Games That Defined The Dreamcast

Retrogaming with Racketboy has a piece looking at some of the console-defining titles we miss from that little white box. From the article: "Phantasy Star Online - Sega was one of the main pioneers in online console gaming. While they had modest online offering with both the Genesis and Saturn, the Dreamcast was the first of their consoles to have online capabilities built into the stock machine. The Dreamcast came standard with a 56k modem and also had a (expensive) LAN/Broadband adapter available as an upgrade. Phantasy Star Online paved the way for Sega's groundbreaking online network and for later networks like XBox Live."

two words..

[Anonymous Coward]

soul calibur. Only game I bought the system for, and the best game of the generation by far.

PSO

[nomadic]

Phantasy Star Online was easily one of the most gorgeous games I've ever seen; vibrant colors, detailed artwork, and the music was pretty kickass too. The gameplay was more like a networked Gauntlet rather than a real MMORPG, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The cheating, however, made it completely and utterly unplayable. Stupid game genie or gameshark or whatever the hell those cretins used.

Re:The broadband adapter was barely worth noting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Phantasy Star Online (v1 and v2) did support broadband, except for PPPoE connections. The problem is, you had to configure your DC first with a Japanese web browser, or the Japanese PSO disc. PSOv2 American did "support" BBA configuration, again, minus PPPoE, but didn't "officially" support it. When you put in PSOv2 (US) there was a config option which just launched the BBA config shell of DreamPassport 2. (the Japanese browser)

Why it was like this? PPPoE wasn't used in Japan, and therefore not part of the Japanese networking code. There also was, stupidly, no standardized code. Because of contracts with PlanetWeb, that's where some of the difficulties came in in terms of "official" American BBA support.

Street Fighter 3 : Third Strike

[VGfort]

The only other system that has this game is the Playstation 2. This game isnt available to arcade emulators either, because the Capcom got smart and started encrypting stuff. Althougth the Dreamcast emulator Chanka will play this game.

Re:The broadband adapter was barely worth noting.

[nvrrobx]

Phantasy Star Online did indeed support the Broadband adapter. I wasted several months of my life on that game.

The US release would use the BBA if it was configured, but you didn't have a way to configure it without the Japanese Broadband Passport disc (which I had).

Quake III Arena was the other game that supported it (the US release) and it worked really damned well.

Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future

[rednuhter]

Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future, simply amazing.
great graphics, sound, music locations and story.
great fun to serious and causual gamer alike.
I brought it into work and used the VGA adaptor to show someone who had just bought one of the first PS2s and he was blown away and vowed to buy a dreamcast just to play the game.
Hell, even my mum like swimming about as ecco just for the experience.
Why they never released an official sound track I will never know, but check around on google and you can download all the tracks as ripped from the PS2 version.