I discovered that the Dreamcast aged less than gracefully in the twenty years since its launch, but I'm nevertheless determined to squeeze as much entertainment as I can out of this machine. I dropped several dozen games onto an SD card, including my favorites from when the system was launched and titles I missed the first time around, and here's what stood out for me. Note that these aren't reviews, exactly... just brief impressions.
TOY COMMANDER
Heading the list is this vehicular combat game that's less Twisted Metal and more Blast Corps meets Toy Story. You're a little kid, and you keep yourself entertained by starting epic wars with your playthings. Fighting on the side of good are an assortment of airplanes, helicopters, and trucks. The villains include a robot with a missile launcher arm, that lame stack of rings you had as a baby, and a teddy bear with the parts from other toys stuck on it. As the battle progresses, you'll annoy the cat, shatter wine glasses, and flood the kitchen, adding to the excitement but also the frustration of your unseen parents. I get the feeling that this epic war will end with an epic spanking...
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| This kitchen is totally giving me Chibi-Robo flashbacks. (image from YouTube) |
It's harder than it should have been, but it's not hard at all to see how Toy Commander achieved its cult status. The vivid graphics have the same sense of scale as an early Katamari Damacy stage, and most of your vehicles are armed to the teeth with roll caps, colored pencils, and eraser bombs. During each mission, you'll gleefully gun down tanks, missile silos, and wooden block barriers, probably making a mess of the house in the process. Your parents are going to be so mad when they get home.
GAUNTLET LEGENDS
In a previous post, I described the Dreamcast as a transitional game console. It's fair to say that Gauntlet Legends is a transitional game, sandwiched between the groundbreaking action RPG released in 1984 and modern dungeon crawlers like Torchlight and Diablo. The problem is that it blends the worst parts of the earlier Gauntlet games (the mind-numbing repetition) with all the aggravation of more modern (but not nearly modern enough) 3D graphics. It isn't just that Gauntlet Legends is ugly... it's that its jagged, low polygon terrain is tough to traverse, with confusing topography, paths that loop back onto themselves, and breakable walls that hide themselves a little too well against the rest of the game's scenery. After a few stages of Gauntlet Legends, you realize why more recent games in this genre, particularly the Gauntlet remake by Warner Games, keep the camera zoomed out and the playfields relatively flat... they're just easier to navigate that way.
Rogue-likes of the 21st century have another advantage over Gauntlet Legends... they offer more for the player to do than cut a path through a seemingly endless demon army. You can find, equip, sell, and fortify hundreds of different items in Torchlight, and change the weapons and armor you've collected to adapt to a variety of different combat situations. Gauntlet Legends gives you health, keys, screen-clearing magic, temporary power ups... and that's pretty much it. That was good enough for an arcade game in the mid 1980s, but not fifteen years later on the Dreamcast, and certainly not now.
MORTAL KOMBAT GOLD
This is one of those rare games which I didn't like when it was first released but has sweetened with age. Okay, "sweetened" is too strong a term... maybe "mellowed" would be a better fit. Mortal Kombat Gold seemed downright offensive next to Dreamcast overachievers like Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive 2, but twenty years later, it's easier to accept the game on its own terms.
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| Uppercuts that spew more blood than a body could physically contain. Pretty much business as usual for Mortal Kombat. (image from Oldies Rising) |
It was disappointing in 2000 and it's still not spectacular now, but Mortal Kombat Gold has the awkward charm of a game that's trying to keep up with the times while still holding onto its identity. The camera sometimes stops in front of walls during fatalities, leading to some unintended censorship. Blood leaps out of wounds as a spray of red diamonds. Endings are illustrated with stiff, muddy computer rendering. It'll make you laugh and cringe at the same time, like that yearbook picture of you with a mullet.
KING OF FIGHTERS 2000
I like King of Fighters 2000, but I love the preceding game, King of Fighters 1999. I love it so much that I have copies for several of my systems, going so far as to purchase NESTS Saga from the Japanese Playstation Store so I could have it on my Playstation 3. I'd have it for my Dreamcast too, but I've got that system connected to my television with a VGA cable, and KOF '99 won't work with it. King of Fighters 2000 does, so that'll have to be my silver medal.
Look, there's nothing wrong with KOF 2000. It's a more ambitious game than its predecessor, with a larger selection of fighters and way more strikers. Each character has their own alternate striker, so you can briefly summon fighters like Mature, Vice, and Geese Howard who died in previous King of Fighters installments, or characters from entirely different SNK games, like Metal Slug and Robo Army. You get the impression that the design team knew SNK was almost bankrupt and went all out with this entry in the series, thinking that it might be the last.
With all that said, it's still not King of Fighters '99. The novelty of the NESTS storyline and a more futuristic aesthetic has worn off, and the new batch of backgrounds just don't have the same impact as the old ones. KOF '99 had a lush green park that starts out sunny but is hit with a sudden downpour halfway through the match. By contrast, the sequel has a run down city block getting plowed under by a bulldozer. Urban renewal may be a necessary evil, but it doesn't make for a memorable fighting arena.
King of Fighters 2000 is still a great game, no question, but alas, my heart is elsewhere.
SAN FRANCISCO RUSH 2049
Midway's probably best remembered on the Dreamcast for its technically sound but fiendishly hard racing games. Many a game controller was sacrificed on the altars of Hydro Thunder and 4 Wheel Thunder, but San Francisco Rush 2049 was the most brutal of them all... a racing game so hard that you can't possibly win against the computer opponents unless you memorize the layout of each track and take all the hidden shortcuts. Rush 2049 is so hard that even its cheat codes are hard, forcing you to punch in long, complicated strings of buttons to unlock options that might make the game possible for mortals to finish. It's difficult, is the take home here.
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| It looks nice, runs fast, and hates your friggin' guts. (image from ProDriveGT on YouTube, who's somehow good at this) |
PROJECT JUSTICE
Fighting games with a high school setting were pretty popular in Japan at the turn of the century. There was Sonic Council and several flavors of Asuka 120%, but the valedictorian of this class was Capcom's Rival Schools. It even traveled overseas to be a foreign exchange student in American arcades, briefly catching the attention of players bored with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.
Project Justice is the sequel to Rival Schools, quite similar to the original at its core while tapping the power of the Dreamcast to deliver better graphics and more complex gameplay. Teams are now built from three fighters rather than two, and you can use them all at once to deliver a spectacular beatdown... if you've got the three stocks of super meter for it. The more modest team up attacks from Rival Schools can also be performed, but these can be interrupted by one of your opponent's teammates, generally making them not worth the risk.
Just like Rival Schools, there's a lot about Project Justice that feels off. Movement is slightly stiff, forward jumps don't take you very far, and you can't switch between teammates in the middle of a fight; only between rounds. Nevertheless, you've got to give some credit to a game featuring juvenile delinquents, youthful athletes including a sumo in training, and a principal with a startling resemblance to Stephen King.
YU SUZUKI'S GAME WORKS VOLUME 1
It's all the fun of Sega's Super Scaler arcade games, without having to play Shenmue first! Ooh, sign me up! This collection offers the expected trio of OutRun, Afterburner II, and Space Harrier, then tops it all off with Hang On and Power Drift. Space Harrier actually looks better than it did in Sega Ages for the Saturn, which is odd because there didn't seem to be anything wrong with the Saturn version. My best guess is that the Dreamcast's higher resolution gives the graphics added pop.
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| Ugh, those accursed log bridges... (image from Retrogames.cc) |
THE TYPING OF THE DEAD
House of the Dead 2... as a typing game? It happened, and it was a remarkably prescient decision for Sega. The House of the Dead games were originally designed for light guns, but those don't work with modern displays... the onscreen flashes used to communicate with the gun are hopelessly out of sync on an LCD screen. However, a computer keyboard talks directly to the Dreamcast, taking the picture out of the, uh, picture. Well, you'll still need some kind of display to know what to type, but just about anything will do.
Let me get right to the point. Typing of the Dead makes House of the Dead 2 playable in the far-flung year of 2019. It's a ridiculous way to play the game, especially when you're keying in phrases like "He was an iguana" and "Unwanted hair" to blow chunks out of zombies, but it's not like the game wasn't weird before.
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