Ahead of its Time, Behind in the Next

I've played with the GDEMU for a few days, tried a handful of games, and I'm satisfied with the experience overall. It's a handy device as long as your Dreamcast cooperates, and a 32GB card offers plenty of space for most fans of the system. The GDEMU has gotten me reacquainted with the game system that swallowed up most of my free time at the turn of the century, but it's also brought to light an inconvenient truth about the Dreamcast.

I doubt I would have ever admitted this in 2000 when I first bought the system, but in hindsight it's become increasingly clear that the Dreamcast was a transitional console, like the 3DO years before. Was it more capable than previous systems? Yes, absolutely... the Saturn has a strong reputation for 2D games, but there's no way it could have handled the manic three on three fighting of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, even with a four megabyte RAM cartridge. It's also got a leg up on the 3D capable Playstation, with polygonal characters that are more detailed and less angular. Going from the Playstation version of Hydro Thunder to its Dreamcast counterpart definitely felt like an upgrade.

At the same time, the Dreamcast feels out of step with systems of its own generation, like the Playstation 2, GameCube, and especially the Xbox. The graphics are rougher and the gameplay less developed than later releases on those three machines. Maybe the Dreamcast would have been able to catch up to the competition if Sega hadn't cut its life short, but it's hard to imagine highlights of the sixth console generation like Katamari Damacy, Resident Evil 4, and Crimson Skies working on the system. The limited RAM of the Dreamcast (26 megabytes in total, compared to the Playstation 2's 32 megs and the Xbox's 64) and the lack of a second analog thumbstick on its controller would have been serious handicaps.

Some aspects of the Dreamcast's design seem puzzlingly backward and wrongheaded in hindsight. Case in point... the VMU unit. Rather than plugging into the console, this specialized memory card is pushed into the controller, with a screen facing outward that functions as a miniature heads up display. The only problem is that it's an extremely tiny black and white display with limited applications. It's no good as a map and offers little room for other useful information, so developers generally stuck cute icons on the screen and called it a day. You could also remove the VMU and use it as a tiny handheld game system, but it was no Game Boy, relegated to pet raising sims and other short-lived diversions. All that unwanted functionality just feels like a bad bet on Sega's part, especially when you consider that later systems had many times the storage on their dedicated memory cards.

The VMU didn't ruin the Dreamcast experience, but it did make playing the system more costly and cumbersome. Controllers were larger than they needed to be to accommodate the memory cards, while coming up short on buttons... players had to smash start and light punch together in Capcom's fighters to taunt, and squeeze the triggers on the underside of the pad to unleash their strongest attacks. Alternatives were available, but most of these third party joypads were as large as the genuine article, and somehow even uglier. If you wanted a controller better suited to the fighting games that made up a significant chunk of the Dreamcast's library, you had to buy an adapter, which have only gotten less common and more expensive in the years since the system was discontinued in 2001.

I've been enjoying my time with the Dreamcast, don't get me wrong. However, it's a bitter pill to realize that the console which seemed so ahead of its time in 1999 has lagged so far behind its rivals.