buy a DC because of how the PS2 would be so powerful it would blow it away since it could launch nukes, etc.

Having said that, I sold a lot of people on getting Dreamcasts based on the amazing games it had. Powerstone, MvC2, Zombie's Revenge, Chu Chu Rocket and so many others as party games just had people so damn keen to get into gaming - even those that didn't dig games too much.

Those games suffered from "Saturnidis". Too much arcadey games, with too much arcadey gameplay, short duration that grew old fast.

They also got outdated visually too fast.

The PS2 came with games with more "substance" and people were expecting to see the return of huge PS1 successes on the PS2. And it did deliver in many of its promises (MGS2 was a shocase of the 1999 tech demos applied in a real product). Which is what was happening. The DC (edited: oops wrote Saturn accidentally) was mostly getting arcade games and too many ok racing and battle games.

 

[fearsomepirate]

And of course dont bring up the Wii, all systems prior to Wii existed in a "hardcore" only world and played by those rules.

Yeah, I remember all those hardcore eight-year-olds playing Super Mario Bros in my neighborhood. They were total badasses. Or when Donkey Kong Country came out? A monkey in a necktie? F'in hardcore man. I had to go headbutt a cat just to blow off testosterone after collecting those bananas.

 

[Sonic]

Let's keep it Dreamcast centric at least.

Great games on the Dreamcast that I remember fondly:

Sea Man - This game was great yet creepy at the same time. Spent hours and my guy always insulted me.

VF3tb - Good port of Virtua Fighter 3 for the DC. Not perfect but if given more time would have been superior to the arcade version. I don't play this any more seeing as there's still a working arcade cabinet with it 2 rooms down.

Shenmue - I loved this game but it might have been too ambitious for its time. I don't think it ever made the money back it invested. I wish they would have done a proper port/upgrade when they released it on the Xbox. If it was ever completed it would have been one epic series.

Power Stone - LOVED this game and played it non stop at times. Capcom made a faithful port and the game was every bit as fun on the DC as it was in the arcades.

Resident Evil: Code Veronic - Awesome.

Skies of Arcadia - The art in this game was amazing with decent character development and a run of the mill story line but done in a good way. The only major glaring issue I have with it is the amount of time between random battles. I do not like getting out of a battle and walking/flying for less than 10 seconds only to be back in a battle.

Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 - These to me are the last good Sonic games.

Soul Calibur - This game was legendary in its time and everybody was playing it at their house or a friend's house. The weapons were freaking awesome and it was a sequel that one upped its predecessor in every way. Soul Edge/Blade was the original released in arcades and on Playstation 1.

More to come!

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Well, to contribute, all I know is that when the Dreamcast launched it was THE console to have and I wanted one and was jealous of those people who had one.

Fortunately, I could count those people that had one on a single hand and by the time the money was available to buy one, it was no longer the powerhouse it was when it launched. It had already been surpassed.

The Dreamcast failed because it was more powerful than the current hardware, but that lasted a very short period of time. By the time most people were ready to buy it, either because they saved their money or because it dropped in price, it went from being the top of the line to being questionable and a niche.

It failed because it wasn't on top long enough and it didn't have a large enough library when it was on top, and as soon as it wasn't on top, its library collapsed even further.

 

[Chris123234]

...

 

[tha_con]

You don't quite seem to get it - when the Dreamcast was released, it had a headstart on PS2 in terms of availability, it was out months ahead and PS1 was its main competitor.

Dreamcast's graphics IQ caned first gen PS2 games even when they did appear, Dreamcast had more games, more better games. It was effectively state of the art for a good, long while. And of course it was cheaper than the PS2.

Even with all these advantages, it failed horribly. The hardware wasn't the problem. Your notion that better graphics would've saved the day just doesn't compute. If it launched later with a better GPU it would've failed even more drastically, assuming it was indeed up against PS2, Xbox, GameCube etc as you seem to be stating.

SSX > *.

No, I agree that the DC had a ton of great software available when PS2 launched.

Honestly, consumer awareness was just "there' for PS2. It was the next best thing (even TIME was publishing articles on it). DC just didn't have any of that...or SSX.

 

[grandmaster]

Fair dos - SSX was absolutely wonderful. RR5 looked great too, but didn't really capture the imagination as a good game.

As you say, PlayStation was *the* brand of the era, handled by expert marketeers. Watching the same marketeers that had failed so badly on the Saturn transmuting into Sony wannabes was teeth-achingly painful.

Given a better machine, those same people would have done just as poor a job.

 

[pipo]

Let's keep it Dreamcast centric at least.

Great games on the Dreamcast that I remember fondly:...

PSO. For hours and hours and hours....

 

[Iron Tiger]

Fair dos - SSX was absolutely wonderful. RR5 looked great too, but didn't really capture the imagination as a good game.

RRV sort of killed the series momentum. They replaced the virtual spokesmodel Reiko Nagase (who was even shown in PS2 tech demos) in favor of the one-off skank Ai Fukami. The gameplay depth of Ridge Racer type 4 was cut down to barebones. And when critics flamed Tekken Tag Tournament for combing artifacts, they fixed it in Western releases, but didn't bother fixing it in RRV. There were relatively complex environments, vehicles, and effects, but the combing seemed to keep it from being a flagship racing title and everybody just waited for Gran Turismo 2000.

 

[Nesh]

What do you mean by "combing artifacts"?

I remember that the main issue were jaggies and were later fixed

 

[Akumajou]

It's obvious why the Dreamcast bombed. The PS2 shipped with 50% more untapped potentials, and the Dreamcast lacked the ability to synthesize emotion.

It had more to do with a lot of angry Sega Saturn owners, Sega 32X owners and Sega CD owners lacking any type of blind devotion to a company that kept rushing to pull the plug on them.

And btw I was one of those formerly blind Sega followers...

 

[Akumajou]

Not to disparage your opinion but I must object to your contention that a Tekken game could ever look better than Soul Caliber, let alone be a better game. Soul Caliber had absolutely gorgeous environments and the characters weren't half-bad either.

Not to disparrage your opinion but I must object to your contention that a Namco TekCalibur ended up looking better than half ass efforts to have Sega Virtua Fighter 3 and Fighting Vipers 2. Madface.

 

[sunscar]

Agreed

Honestly, I think everyone except the diehard and those with their heads in the sand, know precisely why the DC failed, and it wasn't hardware or software - it was the company making terrible decisions. They're still making them today.

Things like releasing half a dozen platforms in less than a decade, only to barely support any of them, passing over key games that *should* have been released outside of Japan *in their entirety* (lookin at you Shining Force III) - Things like that severely crushed peoples' faith in SEGA, and rightfully so. It seemed like every year and a half, SEGA had some new hardware, or some new gimmick they weren't going to care about fifteen titles later, so the mindset became "If they don't care about their hardware, why should we?".

So in summary, SEGA killed the DC by alienating their userbase further and further with each passing year leading up to it in every way they could (remember, they wanted to keep their name off the DC initially for this reason).


S.


A sidenote... It is for precisely this reason that I avoid topic threads about .5 revisions and gimmicky BS in gaming (Directly pertaining to 3D projection and PS360.5 comments). IMHO, gimmicks and .5 revisions are what helped murder SEGA as a hardware manufacturer in the first place. Now it seems everyone's all gung ho for it all over again - The idea that people should embrace the practice a decade later seems if anything, like madness.

 

[Iron Tiger]

What do you mean by "combing artifacts"?

I remember that the main issue were jaggies and were later fixed

Field rendering a high speed game causes a lot of combing when objects in one field aren't sync'ed with the next. Some people called it jaggies (because it looked low res, and technically was), because people that read the Dreamcast specs and knew it could do antialiasing, assumed that it's higher IQ came from that. I don't know if any DC games actually used AA, but the image integrity relative to launch window PS2 games should be attributed to frame rendering vs. field rendering.

TTT got a fix (which either used frame rendering, or sync'ed the fields better), but RRV didn't. The combing would probably be more noticeable in RRV anyway, since there's a lot of high speed motion on a lateral plane. I remember running it on my old GE TV through composite cable (which blurred everything to hell) when I first got my PS2, and it was combing city.

I just captured some footage of it running on my PS3, and I'll try to get it uploaded to YouTube and post back later if their transcoding doesn't ruin my footage.

EDIT: Video's up. Make sure to watch it in HD.

 

[V3]

Even with that problem, RRV sold well compare to RRVI and RRVII. To combat it Dreamcast had bad port Sega Rally 2 and another Daytona remake, not even Daytona 2. Sega was pathetic even then.

 

[Iron Tiger]

I think SR2 came out way before the PS2. It was a rush job done on Windows CE, that got lambasted for not maintaining a solid 60fps. Daytona 2000's cars looked like crap, and the handling was too sensitive by default, but the tracks looked magnificent and it otherwise felt like Daytona should. There were other winners like Ferrari 355 and Test Drive Le Mans that stood up pretty well.

 

[.Melchiah.]

No they wouldn't. Bottom line is that money and marketing talks in the games business and SEGA had neither. Your argument is a nonsense not only because you ignore those factors, but also because the Dreamcast had more technologically exciting, better-looking and better-playing games than the PS2 had at launch and beyond.

Dreamcast's graphics IQ caned first gen PS2 games even when they did appear, Dreamcast had more games, more better games. It was effectively state of the art for a good, long while. And of course it was cheaper than the PS2.

It's beyond me why some people still want to keep this myth alive. SSX and Tekken Tag Tournament, which were PS2's EU launch games, could compete with anything Dreamcast had to offer. Visually and otherwise.

 

[Iron Tiger]

It's beyond me why some people still want to keep this myth alive. SSX and Tekken Tag Tournament, which were PS2's EU launch games, could compete with anything Dreamcast had to offer. Visually and otherwise.

Because it's 2 games against a huge library. The PS2 took a while to come into its own and deliver on the hype. As launch titles SSX and TTT were exceptions, but the rule was low IQ. Even DoA2, which was a standout on the DC had inferior IQ on its PS2 port.

 

[.Melchiah.]

Because it's 2 games against a huge library. The PS2 took a while to come into its own and deliver on the hype. As launch titles SSX and TTT were exceptions, but the rule was low IQ. Even DoA2, which was a standout on the DC had inferior IQ on its PS2 port.

Yes, but it doesn't change the fact that it's asinine to claim none of the PS2's launch games could compete visually with Dreamcast's best offerings. When SSX and TTT could beat visually anything DC had.

And it only took a year for the PS2 to deliver all the promises with Silent Hill 2, MGS2, GT3, and the like.