The Do's and Don'ts of the Sega Dreamcast Library 

Lunchtime matches were a staple round mine for the boys

I had never played it until a few months ago. I bought a box of old broken down consoles to fix up and sell, a Dreamcast among them. It had a copy of Soul Calibur with it that had the data layer scratched so I had to buy another game to test it. Virtua Tennis was the cheapest thing for the system at my local retro game store. Once I got it fixed, I ended up playing the hell out of that game. I really didn't expect to. I wasn't buying either thing to play for myself. But I tore it up. I don't even care about tennis at all.

My thoughts exactly. When a friend brought it over, I was wary. But it ended up being an awesome game.

Played the demo with my buddy and immediately headed out to buy it the same day.

Virtua Tennis is up there with Mario Tennis for best tennis game, period.

Yup. Folks like you were my primary target for this video.

My hidden gem recommendation is Jedi Power Battles. The playstation version is really bad, but the Dreamcast version is amazing.

Welcome to what I believe is one of the greatest console of all time. I find myself playing on it every other day, mainly because it has such an amazing abundance of easy pickup 'n play arcade titles. :) It's been 23 years since I bought it and it is still soldiering on as one of my favorite consoles

Get Shenmue.

Gonna get a GDEMU?

Sucks that it was Sega's swansong, and they wouldn't go on to make more consoles. I loved Sega consoles and games.

While the 32 bit era had great 2D games those 3D polygons have aged terribly. N64 was mostly kiddie games and could not give us anything like Final Fantasy VII. PC gaming completely dominated. Until Dreamcast came out I wasn't all that impressed for a long time. It was the last console that I was interested in.

@@AngryCalvin 32 bit era polygons have their charm though ; some games still look great

I bought one due to the ps2 being sold out, way better in my opinion and it still functions perfectly today

The Xbox is it’s spiritual successor

I would rank it top 5 consoles of all time...I used to rank Dreamcast #2 all time behind Xbox 360 only, but then my love for PS4 increased over time. And PS5 is pretty fucking awesome so far.

@@johncook9392 I would agree with you except that I have never owned the newer ones but did play the ps4 so other than that I agree. And for when it came out and what not the xbox 360 is my all time favorite with the Sega Genesis #2

@@hoseahosanna6700 Yeah I rank Genesis very high also, definitely one of the best systems of all time!

Shame many missed out on it bitd... if more had given it their attention during its shelf life then maybe we would have seen even better results and even a true Sega console successor 🤠

Yes it is , like bought mine on the intial release and the games I have play and still look great.

Same ,. cept me it was for OG xbox stuff. i had such a huge DC library of games too. a few years back a friend sold me his black sports DC and a few sports games he had with it , but a couple months after i got it a power surge during a storm killed the deck.

I only sold mine a couple years ago, a brand new Saturn and stacks of games for both! I sold em cheap as too, I charged em $10 a game and gave em the consoles for free!!! What an idiot!?

I never sold a console, but it was my big brother's. My first own console was the PS2 and I still regret not getting a Dreamcast as well.

My biggest problem with the Dreamcast is the rose colored glasses people have for it, its nowhere near as good as a PS2 or even a GameCube, not because it's life was cut short either.

avoid acclaim in general rule

Acclaim did alright with Bust A Move 4 (Puzzle Bobble 4) as well, which I know is mostly a PS1 port, but the visuals have been given a nice hi res upgrade, without breaking the games fundementals, plus the game is downright fun. In some cases, sometimes games even got backported to the PS1 (Capcom Vs SNK Pro and Puyo Puyo~n), those 2 I have in my collection as I don't own a DC, but they are still fun regardless.

Usually Acclaim is a no go but I will never forget that they also released the first Burnout games for the PS2. Therefore I saw the logo so many times as a child.

Vanishing Point is a good game on the PlayStation. This is one game that was made worse with the higher framerate of the Dreamcast. The game is not perfect either, but the physics model makes sense on the PS, on the Dreamcast it makes the game too twitchy and floaty to control

Did they not release trickstyle? That was a great game

know about the Great Reset?

@@donkeyparadise9276 no

Along with it's sequel it's by far one of my greatest experiences in gaming. And I didn't get to play it until it came out on Steam and was supposibly very dated. And I have been an avid gamer for over 40 years now starting with Atari 2600. Shenmue was the ultimate experience.

Its not an RPG, The genre called FREE (Full reactive Eyes Environment) by Yu Suzuki himself if I remember it correctly (there is no Open World genre back in the day AFAIK). CMIIW.

Playing Shenmue as a 13 year old was a magical experience. I will never forget it.

Shenmue 2 is so much better than the first game. I’ll say shenmue 2 is a top 25 game of all time

Playing 1&2 first time right now, absolutely deserves the legendary status and glad it can continue

Sega dead

"SEGA didn't care about the cinematic experience" *Shenmue, D2, Space Channel 5, Sonic Adventure 1-2, Skies Of Arcadia have entered the chat*

@@etenby699 Six games out of how many?

Also it had a unique soundtrack unlike the PC version which I always quite liked.

@@KrazyKupo That's true! And it also offered unique levels as well (Although these weren't very good). They were optimized for split-screen play (even four players). I think this is why the game has to be considered more than just a "port". It's a unique version of Quake III Arena, and Raster Productions basically rebuilt the engine to support native dreamcast features (without Windows CE or common tools at the time). adapting arenas for the different game modes, as well as textures for the insane hardware texture compression that Dreamcast offered (if used correctly the Dreamcast's 8MB VRAM could theoretically offer 64MB worth of texture memory)

The new OST on dreamcast was great.

Quake 3 DC is fun in the same way an NES arcade port (Double Dragon for example) was fun, even though the original version would be the definitive way to play

@@gc3k absolutely! I mean, I could just remove it from my GDEMU, but I still appreciate this version and play it from time to time (mostly out of an inherit technical curiosity) :)

I played those demo discs so dang much lol. I think most of the games I bought were ones I liked from them. Played the crap out of Rush 2049, Virtua Tennis, and Tony Hawk. The Toy Commander Christmas demo was sooo good too. My real Toy Commander disc stopped working for some reason not long after buying it. Was pretty bummed out. Around that time I figured out discjuggler (2002 ish) so I just sailed the seven seas for Toy Commander lol. Damn takes me back. Crazy memories.

I think other than powerstone and shenmue, toy commander was my favourite DC game

Toy commander was awesome both single and multiplayer.

Since the start of the pandemic, I've been gradually building up my retro library and like you, got myself a Saturn and Dreamcast (first time in my life). Pretty damn good consoles, though I modded them both to avoid the hassle of paying for expensive copies of games.

@@ultraspinalki11 ya don't even have to mod a dreamcast with iso files but I don't know if its very healthy for it!? I've never had any problems but my first dc died and I only ever did the right thing!?

@@ultraspinalki11 I'd love to learn how to mod consoles, especially for the Saturn. It's games are quite expensive.

@@pauldutton1082 if you look up retrorgb, he gives a list of trustworthy modders from around the globe. If you're lucky, there might be one near you that you can pay to do the job for you.

Tons of emulation snk options on the caster of dreams too

No Sam Sho's or Metal Slugs made it to DC, but if you go the DC route for SNK games, make sure to get the Japanese versions. The US versions of Last Blade 2 or Garou Mark of the Wolves were either censored (white blood in LB2's case), or made the motor in your DC run super loud, and in MotW's case, the US version uses Terry's voice clips from the Real Bout series, while the Japanese version uses the proper voice clips from MotW. Last Blade 2's Japanese version has the blood, instead of the white milk seen in the US release. KoF 98, aka 99 Dream Match isn't all that hot (98 UM years later is the best port of 98 to have), but KoF 99 (aka Evolution), 00, 01, and 02 are fine on the DC, and were good enough in fact to be directly ported to the PS2 in Japan for KoF Nests Hen compilation, aka Nests Saga, which ports 99 Evolution, 00 and 01 onto 1 disc, along with their AES counterparts on the same disc. As far as I know, only 6 SNK games made it to the DC, though recently some of SNK's Atomiswave arcade games have been fanported to the DC, without the extras found in the PS2 console versions.

@@Bloodreign1 actually there are but you have to burn the discs yourself

@@Bloodreign1 I always hated garou on the Dreamcast because of the voice clips making a lot of noise accessing the disc all the time. Are you saying the japanese release doesn’t have this issue?

@@Bloodreign1 technically atomiswave ports of samsho 6 and metal slug 6 run on the Dreamcast

Plus other arcade compilations and more previous 1st/2nd party sega games. Especially sonic gems collections, Capcom, and midway arcade treasure series and ect. Since sega robbed us from a solid run with the saturn due to poor management and marketing. The dreamcast lifespand will become longer. I wish sega would've port there compilations to the Xbox instead of snubbing them completely.

Can you imagine a Panzer Dragoon Saga 2? A Shenmue II release in america, and a Shenmue III striking while the iron was still hot? We would have had so many more excellent shoot-em-ups, racing games, fighting games (IMO this was the genre's peak period), and even lightgun games would have been a really viable genre to explore more. Games were wildly creative at that time too, not settled into just a few tropes! There was even talk that someone was developing a first person sword fighting game using the fishing rod controller... imagine that!

Way too often random encounter. You can cheese it by listening to the disc revs, but... it's still something obnoxious.

@@chauhoanglongnguyen7790 Are the battles as frequent as the ones in VAY? Because that would be scary!

What did you think of Grandia 2, I felt I had more fun on grandia.

I have such fond memories of skies of Arcadia. I just started it again and it is more wonky than I remember and the battles definitely come a little too often. Still a great game though.

i played it on a dc emulator so i could quickmap 2x speed for doing the random battles@@nicholasadamson2103

And Grandia 2!

Samba is even capable of teaching proper rhythm vs. the Rock Band stuff. Very challenging and fun. A perfect party game.

That one might fall under PC ports though.

@@rosskwolfe That's true but Dreamcast version has a bonus circuit, is easier to play today ( no Windows xp and above, not that easy to "emulate") and gamepad support work pretty great

@@zanrek5021 Re-Volt is easy to get running on modern PCs thanks to RVGL. It runs smooth as butter and looks better than ever, and as a bonus it also includes the Dreamcast-exclusive track and cars.

And Trickstyle.

I appreciate that! Thank you.

With so few being sold and so many ways to resurrect them I am equally sad and curious as to what became of it? Optical Disc drive emulators and even modern upgrades available for the power board and fan means so long as the mother board is good, all is not lost.

Glad you enjoy it!

It's a classic for sure.

My favorite console of all time

@@aegisreflector1239 Same here,amazing how so many great games were on the Dreamcast with only two years on the market.

It forced sega to release the dreamcast too early due to losing a lot of money during the end of the early to mid 90s. Which cause the saturn to fail in the west and Europe by sega bad decisions.

@@maroon9273 Saturn unfortunately had already failed in the west. SEGA wanted to release the Dreamcast before the PS2. But the damage had already been done. People were brain washed with the PlayStation brand name so much that they compared the PS1 to the Dreamcast.

@@majimamike4097 Since the saturn failed two holidays years in 96 and 97 due to sega horrible marketing and management. It lead to Bernie stating the saturn is not the future and the dreamcast was born. I guaranteed had sega did the right marketing it would've sold more than the n64 (34 million) and even twice with a powerful cleaner hardware. The ps1 did not stop the n64 having a successful run in the west and Europe. 33 million consoles sold and the mario 64 (11.9 million) outselling ps1 grand turismo (10.9). Had n64 used optical disc, it would've sold more units.

@@maroon9273 I agree. Marketing is everything. You can sell literally nothing by using good marketing. SEGA could have saved its hardware part by showing it off more to the customers. The twin-cpu obstacle would have driven developers away but still Saturn had some of the best games of its genre.

@@majimamike4097 dual processing and difficult dsp limit the console reaching its performance during its lifespand. Similar thing happened with previous hardware that were underpowered against the saturn including sega cd, 32x/32x cd add-ons and the atari jaguar. At least n64, ps2 and ps3 hardware were pushed to its limits nearing the end of its lifespand. Had sega cared about the marketing the saturn well in na/eu. We would've seen developers push it to its limits during the end of 90s and to the Yes, especially 3D based games. We would've seen 3D games being pushed to its limits during end of the 90s and the 00s if sega marketing was better during its earlier days. At least the n64, ps2, ps3 were able to push their hardware to its limits nearing the end of their systems lifespand. Same thing with the genesis. Genesis had a slump during 1993 to 1994 due western developers creating low quality engines instead utilizing dma channel on the gpu. Which is difficult to access due to the genesis exapansion unfriendly limited hardware. It took 9 years for the genesis to use software scaler scaling sprites (jurrasic park lost world) with sega cd add-on. Also, other games that pushed the system to display 32-bit like graphics in the mid 90s without the 32x add-on.

Saturn had a ton of great rpg titles: Panzer Dragoon Saga,Sakura Taisen 1-2,Dragon Force 1-2,Shining Force III trilogy,Grandia,Lunar 1-2,two Devil Summoner, Tengai Makyou 4th apocalypse. That was one of the reasons the system was a success in Japan...and why Dreamcast failed there as well .

@@carlosaugustodinizgarcia3526 Yup, exactly. Dreamcast had some in Japan too, but not that many, and they were really minor in comparison it would seem. Apparently, it had tons of VNs though. Nothing beats PSP (and, probably, Switch) in that category though, as far as consoles go.

I'm learning to code purely to make 3D platformers for Dreamcast. Also to hopefully male unofficial ports for games like Rayman 3, Sonic Heroes etc.

Sucks that it took so long for us as kids to realize Acclaim sucked, despite their licenses being so appealing.

Acclaim a lot people may not know is really LJN by a different name

@@avalond1193 yes and no. They were sold to Acclaim in like the early 90s I believe and folded up in the mid 90s

I mean if it wasn't a Turok game or shadow man (and a few other random ones) then yeah if it had acclaim on it avoid it at all costs.

AKA lame

Revolt needs to be on PC. I believe the custom level community is alive and active. Even the lego editor is decent. One of my favorite games of all time. The fact that you could even edit the corse graphics maps was a blast.

@@trebleboost7 Cool. Thanks for the info 👍 I have a PC myself so I'll try it out

Power stone 2 is better

Rayman 2 is one of my all-time favorite platformers. It ran super smooth, had gorgeous art, controlled well (even better than Sonic), a nice story and length, memorable music and sound, and... look, if you like adventure or platformer games at all, you just need to play this.

Yeah, I was surprised Sega Lord X bagged on it so much. The poly count was higher and framerate was better on the DC than N64, and it was actually an upgrade for me versus the PC version.

I like it too. Its got more to it, if you really get into it and its sorta relaxing because of the way you don't really have brakes, or use them. Ya just get in the zone and its peaceful.

I was so excited by the prospect of playing Dreamcast games on the Steam Deck. HOWEVER, I get artifacts, both in flycast and redream. These artifacts do not crop up anywhere else but dreamcast emulation. I have a Ryzen 2500U laptop and I tried SteamOS on that one as well, but it doesn't exhibit any artifacts.

@@PixelShade sigh so far this thing is so so. I wanna see it a year from now tbh.

Cracking game. Needs an update/remaster

Yeah, it was almost like Soul Reaver and Rayman 2 were developed for the Dreamcast first, then ported to everything else. At least, that's what the quality feels like :D

Totally agree. From 20fps on ps1 to 60 on dc. This guy didn’t do his homework enough. I bought the PS one version later and I was like oh my god this is hideous

And the Tony Hawk games.

Back in the day, I was the only one who had a Dreamcast... and the unique library was a good reason for friends to agree to come to MY house instead of me just going to theirs.

Your mistake for not buying a Dreamcast in 1999 like the rest of us.

I bought it 1999 and Saturn in 1995. How much to upgrade your DC with the GDEMU?

@@costumeninja1914 you can only get a clone now. That's what I got. Your Dreamcast has to be an original one with a 0 or a 1 on the bottom. The GDEMU was only $45. I do not own a computer so I bought a fully loaded sd card and that was $145. And a single resistor to take the load off the power supply was just a couple of bucks. That all you need to get going. So $200 all in if you already own the Dreamcast, and then you'll have every game.. I also bought a 3D printed tray to hold GDEMU down and hold the SD card.that was only $15.

If you were only going to play one game... not a bad choice. Rayman 2 was iconic. I wish Rayman 3 felt more like it.

PlayStation mini is a good option. It’s easy to hack and will play tonnes of cool stuff like any PlayStation game doom wolf 3D Tyrian apps. Highly recommend

Those games are how they would look as ps1 games with the 3dfx graphics card on pc! They don't have any extra detail or anything in the 3d models, under the textures. He's not saying they are all crap but the were half arsed ports, they didn't do anything and that's a shame. Most of them are OK but they're pretty primitive compared to the real dreamcast stuff. I don't wanna disrespect the great Dave Mirras legacy, but that and urban chaos were stinkers. Soul reaver, Tony hawk etc were all awesome on ps1, and that's how it worked. They didn't have to change up the games but they could have least changed the models to what dc could do. Look at soul calibre!? Its a million times better than the arcade version, forget about the ps version! That was mind blowing at the time.

Appreciate it!

Saturn is easy, be careful of anything that isn't sega.

@@jeremyrobertson7267 And get mainly the import games.

@@Zahir658 yeah Japanese got the best and most. Pal regions got some really good games at the end but will be hard to find, they were not easy to find new.

@@jeremyrobertson7267 I see. And also get a 4MB Memory Expansion pack for greater experience.

Underrated game! Sonic Shuffle is pretty rough in some ways, compared to Mario Party, but it had some great ideas. I liked the added strategy of choosing which cards to use, and how to use them in navigating the board, even if it slowed the game down a bit. (And for a while, the Mario Party series completely eliminated this aspect, by putting everyone in the same vehicle! Boring!) It also gave extra rings to the winner who carried the team in a 1v3 match, which was nice. And the cheesy cutscenes, enemy battles, and Sonic's Room were all nice touches. But yeah, the loading... :( I should go back and see if Retroarch/Flycast has fast loading, as that would make a big difference. Oh, and the mini-game explanations are incomprehensible at times.

@@3dmarth yeah def had flaws, but me and my friends always enjoyed it back in the day