Dreamcast: The Forgotten Gem

I don't know about you, but the console I'm most nostalgic for is and will always be the Sega Dreamcast. You remember the ads "It's thinking" and that was the truth. The sad part is that the thinking ones rarely win.

Why the Dreamcast? Quite simply because it offered the best in every category of game. And this - in 2000 or so - was the creative peak of the industry before the current Wii/minigame/Guitar Hero resurgence.

• Consider artful games: D2 and Shenmue, which knew how to tell a story with awesome cinematography.
• RPGS: You had Skies of Arcadia and Grandia II, which weren't Final Fantasy, but seriously… did you play FF9?
• Eye candy: The Dreamcast was the first time I experienced full visual orgasm. I mean, did you see Sonic Adventure when it first came out? It was like Mario 64, but without the glitches that obscured the brilliance behind it.
• REALLY FUN fighting games: If you played Soul Calibur, then you didn't stop. For a long time. Power Stone and the other Capcom classics also offered a fighting game that let you button mash either cooperatively or against your friends (back before Xbox live robbed us of them). Also, it had Blitz and good 2k sports.
• Integrated the chic: Remember Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi. Sega knew how to take a simple idea and integrate graphics and sound to make a fun experience.

And the fun experience is what gaming is all about. It's not like Nintendo invented this yesterday with the DS and Wii.

That doesn't mean the Dreamcast got everything right. They missed the boat on broadband and didn't correct the shortcoming in time. The VMUs were really dumb and didn't hold nearly enough saves, making the experience frustrating. They say Dreamcast was just ahead of its time, or that Sega just didn't get the developers they needed. This is probably the case. But so the Dreamcast is not forgotten, I will point out the ways that it revolutionized the industry and might be taken for granted.

• Integration of an successful mini-API. The Dreamcast fortunately supported Windows CE, and this encouraged development of smaller, but ingenious, projects. I'm sure Sega didn't anticipate or endorse the homebrew development, but it is one of the defining capabilities of the system.
• MINI-GAMES: Dreamcast knew how to keep us entertained, even if you lacked the Moraccas for Samba de Amigo. The VMU, however ridiculous it was, made developers scratch their heads for extra challenges.
• Beautiful graphics. Sure, the Dreamcast might not ever match up to an Xbox360. But if you ever played Dreamcast on a VGA box, you know how good it could look. With the Dreamcast, the video game hardware reached a level where aesthetic sense was satiated, but developers didn't have to go overkill for minute detail (as say, the Halo series has evolved into).
• Networking. Dreamcast got run over in this area, but it was probably the grave on which we learned how to do online right. We needed the Dreamcast, with PSO and its attached keyboard, to tell us what console online gaming was and (well, more frequently) wasn't.

Probably most people would disagree - that in fact SNES is the best console ever. And maybe it is. But then again, I've tried to play Chrono Trigger and couldn't get into it. Gamers of my generation grew up with SNES, but the games we advanced into gamerhood with (aka under which we became Man-children, or whatever the term is) had FMV cutscenes and blocky 3D graphics. Therefore, I give a sweet ode for the Dreamcast. See ya later, I have to go back to Shenmue and Sonic Adventure 2.