Favourite Dreamcast games

Other Games
1

The title speaks for itself. What are your favourite Dreamcast games and why?

I’m currently playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 again as evil Ryu, because I love dark heroes. “Nothing that stands before me will survive”. Sword of the Berserk is another favourite of mine, easily finding its way into the same league as Guardian Heroes for the Saturn (very few games now breath new life into this dying genre).

My other favourite Dreamcast games include: Daytona 2001, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, and Skies of Aracadia.

2

Shenmue 2 (altho I only played the tranlasted XBox version of it) would easily be one of the best I’m sure.

3

The Dreamcast version supposedly grinds to a halt in some places. Slowdown is non-existent in the Xbox version, or so I hear.

I plan to buy this game from Amazon at a really low price and laugh at all the people who paid full price for it. >:)

4

I paid 30 euros for it.Yep I can confirm that.No slowdowns.

5

The original crazy taxi game, I heart it :slight_smile:

6

I don’t actually have my Dreamcast set up anymore, but the game I think I played the most was the first Sonic Adventure. Mainly becasue I played through the entire game twice because, the first time, a glitch stopped me from getting all of the Emblems. I guess the fact that I was determined enough to go through it all again straight away must mean I enjoyed it…

And was it just me, or was Sonic Adventure 2 jut strictly worse than the first game in practically every way? What was the deal with that?

7

SA2 was more commercial. And I think Sonic Team were on a dope trip. Arcie’ll tell you otherwise though. Shenmue 2 has no slowdown, at least on my Dreamcast.

To answer the original question:

Sega Rally 2
Sonic Adventure
F1 World Grand Prix
Virtua Tennis
Shenmue
Shenmue II

8

I never bought the Sonic Adventure games because I don’t actually enjoy its genre. Sonic Adventure 2 made vast improvements in the graphics department over the original, but I fear that the development time of many last generation Dreamcast titles was decreased the moment Sega announced it was scrapping the Dreamcast.

The demise of the Dreamcast alos saw the cancellation of Half Life, Skies of Arcadia 2 and Soul Reaver 2.

9

Was it that bad?

10

Does Sonic Heroes have anything to do with the original Sonic Adventure’s ?
I weep for SR2’s cancellation :frowning:

11

Shenmue - Amazing visuals and atmosphere, superb gameplay and insane attention to detail.

Soul Calibur - Best. Fighting. Game. Ever. (If we discount Virtua Fighter 4 Evo and Soul Calibur 2;)

Shenmue 2 - Amazing, second only to shenmue 1. Some jaw dropping scenes…

Skies Of Arcadia - One of the best console style RPGs ever.

Resident Evil: Code Veronica - Amazing graphics and atmosphere, it restored my faith to the resident evil series.

Rez - A work of art

Ikaruga - One of the best shooters ever

Metropolis Street Racer - Grat controls, great graphics, great fun :slight_smile:

Fur Fighters - DC’s own little “Goldeneye” in my opinion… the multiplayer is just amazing!

Virtua Tennis 2k2 - Very addictive, superb fun with friends. Great graphics too!

Phantasy Star Online - Addictive online and a first for console gaming

Ferrari 355 Challenge - Maximum realism, sweet car, sweet graphics :slight_smile:

Quake 3 Arena - Trully spectacular conversion with most of the gameplay intact. The DC’s controller and the setup of the buttons just made it feel almost as natural as the pc version.

I’ll reply again if I think of more titles…

Added: Yes there’s areas in Shenmue 2 where the game slowsdown but not to a halt, I’d say to halfspeed. What I like is that even tho fps gets low, instead of making the movement all choppy, the game actually slowsdown and still shows all frames, I find that less annoying than choppy fullspeed movement.
I prefer the Dreamcast version of Shenmue 2 over the X-box one because the spoken dialogues are all in Japanese and give it more atmosphere where in my opinion it lacks it in other aspects compared to the original Shenmue.
I hear controls in the X-box version are worse as well, oversensitive I think is what I read in most places… On Dreamcast it’s same as 1 except with a more refined battle system. Plus you can load your Shenmue 1 savegames :slight_smile: And where it looks like a very impressive title for the DC, on X-box it might seem a bit lacking… Imo the game belongs on the DC no matter how you look at it.

Edit: Just added a short “why” I chose the games…

12

I din’t think SA2 was horrendous, it just seemed a bit worse than SA1 in pretty much every department (except graphical quality). Well, the camera angles were horrific - why they bothered with an auto-positioning camera I don’t know.

But on top of that the little things built up. You had less characters to choose from. They’d removed the mild exploration elements of SA1 and made the game totally linear. If you did Sonic’s roll move, you really slowed down, which is just wrong for a Sonic game. The translation / cheesy voice acting was worse than before. The levels were much less varied; too many of them were set in the first city area, and too many were set on the final space station. And then personally I found two thirds of the levels in the game - the ones where you didn’t play as either Sonic or Shadow - to be either too simplistic or unenjoyable.

But SA2 wasn’t a terible game at all; to me, it just seemed to get the above elements wrong where the original game succeeded.

13

Level design was just horrendous. And also, the Sonic played too similar to Shadow, Tails to Eggman, etc. It seemed like a cheap way to extend the game.

14

I love the original Sonic Adventure with all my soul. I think it is a superb game that launched dreamcast ans showed what t was made of (which makes me wonder why there was no advertising of it as i stated in that other topic…)
SA1 was better that SA2. I loved the adventure stages and all the levels were different. I agree about SA2 being linear, it had very good ideas, but really it was just 3 characters. The eggman/tails levels got boring quickly. Shadow/sonic were too alike, and i still see rouge as a knuckles rip off. I feel sonic/knuckles should have their own unique style and not allow others to just mimic them. The only advantage SA2 had over SA1 was the Chao system, i prefered that a lot more :slight_smile:

Other great games i loved were Shenmue, a superb “Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment” game, Crazy Taxi - after playing it in the arcade i couldn’t get enough of it, And soul Calibur. No need to explain
EDIT: how can i forget MSR! That game is… superb

15

I only had my DC for about a half a year, but some of my favorites were Code Veronica, Skie of Arcadia, Sonic Adventure one, and… Chu Chu Rocket!! To this day I have not played SA2.

16

My favorite would have to be Skies of Arcadia, which proves that you don’t have to have an angst-ridden/shallow protagonist with a poor childhood for a main hero in order to have a good RPG.

Other favorites:

Soul Calibur (of course!)
Phantasy Star Online (hundreds of hours >_<)
Grandia II

17

Quite a few mainstream gamers actually prefer linear games over something that allows for a little exploration. Perhaps this is for the same reason mainstream gamers prefer to bash the same button over and over again in Action/RPGs instead of actually finding their way out of labyrinthine dungeons while solving logic puzzles every step of the way in real Action/RPGs.

I lost track of the number of times I wanted to kill Ryudo just to silence his interminable cynicism. Melfis should’ve been the main protagonist. The we-don’t-need-gods-to-survive storyline didn’t help draw me into the whole experience either.

I hope Game Arts does a good job with the next game.

18

I admittedly wanted to kick Ryudo, Millennia, and Elena to the moon numerous times, but the battle system was one of the most engaging I’d ever played. I’m normally not big on combat, but Grandia II’s made the game so much more enjoyable than it would have been otherwise.

19

You’ll hear no complaints from me about the battle system. Also, I never tire of fighting insanely huge bosses.

20

Skies of Arcadia

If only because it was the only RPG besides PDS to really leave me 100% satisfied after playing

Shenmue

Of course the sequel is better, but in terms of being in awe of a game, this was the first to gobsmack me. Loved it.

Crazy Taxi

One of the only games that made quit playing after 30 minutes…only to go back 5 minutes later and play for another 30 minutes…repeat till sleep is required.

Metropolis Street Racer

Funny that PGR doesn’t hold a candle to this fine effort. Everything about MSR was original, from game progression to the brilliant/sometimes hilarious soundtrack.

I always considered buying Berserker for DC, but I couldn’t find one favourable review in the UK press. Geoffrey, is it really, really worth picking up?