Get Played - 25 Years of the Sega Dreamcast

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

It's the 25th anniversary of the North American release of the Sega Dreamcast! Matt, Heather and Nick talk about the console's launch into immediate obsolescence, the games that made it great, and take a stroll down memory lane as they celebrate Sega's final video game console. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @getplayedpod. Music by Ben Prunty benpruntymusic.com. Art by Duck Brigade duckbrigade.com. Check out our Anime watch-along podcast Get Anime'd and our complete Get Played, How Did This Get Played? and Premium DLC back catalogue only on patreon.com/getplayed. Join us on our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/getplayed Wanna leave us a voicemail? Call 616-2-PLAYED (616-275-2933) or write us an email at [e-mail] Advertise on Get Played via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. All right, Sega, it's been a tough year. The PlayStation 2 is on the horizon and Sony is eating our lunch here with the Dreamcast. I don't even want to hear about Sony. on the horizon and Sony is eating our lunch here with the Dreamcast. I don't even wanna hear about Sony. We've launched the Dreamcast and I do think that there is a corner of the market that we can still claim.

And I think we're gonna have to lean into experiences. And I'm talking about games that might be a little left of center, a little strange. Things like our big hit, Seaman, where we have a microphone in the controller and you talk to a fish on screen. Or Bass Fishing, where it comes with a virtual fishing pole, or even Samba de Amigo, which comes with maracas.

So I want you guys to be thinking, what can we snap into the controller? What kind of experiences can the Dreamcast offer? Okay, all right. This is, no, this is a good area to be thinking. You know, these wacky peripherals, these really distinct sort of games that you can't get on your conventional Sony hardware.

That's right. This is for real enthusiasts. All right, I got one. All right. Brick layer. Comes with a brick and a trowel. You build a brick wall you so it's it comes with one brick and a trowel Oh, yeah, like sort of pizza pie shaped metal of thing. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's it could be multiplayer though

Like if your friend buys the game, they have a brick to and then they're in brick They come over you can stack both bricks and you have your own trowel to do some spreading. What is the video game component of this though? Cause it sounds to me like you guys are just trying to sell me a brick. Well yeah, I mean the brick's part of it. The brick is like a big heavy box. We already got the brick.

So you know what, I'll write it on the board. I'll write it on the board. Which is just an idea, we're just getting started. We're warming up, it's early. I got something. Okay, great. The game is called Follow My Wife. All right, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're warming up. It's early. I got something. Okay, great. The game is called Follow My Wife. All right.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, scandalous, okay. And what you do in the game is you get in your car and you park outside your wife's work. And then you see where she goes at lunch and then you figure out that she didn't actually go to, she didn't go home for lunch. She stopped at some motel or something. And then her boss showed up there too. John, I appreciate you thinking outside the box. I do think this has a lot more to do with your personal life.

No, it didn't even happen like that. Does it come with like a steering wheel or controller or something? It comes with a steering wheel and like. Maybe like a long lens camera? Long lens camera, a box of tissues. Okay. A wedding ring. All right, all right.

John's idea gave me an idea. Okay, great. What is driving his feelings? Like the idea that, you know, like he's grappling with his wife's alleged infidelity and what that means for his reality. What does he really want? He wants revenge.

So my game is called Revenge, and it comes with the implement for revenge. A brick. Okay. You come up behind whoever's wronging you, and you hit them with a brick. Okay, but again. You spread them with a trowel.

I see that you want to include a brick in a peripheral box, and I get that, I get that. I don't know what the interactivity is with it. I don't know how it hooks up to the machine. I do like that you've pitched two different games that use the same peripheral. Could you, instead of hitting with the brick? Yeah, could you tie a note to the brick and throw it through a window that's a stay away from my wife

Absolutely shatter some glass okay, make some noise. I think I'm just gonna announce that we're canceling the system wait wait hold on Hold on it's not good. It's gonna get rash here alright. Hey, I think I got the idea For a mascot that's really gonna put things over the top. I swear to God. This guy is sort of a chip off the old block, if you will, or maybe even the old block himself. Bricky the Brick. I'm gonna write CNN.

I'm gonna write CNN and tell them we're ending the system's run. I'm gonna tell them it's over. All right, great, I'm just gonna fashion this noose. Ha ha ha ha! Make two. Sega! We squint at our VMUs and are seriously wounded,

but our soul still burns as we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the North American Sega Dreamcast launch this week on Get Played. [♪ theme music playing. [♪ theme music playing. Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between. It's time to get played. I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Nick Weigert.

That's me, Nick Weigert, and I'm here with our third host, Matt Apodaca. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the premier video game podcast where we are celebrating an anniversary today. A big milestone in the history of gaming. It's 9-9-24 as this is being released, which means it is the 25th anniversary of the release of the Dreamcast on 9-9-99. That's right, two years and two days before the world changed, the Sega Dreamcast came out and we love to see it, don't we folks? Yeah, hard to say what event has a more lasting legacy.

What I will say is that we are specifically talking about the 25th anniversary of the North American release of the Dreamcast because this was back in the days of staggered worldwide launches. And the Japan Dreamcast because this was back in the days of staggered worldwide launches. And the Japan Dreamcast was released way back on November 27th of 1998, almost a full year earlier. An incredible delay. And then it was another couple months

until it was released in Europe and across the world. Wow. Yeah, North America, 9,999. I was there. If you're a under 25, I think that maybe you don't appreciate that pause in between a Japanese release and an American release. And the only way that you could get information about video games back in this time is magazines So you would pick up a video game magazine like Electronic Gaming Monthly like Nintendo Power

Like PC gamer and you would read about a console that you had never heard of anywhere else The first drop of information would be Sega is bringing out a new, and this would have been in 1997 that you had read this, which was on the heels of the release of the Sega Saturn, the 32X, all of those Sega systems. And then you would see that it had been released in Japan, and you would see screenshots of it, and there was no way to watch footage of it, no commercials you could access,

you could only look at these still images of a video game console that you couldn't physically see with your own eyes anywhere. Yeah. Yeah, it was like, and you know, the video was few and far between in the pre-YouTube days of the internet, though it did exist, things did get circulated,

but yeah, it was, you were not, you're not gonna as likely to just like, oh, I'll just see some footage of these new games. We were in the early days of like the game spots and the IGNs, and I'm trying to remember other sites that no longer exist. You know, you might find something on like Slashdot or one of those early aggregation sites or something.

But yeah, it was, and then forums were also a big thing. I remember reading about, like reading people like on, you know, back when the, when NeoGAF was the gaming age forums, and when that was connected to it, I guess a now defunct website. Like I remember reading people who had like imported

a Dreamcast and their firsthand impressions, but like it was a lot harder to get information. But also a lot of those impressions are without photos, without video. Yes, right, right, they're just pure text. Because there wasn't digital cameras, not in wide circulation in 1998, 1997. So unless you were taking a photo with your film camera,

going to the pharmacy, developing the picture, bringing it back home, putting it on a scanner, which would have been exorbitantly expensive, scanning that image, downsizing it so that it was only like one kilobyte, and then putting it on a forum, you could only talk about it. I'm supposed to send a pic of my hog to this girl I'm interested in.

I'm gonna get this film developed. That wasn't a concept then. That wasn't a concept. You put this in an envelope with a letter? You think people weren't doing that? I, no, I There's no fucking way they were doing that There's no way they weren't

Take a picture of the dick and put it in the regular mail You think people were doing that? I think some people were doing that I can guarantee it was happening Like that maybe not at the level And mastery of now Right This mastery is the right word, yes like that maybe not at this at the level and mastery of now Convenient as master is the right word yes, I

Think why they would Thomas Alva Edderson for it first like came up with it like the one of the first things he did Was take a pick up his hog why not yeah? It was him right. I'm just gonna say was him it probably also was like a radiation process. Yes, right yeah, and so it's like He got like a bad rash after, he's like ugh, this fucking dog is a stuff. I've seen two inventors here, Louis Le Prince and Johann Zahn. Guess what, who fucking cares?

I'm crediting the American guy. That's right. Louis Le Prince and photos are Prince, how about that? That's, I think it was that? I think it was him. I think it was him. I give it to him. Diebreaker goes to him. Happy anniversary to the Dreamcast.

Mamma Mia, let me let Prince out my hog. I don't know why I came here to do the show. What have I done? It probably stunk, because those people in the back didn't take baths. Why? Stinky ass hogs taking a picture of it. Why do I tolerate this? I could just walk out. Cuz you those people in the back then didn't take baths why why stinky ass?

I could I could just walk I could walk out Just leave I can't Google on this computer Who took the first hog pick cuz it's Mike, but I can't look it up on my phone Yeah, you can probably find the earliest I mean I bet I bet an early example exists from like the 19th century or something you know one of those I mean I bet I bet an early example exists from like the 19th century or something like that I think I dissociated for like 30 seconds You know when people would write letters? They'd be off to war or whatever They'd be like oh man I wish I could show you my hog

Like they'd be writing stuff like that I don't know how long I was out It could be an hour Dearest Bildred I spent a fortnight in the trench I only wish I could show you a photograph of my hog Dearest Mildred, I spent a fortnight in the trench. I only wish I could show you a photograph of my hog. Yeah, dear Gertrude, the nights are long and hard, just like my hog.

I wish I could show you love, Obadiah. Good old school name. We're talking about the Sega Dreamcast, 9999. We are celebrating that anniversary. But before we do that, before we get into the thick of This era of retro gaming it's time for the question. We always ask. What are you playing? What are you playing? Oh? Where's an evil merchant are you okay? Evil merchant? What's going on? I lost my shoe. Oh boy

It's always in the last place you look too, isn't it? How did you lose your shoe? That's where it should be. No, I was in the Los Angeles River. I shouldn't have been there. I was swimming when I lost my shoe. Now, you know, I would not, yeah, I would not think that's a body of water

I would want to swim in. You know, first off, it's not particularly deep. And secondly, it can be often pretty polluted and, you know, kind of filled with garbage. After those rains, it's not particularly deep, and secondly, it can be often pretty polluted and kind of filled with garbage. After those rains, it was okay. They swept a lot of that shit out to sea. Oh, that's nice. When it was raining really hard last year, I went down to where I could see the LA River really good. Me too. Me too.

And it was gorgeous. It was terrifying. It was really scary, actually, yeah, but it was gorgeous. It was terrible. It was really scary actually yeah, but it was unbelievable I just never seen you know been as a Southern California kid my whole life I've spent time near the LA River had not ever really seen that much water in it before No, it takes it takes almost a flood for the river bed to actually like be filled up. Yeah, otherwise It's usually just kind of a thin trickle just sort of bisecting the city. Yeah That that's there shoes probably somewhere in there. Yeah

You don't have a second pair. No Wait, does that is that something you're allowed to do you can buy a second set of shoes? Yeah Yeah, I would also just say like you are barefoot So like you lost your shoe was that the one shoe you were wearing or did you lose your other shoe? I bought one shoe. I lost that shoe, was that the one shoe you were wearing? Or did you lose your other shoe? I bought one shoe, I lost that shoe. Yeah. They usually don't sell just the one. They usually don't sell a loose shoe.

They usually come in pairs. You gotta find the right dealer. You gotta find a guy like me. I guess that's true. Who sells a shoe? You would know best. I do, I've got a network, an underground network of merchants.

You know shoes like all, like any sort of technology, any sort of innovation, it had periods where it kind of stagnated and then someone came up with a new idea and one new idea that I know came out, you know, 500 or so years ago. The pump. The Reebok pump was not what I was thinking of,

but that was a big idea. That's a huge innovation. That was pretty seismic. What I was going to say- That was pretty crazy when they did that. It was pretty crazy. You had to, and again, we're talking about the Sega Dreamcast, so again,

young people may not remember this, but you had a little, sometimes it was shaped like a basketball, sometimes it was shaped like a tennis ball, and it would be on your shoe, and the tongue of your shoe, and then you could use it to pump it up, fill it up with air and then sort of tighten it You know, I thought it put air in the bottom don't make me you could adjust like like

Suspension in a car. I thought it made you like jump higher. Yeah. Well, yeah. No, it's not like that It doesn't really work. It's your foot. Yeah, just sort of like made the foot the the shoe fit a little bit more snug I want my shoe to hurt. Maybe if I had that I wouldn't have lost my shoe It doesn't really work that way. It squeezed your foot? Yeah, it just sort of like made the foot, the shoe fit a little bit more snug. I want my shoe to hurt. Maybe if I had that, I wouldn't have lost my shoe. That's true. No, what I was saying is that there may have been a time when you would buy an individual shoe

because shoes used to be like, there weren't separate left and right shoes. That was an innovation at a certain point. Someone was like, oh, there should be a different-shaped shoe for each foot. Which foot did people have then? Well, they had they still had two feet, but they were wearing one kind of shoe that like that.

So it was like a little less ergonomic. What was the prime shoe? Why were the foot like was was it like, oh, I got two rights. No, you had basically both, one of each. If you have both, if you're blessed to have both. No, I mean like, which one was it based on? This is like a chicken and the egg sort of thing. You're asking what was the original foot?

Cause no, that- Well, God certainly- If you only got one shoe type, but you have two of them, what is the, which foot is it What is the which one is the original? You know Resident Evil Merchant, kind of a riddle. This question of all the things you've ever said to me will haunt me for the rest of my life.

I'm disturbed by that. Which shoe is the original? So am I. I don't hate it. I wish I hadn't had that thought. Anyway, I lost my shoe. Check out DraftKings Pick Six, the newest way to compete against other players and play fantasy football to win cash with DraftKings! Pick a player and choose if they'll have more or less of a stat like yards, touchdowns, catches, and more. Get your picks right and you'll win cash!

Download the new DraftKings Pick Six app now and use code played. Download the new DraftKings Pick6 app now and use code PLAYED. That's code PLAYED for new customers to play five bucks and get $50 in Pick6 credits guaranteed. Plus, one month of NFL Plus Premium on us. Offer expires 9-19 only on DraftKings Pick6. The crown is yours! Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Help is available for problem gambling. Call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org in Connecticut. Must be 18 plus. Age and eligibility restrictions vary by jurisdiction.

Pick six not available everywhere, including New York and Ontario. Void where prohibited. See terms at picksix.draftkings.com slash promos. One per new customer. Reward issued as $50 in non-withdrawable pick six credits that expire in six months NFL plus premium offer only available to new and former NFL plus subscribers additional NFL plus premium terms at NFL comm slash terms What are you playing Nick wager I actually want to defer because I know Heather and Matt have been playing Star Wars Outlaws and that's the game of the moment and I want to hear all about that. Ohhhhhhhhhh! I will go next.

Have we ever been playing Star Wars Outlaws? Yeah, I've been playing it. And let me say, I have texted the group and I have said I do not understand how this game got such a bad review. Yes, I think I've said several times in the last few days since release, I love Star Wars Outlaws. It is legitimately a great game. I just, I don't know what people want anymore. Because like, if you were to bring this game to me 20 years ago, 25 years ago as the Dreamcast is launched, and you would say, okay, what if you could go to an entire fucking planet,

and it was in the Star Wars world, and every corner of the area that you go into has Star Wars stuff and Star Wars details. I have a couple of theories as to what happened here. I'll start with, I think, consumers and video game enthusiasts such as ourselves. I feel like the Ubisoft brand doesn't hold the same good faith that it used to have.

Of course. That sort of like, you know then patching it before launch, they're not doing themselves favors. Nope. That is pretty common, in all fairness. But I think you are correct. But deleting the save. Yeah, sure.

But I think you are correct that the Ubisoft formula, I mean, this is why I was not excited for this game and I'm not playing it yet, although I think I'll play it at a certain point. But the Ubisoft formula is kind of exhausted. Something like the Avatar game came out last year that I think some people were like, oh, this is kind of good actually.

And other people were kind of like, this is just, we're all used to this. And I feel like also just iterating on Assassin's Creed over and over again, just kind of recycling that specifically. I think now people are kind of just coming in and it's like, oh, this is just Star Wars, Assassin's Creed. What have I told you that this is actually not that at all? And to me, and maybe Heather would agree with this,

to me this is more Red Dead Redemption, Star Wars. Yeah, I wouldn't liken it to Assassin's Creed. Because there's no, Assassin's Creed was more, I don't know, the gameplay loop was designed to be more addictive in Assassin's Creed. And this is more exploratory, more conversational, and there's more like, in Assassin's Creed, you can't go into a saloon

and play fucking cards with somebody. Like you can't learn a card game in Assassin's Creed But here in Star Wars, it's like one of the first things you're taught and a pretty interesting card game It's a good card game and I mean it is it no Queen's Blood from rebirth. Yeah, is it triple triad? No, but it's very addictive and one of the facets of the card game in the Star Wars universe Is that you learn cheats. Like you can learn how to do sleight of hand at the table. Or you can learn how to like bluff a little harder.

So there's like character building. Have you seen Nix's face when he looks at the card? Yeah, I have. He's like kind of like this. Looking over somebody's shoulder. There's like a little- Matt made like a little sort of a smug smile. There's like a little dog cat lizard thing. little, sort of a smug smile. There's like a little dog, cat, lizard thing.

Yeah. That is your sort of Star Wars familiar. Is he a cute little guy? He's a cute little guy. Okay, great. He's amazing. You know when you hear Matt loves this game, it's like, there's gotta be a little guy involved.

There's, I mean, there's a bunch of fucking little freaks running around, like there's a bunch of ugly jerks. It rocks. But I think there's a bunch of ugly jerks. It rocks. But I think there's sort of, from where I'm sitting, there are three other things that are against it. Before we leave Nix. Oh yes. So Nix is the little pet, right? Yeah.

Hey, Nix, and Nick, I like one of them. Seein' double here. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. And I love the other one. And I love the other one. Aw. Aw, that's sweet. I don't have that kind of love for a video game, Carrot, Carrot.

But Nix is great in terms of justifying, explaining things to the, first off, very few tutorials in this game. It drops you in and you just fucking go, which is great, great, great, great, great. Secondly, Nix is a great way to convey information to the player because normally, if you're like running around as Nathan Drake, he's like, well, what do we have here? I guess, I don't know, is this some kind of puzzle?

And no fucking person is there. He's just fucking talking to himself. Yeah, maybe Sully's on the radio or something like that. But with Nix, you do the thing as the character that you do when you have a dog you talk to the fucking dog Yeah, and so she's always like going into a room and she's like woof. This one looks tough next I don't know we better stay quiet in this one. Yeah, yeah Like Nick's talk no Nick's a little like Yeah, it's pretty good. That's pretty good

There are three other things I think okay, I've diagnosed and this could be you know I could be wrong about this people hate Star Wars. Well, okay. Well, this is not Similar for what I'm thinking a lot of a lot of bad will towards the stars There's a lot of bad will toward it and people don't engage that there are I feel like bad actors in these Star Wars Fandom that won't engage in it with it in good faith They already coming in with a chip on their shoulder. They're wanting to dislike it and those same people This is a subsection of this one don't like women and though the female protagonist is a big turnoff for those people as well Yep, the other thing the the reviews the from the major reviewers

They were given six days to cram this game down their fucking throats and finish it to write a complete review Yeah, that is going to make you feel like you're having the same time over and over again You're gonna have a bad time doing it because you're not really getting to explore the same in that same pace that we are. I've done three... I've done almost nothing. Like main missions and I've been doing exclusively side stuff and been like this is all I've ever wanted from a Star Wars game. I spend an enormous amount of time walking around any area. Yeah. Where I'm just like, oh, and then I'll forget that I can run. Like I'm, there is, Nick, there is a dedicated button to leaning on something.

Like you can go into a room and press the, like, lean, and you kind of like just like saddle up on like a bar or like lean against a wall like that I love to lean. It's fucking awesome. Yeah, you love to lean. Hope you love to clean too, buddy What doing a little too much leaning? I've noticed The part of my duties here But like in the stuff that you can learn stuff while you're leaning Yeah, like you you can get intel for like hidden treasures or whatever And I do think there are some I've encountered some stuff that feels a little samey

We're like you know you're okay. This is another stealth area or whatever or like oh It's more treasure that I have to find and I'll also admit that I've heard like similar dialogue from multiple NPCs Yeah, it's like the huts well well they really call it like it is. Yes, but it all feels really good and super engaging and it feels even more immersive than the Jedi games that I absolutely love and think are some of the best Star Wars stories we have. You just drop in and you feel like you're in it

I even I haven't even flown my goddamn ship yet. You haven't know. Oh shit. I'm like just I'm going so slow And just like exploring it. I've written the speeder. I love writing the speeders great I'm having so much fun that if this planet was the one planet if you like this is this is a game of the year I'm really enjoying it. I can see where people might not You know the red dead comparison that I dropped earlier red dead's not everybody's favorite thing even though it's universally Acclaimed people have the same problems with red dead. You know, it's slow in the beginning that type of stuff This doesn't at least it doesn't feel like there's nothing going on There's always something happening.

I encountered a Stormtrooper battle in the middle of the fucking planes there. And it was like, this is emergent. This wasn't just like, oh, this is always there. It just happened to be there when I was there that time. It was very exciting. One of my favorite things, and maybe you aren't here yet, Matt, but there is a reputation

system. And you have three major factions to build a reputation with. And one of my favorite things about the reputation system is it unlocks cosmetics that make you look like those dudes. That's fun. So like, if you want to like, align yourself with the Hutts, you get Hut-inspired fashion that's not like, oh, I've got a Jabba mask. It's like, oh, this is kinda like how these fucking weirdos dress.

You can align yourself with the Crimson Dawn and like, kind of look like those dudes as you get farther and farther in the game. Or you can align yourself with the Pikes, who I think are aligned with the empire Yes, and they have like empire themed Cosmetics, so it's the longer you are engaged with these characters the more you begin to sort of

Acclimate to the way they look and I think that's nice. It's really really fucking love it. Yeah, that's fun I I'm I'm down for anything where you can join factions. I love joining the faction I'm looking through the the the credit the reviews It seems like the critics are maybe a little bit more favorable than the public at large It seems like the Metacritic is sitting around 75 You know cross platforms the user of user closer to 5050 maybe that could be some brigading, but I have also seen some complaints about bugs Which I'm not sure I'm not sure of either of you have encountered. I don't know how buggy it is I haven't really encountered anything like crazy

I've noticed that maybe there's like, you know, like a pop-in here or there but like nothing too severe like that stuff doesn't like Break the game to me. I've seen people, these same Star Wars people that are going straight for the worst base type stuff. Being like, you can make a character look however you want and the character is not attractive. And I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, she's a pretty lady.

Hey, Vess is everything to me now. Another cool thing is that you can so everybody for the last few years has been complaining about like the yellow paint phenomenon in exploration games where it's like oh I know that I can climb this ladder because it's kind of a yellow paint like at the top of the ladder or there's yellow paint on this wall so I know I should follow it you can toggle the yellow paint Oh, okay, you can make the world more or less immersive depending on your play style. So that's really fucking cool I will say my only complaint about it is not really a complaint. It's

that sometimes I don't know what it is that I'm supposed to be doing in a given area and I will do a jump that I assume is like the the way I'm supposed to be doing in a given area, and I will do a jump that I assume is like the way I'm supposed to go, and fall to my death, even if the character lands and survives the fall. So like, you can, you know, you take fall damage if you fall too far,

but I'm like, oh, maybe I'm supposed to go down there, and I like jump, and my character will land and be like, ouch, but then the screen will go black and white and it'd be dead. Yeah. But it's not like I've died. It's just that I'm not supposed to go that way yet.

Whereas Baldur's Gate rewarded me every time I ended up in a place I wasn't supposed to be in. Sure, right. It feels like if I can sequence break, or even not even intentionally sequence break, but just be like, oh, if you're gonna show me an area that I can physically get to, given what you've taught me about mobility,

then you shouldn't punish me for getting there. Yeah, you're just, it's maybe too easy to get outside of the map. Yeah. And there isn't like a clear guidepost for what the play area should be. Okay, yeah, sure. Especially when I know from going to a place and unlocking an area where nothing is interactive yet,

that I will be able to interact with that area later. That's, that all of that like, sort of like boundary stuff is a little frustrating in an open world game. I wanna share something that Matt said earlier, which was about how broken the pipeline is for game reviews. Because anyone who works on any of these sites will tell you that the overwhelming volume of their views for a piece of criticism are launch weekend.

When a game is coming out. That's when people are using reviews to guide purchase decisions or it's like something they want to see if someone's take lines up with their own take. So it does create this sort of gauntlet where they have to rush out a review to have it ready for the day the game releases. However, they are also embargoed. They have all these restrictions in terms of what they can do and what they can say, and they oftentimes don't have access to a complete build of the game until very late

in the process, either because that's just the pipeline for producing a game or the publisher decides we want to be extremely restrictive and really clamp down what's available to someone until the last possible minute. So you end up with situations where someone has to blitz through a game in a ridiculous amount of time and then try to come up with some sort of, you know, informed, like, take on it. And it's just a completely dumb system. And it's just like, it's also like, I'm far more interested in someone who has some time to spend with something and then can later on craft like an essay or a piece of video reflecting

on its overall meaning as a piece of media. I feel like that's so much more interesting, but that's not what the incentives are for if you're someone who reviews games. It's like it has to be out right away So it's it's it's a bummer, and I don't know what the solution is it just sucks I wish like in progress reviews were like more normalized because like then it you can get a little bit you could still get the the hit you know the traffic on your website or whatever if you're you know to your Paper of record or whatever it is you still get that coverage in there people are going to go to that say

I'm not done with this game But this is what I've done with it so far, and I've you know enjoyed this haven't enjoyed this tune in you know check in Later in the month for a more in-depth type of thing, but I understand that it's all about you know clicks and and and and it's all about you know clicks and and and and You know engaging with like an article on a website for a certain amount of time or whatever it is But it's kind of fucking weird that we did this to ourselves It didn't have to be like this you mean us the three of us No, I mean like the industry the world the world yeah the world did this time the world could have been anything and it chose

This yeah, it makes me sick We we made this we were like, you know what system would be great. Yeah is if we made these websites that were that were penalized if you did a did a complete job, yeah and Incentivized to do a job where you might anger somebody. Yeah, like it's weird that we made this. I guess Google made this Hey, I mean, yeah, it's the Infrastructure of the of social media has kind of led to this I mean like if Google hadn't been an ad based revenue company

It's true then you wouldn't be incentivized to have people constantly looking at your pages And perhaps we would have created a subscription-based internet back in the 90s that was more like magazines and newspapers. I'll go even further, and I'll say the invention of the flame and the wheel were a mistake, and we didn't need to do that, and we shouldn't even be here. Yeah.

Agreed. Agreed. We didn't need technology. It's true. I'm glad you both are having fun with it. I'll play it at some point with an open mind. I don't think there's, on PC I think you have to do it through Ubisoft's dumbass online store. Ubisoft Connect?

Yeah, whatever. Yeah, I just like it. I was like, I'm going gonna send it for Ubisoft Connect Plus or whatever, or pay out of pocket for this and have this live in this online store I don't ever use. I don't know, maybe I will. But anyway, I will play it with an open mind. My question is, do you think this is a thing

we should cover? Should we, do you wanna spend some more time in it and see what you think? I don't wanna cover it. Okay. And here's why. I think or? I don't wanna cover it. Okay. And here's why. I think Matt and I probably will talk about the game for a couple of weeks.

Yeah. I don't wanna be pressured to push through this game because the very thing that made the reviewers hate it is the thing I don't wanna do to myself on the podcast. Yeah, I want to come out of this having enjoyed it. There are other games coming out like this, for some reason, dry summer. A dry summer, a trickle. Not very many games coming out through the summer

that I was very interested in. And now September's here. All the games I'm excited for are coming out? This? September, Los Angeles summer. That is true. Hot week. Hot week. Hot week. Los Angeles summer That is true hot week hot week hot week

Green day guys getting a good sleep in What? I don't I just want to know what it meant meant. I don't I just want to know what it meant. There's a song from the Green Day album American idiot, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Wow, okay. Much like the Dreamcast. Yeah. Or definitely maybe, by Oasis.

Yes. Well, 30 years for that, no? 30, yeah. It is similar to things also having an anniversary. Yes. I'm just saying, if we're saying like this week, this week is an anniversary for a thing. 30 years since Green Day's Dookie, by the way, as well.

Wow, how about that? Green Day's been kicking. What a fucking summer that must have been. Crazy summer. For definitely maybe Ann Dookie to come out in the same summer? Holy shit. Not as hot, probably.

You mean like physically on Earth? Yeah. No, it definitely wasn't. Less hot. But there's a song on American Idiot wake me up when September ends and so Nick was saying that right now Billy Joe Armstrong is enjoying some good and well-deserved shut-eye until the end of September this month-long slumber I Love it slumber I love it pick him up October 1st wait so all that and you're like actually now I'm on board that's pretty good I just didn't understand what the fuck he was talking about

like I as a joke I'm not sure that I appreciate it but I do love the thought you like the information like it's a lot of information to pack into a single sentence that came off to me like nonsense it's kind of his style I fucking loved it any other thoughts on on Star Wars Outlaws? Any other little guys we had in Droids of Note? Sabacc, any more insight into Sabacc? I fucking love Sabacc so much. I'm sorry, I love it, I fucking love it.

I love Sabacc. I helped a droid with the motivator issue that it needed a new sort of motivator thing. And it was funny because it was speaking in binary and in the subtitles it says it's speaking in binary but his owner was translating for the droid and he was saying all this sad shit. He said, my self esteem is at an all time low.

It was really funny. I like, you know, when you, obviously you see the guys from the movies, you're like super excited. I like seeing the trash can guys who are like walking around that are just like literally like cafeteria trash cans. I like seeing the 3PO likes.

Love seeing the 3PO like. That's pretty good. I kind of wish you could ride other stuff like in Grand Theft Auto. You can only kind of ride your speeder or your ship. Sure. But if you see a Bantha around, you should be able to get on the Bantha and ride the Bantha. Apparently when you make it to Mos Eisley, because Tatooine's in the game, because it has to be in everything Star Wars. Yeah.

If you go to Mos Eisley, the carbon mark from when Han Solo dodged the laser shot is on the wall. That's fun, nice little detail. That's pretty cool. Yeah, pretty good. It didn't happen, but. Yeah, didn't happen. Weird that they would.

I don't know I saw it So I agree to say McClenkey Yeah, that's that's that's hung in the in the bar his last words I'll talk about the shadow of the earth tree DLC a little bit. There we fucking go! So I was having a lot of fun with this game. I'm playing it a lot. I went through a pretty tough dungeon and I got to the boss and he was just kicking the shit out of me.

Which you know, will happen in these games. But I was just like I have this I was really struggling with this guy I was pretty good to a second form is like I feel like I have no shot at all and I have not been looking up Anything in this game. I've done. I've been just sort of like wandering around taking stuff in Exploring spots. Can you tell us this boss? Well? Here's the thing? Okay? I look this up and I checked the guys like how what's what's that? How do I how do I beat this boss? And I just looked up a guide real quick and I found that it was the last boss. And I was like, oh, I accidentally got to the final boss

a little bit too early. Oh shit, oh my God. So I was just, that was like 10 hours ago in my play session. So I was like, I gotta leave. I went in the wrong dungeon and I just left and I went exploring a bunch of other places. That big boss, I gotta go.

Yeah. Welcome to Redis Perspective. He's like, what the fuck's going on? I wanted to kill that guy. I went exploring a bunch of other places that big boss. Um, I gotta go Kicking the shit out of them these left That's a really funny Elden Ring like feeling that they must get yeah Millennia like sees like people come in common common common and then one of them's just like, fuck this, and leaves. Where'd the tarnished go? This guy with a fucking jar on his head and a diaper beat the shit out of me? So I've talked about the level design a bunch. I mean, Matt, we're texting more about this,

but the ruins areas, first off, it's just kind of like this maze-like construction, but in an open sort of space. Like, that's like, I don't know, just like really cool geometrical, they figured that out. But also just the art direction of it. It's just like really those ruins that you find. And I find the quest like super compelling when you find that weirdo in the church and

he's like giving you pieces of a map and you're finding different, and he's like, oh wow, I found a completely different area in this area that I previously explored because of this clue this guy gave me, and then that happens like multiple times. That's all really fun. The Mesmer, the Impaler I was struggling with, but that was a really fun boss fight. The Saint of the Bud, yeah buddy.

That's a really fun fight. I love that scorpion, that's a really cool, an incredible character design. It's a great, great boss fight. And it's a super fun fight. And it's really challenging the buttressants tonight I'm not sure if you got to that guy who you just leave at the very bottom of a huge pit Like you just jump off you basically take a blind leap of faith

Which I would not have done if there weren't messages there that were just like time for jump or time for rump where people were writing and Yeah, I was just like I would find it and then you just jump and you fall forever. And he's this big stinky guy who's got an insane attack sequence. And it is one of those things that I started to feel. And I've read some reactions to the DLC, which are like, this has turned into such a waiting game now. Like a boss will have a six-hit combo that you can't interrupt. And so it's just a lot lot of like dancing and dodging

and then picking your spot and then they'll maybe cancel right into something else. And so like that is definitely a boss where he's like, he's got this insane thing he just kind of keeps going at you. He's putting you to sleep. He throws his horse at you at a certain point. There's just like so many attacks

that are coming in a sequence and it's just a lot. But I got his sword and I've been using a sword and I'm realizing it was that moment when I was like, oh, a huge part of the appeal of this is Mega Man. It's that you can beat someone and take their weapon. And it's like, now I got their weapon and whether it's useful or not,

whether it becomes your thing, this has become one of my main things that I use along with that anvil, that big anvil hammer that I got from the lava forge. And it's like, oh yeah, I'm using this weapon, this guy was using to kick my ass and now I get to use it to beat guys up. That's a lot of fun.

I don't know. And it's also, I mean, it's not just Mega Man. At the time, Mega Man was considered an extremely difficult game. It was, yeah. And so when you would finally crest one of those bosses, you'd be like, holy shit. I've got windman's power Yeah, he's got he dot he blocks bullets cuz there's little leaves right get equipped with bubble lead. I was like all right great

Here we go. Yeah, have you you mentioned some other bosses have you have you encountered? the mother of fingers No, I have not if there was a quest to look up, yeah. I think it's one of my favorite quests in the game. Yeah, because there's definitely some stuff I've missed. There's still some map areas that I have not like, I have not like, you know, gotten the map piece for. I've not found the map yet, and so like I have just like huge sections that are just kind of fog of war. And I still, I've heard about the bail guy and bail and I still have not found the map yet, and so I have just huge sections that are just kind of fog of war. And I've heard about the Bale guy, and Bale,

and I still have not found Bale. Oh, shit! You haven't gone to the big mountain? I guess so, I guess I have missed that part of it. So you're ahead of me in terms of some of these bosses, but you also are behind me on that. That's really wild. Yeah, because I haven't done the putrescent knight either.

Yeah, that guy, hey, like I'd see that guy out. That was a lot of fun. I'm too scared to go back? But yeah, I ended up beating Romina, the Saint of the Bud, like I think pretty early. Because I was like, I went after her and then I like later went back to, I think I did her maybe even before Mesper

and some other fights. Anyway, there are some performance issues on PC, which I know a lot of people have encountered. I wish it was... This is one of my favorite games, and so I wish it would be becoming one of my favorite games, and I just wish it was... I just performed a little bit better, and I didn't have to deal with weird micro-settering and frame drops sometimes at really inopportune times. They don't seem at all tied to my hardware because I get a pretty hefty PC. One other thing I want to bring up. So you gotta, you're playing the base game.

You got the Jar Guys, you got the Jar Alexander. These cute little guys, you're seeing them around. So like, yeah, okay, sometimes you fight one and you kill them and you get the hunk of meat. So it's like, oh, what's really going on there? There's some bit of Jar Guys canon that is you fight one and kill them until you get to the hunk of meat. So I was like, oh, what's really going on there? There's some bit of Jar Guys canon that is conveyed to you, you know, like anything, like everything in this indirectly. Yeah. But you learn like what the Jar Guys actually are, what's going on inside those jars.

And like everything in this reality, it is a nightmare. It's just like, why does everything have to be so haunted and horrific? Why can't we have the cute little jar guys? Why do we have to learn the reality of the jar guys and learn about the torment that exists within, both physically and mentally? It is, when I got- Really disturbing.

When I got to that section, it was, in a game full of Gigantic bummer. Yeah, one of the bigger bummers in the game. It fucking sucks. I hate this Look at this I like to know this like the like the when they crack and the creatures are sort of like half in they Look all fucking gross awful awful shit, but but an incredible game. I. Looking forward to finish. Yeah. Let's talk about the Sega Dreamcast. 9999 was the day. Act one, a dream deferred. Today is 25 years since the launch of the Dreamcast. What does 25 years mean? What does one year

mean? What does a moment mean? I ask because there's a moment in every tech company's life where the future seems bright, the possibilities endless, and the only thing standing between you and success is the ability to execute on your wildest dreams. For Sega, that moment came in 1997, 1998, and 1999 with the launch of the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast was supposed to be Sega's big comeback. After the lukewarm reception of the Sega Saturn, they needed a win.

And so they poured everything into this new console. Sleek design, in an innovative technology, and a library of games that promised to push the boundaries of what was possible in the home. It was the first console with a built-in modem for online gaming. This was a time when most of us were still wrestling with dial-up, and the idea of playing against someone halfway across the world seemed like something out of a science fiction novel. But here's the thing about dreams.

Sometimes they don't line up with reality. The Dreamcast, for all its ambition, was a little too far ahead of its time. Sure, it had online gaming, but the infrastructure just wasn't there yet. Most people's internet connections weren't fast enough to handle the demands of online play, and Sega's servers were often unreliable. And then there was the competition. Enter Sony. The PlayStation 2 was looming on the horizon, and when it finally launched, it was everything the Dreamcast was and more.

It wasn't just a gaming console, it was also a DVD player, at a time when DVD players were still expensive and highly sought after. Suddenly, the Dreamcast didn't seem so revolutionary anymore. It was just another video game console. But let's go back for a second.

Before the Dreamcast became a cautionary tale, it was a beacon of hope for Sega fans. It had games like Sonic Adventure, which brought everyone's favorite blue hedgehog into the world of 3D. There was Crazy Taxi, a game that was exactly what it sounded like, chaotic, fast-paced, and a whole lot of fun. And apparently a favorite game of vice presidential candidate Waltz. And then there was Shenmue, an investigation life simulator game so ambitious in its scope that it practically invented a new genre. These were the games that defined a generation,

and for a brief moment it seemed like the Dreamcast was going to be Sega's salvation. But then the cracks started to show. Developers were hesitant to commit to a console that seemed doomed to fail. Sales started to slow and Sega, already struggling financially, couldn't afford to keep the Dreamcast alive. By 2001, just two years after its launch,

Sega made the difficult decision to pull the plug on the Dreamcast, marking the end of their run as a console manufacturer. I quote from the BBC News on Wednesday, the 35th of January, 2001. Japan's Game Maker SEGA is to end production of its Dreamcast games console. The company plans to restructure its business by focusing on selling software to its previous rivals, Sony's PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's Game Boy Advance.

Sega's also in talks to sell software to Microsoft Corp's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube consoles, which have not yet been launched. It will also deliver Sega games to Palm handheld computers and Motorola mobile phones. Sega will continue to sell Dreamcast, including hardware, for the immediate future. So what happened? How did a console that was so full of promise end up as one of the biggest failures in gaming history?

It's a question that has been asked countless times in the years since, and the answer is complicated. Some say it was the timing. The Dreamcast was too early, out of its time in a way that made it difficult for the market to catch up. Others point to Sega's history of missteps, the way they fumbled the Saturn launch,

the way they alienated developers and fans alike. And then there's the simple fact that the Sony PlayStation 2 is just better. It had more games, more features, except for online play, and it was backed by a company that seemed to understand what gamers really wanted. But maybe, more features, except for online play, and it was backed by a company that seemed to understand what gamers really wanted.

But maybe, just maybe, the Dreamcast was a victim of its own ambition. It was a console that dared to dream big, to push the boundaries of what was possible, and in doing so, it became something more than just a piece of hardware. It became a symbol, a reminder of what happens when you reach for the stars,

even if you don't quite make it. Today, the Dreamcast is remembered not as a failure, but as a cult classic. It is a devoted following, a community of fans who keep its memory alive through homebrew games, fan projects, and online forums. For them, the Dreamcast was more than just the console, it's a piece of history, a reminder of a time

when Sega was still dreaming. And maybe that's the real legacy of the Dreamcast. Not the sales numbers, not the console, it's a piece of history, a reminder of a time when Sega was still dreaming. And maybe that's the real legacy of the Dreamcast. Not the sales numbers, not the games, not even the technology. But the way it dared to dream big, even when the odds were stacked against it, the way it tried to do something different, something new, something bold. In the end, the Dreamcast may have failed, but it failed in the best way possible by dreaming for something greater. Wow. Those are fun guys, I like doing those.

I love hearing them. I like hearing them. I wrote something too. Okay, great, thank you, Matt. The dream cast is really cool. I liked it a lot. I didn't have as much time. Liked it a lot Yeah, it was good though. It's good. I liked it

Can we play the dreamcast startup sound are you asking me? I don't have that prepped No, I was asking like just the room good. We can we yeah We can. But this. Oh. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.

Pretty good. You know. It's really, really good. You know, one of the, I feel like we have lost our sense of the graphics upgrades that used to happen in gaming, that you would have these consoles come out and suddenly games would look entirely better

and crazily different. And if you compare the PlayStation, which at the time was like the dominant console or the Nintendo 64, if you compare those consoles to the launch videos of the Dreamcast, like Sonic Adventure looked fucking crazy. It looks so much better. And then, you know, the other, the best looking

and the best overall of the launch title, Soul Calibur, which I'm sure we'll talk about, just looked, it looked arcade perfect at a time when you just didn't see ports that looked as good at like, you just still arcade cabinets for the most part were outstripping everything but high end PCs. Yeah. And, you know, but then you had like the had the Naomi hardware that was in a lot of Sega cabinets was the equivalent

to the guts of the Dreamcast. So you were just getting arcade perfect ports, even though that was an Amco game. But I was going to say, it looked so much better. You're absolutely right. The PlayStation 1's 3D is, people are going to have nostalgia for it, and I'm sure there will be, there have already been games, there will be more that are like created to try to recreate that aesthetic. But at the time, it was pretty abrasive to look at.

All these textures with no filtering, what it was like to play a game with load times that had on a double speed CD-ROM drive, like it was just like, and all the aliasing, because everything was like, you know, 320 by 240 or whatever the resolution was, and the N64 had its own problems, had this horrible draw distance, had the, you know, the textures are smoother and that there was, you know, more filtering and shaders, but it was like... I want to say the thing that... But everything was so low poly. The thing that the PlayStation looked like to me low poly, just going on the plane there.

The thing that the PlayStation looked like to me as a gamer at the time was you'd look at the screen and you would see like the characters in Final Fantasy IX and you'd wonder what they were supposed to look like. Yeah, it was still in the same way that sort of like, you'd look at the pixel art of a, just to give you a final fantasy, you look at the pixel art, I really like,

but of a character in Final Fantasy IV and then Fantasy, look at the pixel art, I really like, but of a character in Final Fantasy IV, and then you look at the manual to see Yoshitaka Amano's character design art and be like, okay, this is representative of that. This is trying to accomplish that. It was the same sort of thing, but in 3D, whereas now 3D is trying its best to represent either reality or something, or some sort of stylized world. Yeah, it was comparatively really crude, and the Dreamcast, to your point,

was like a huge step up in terms of graphics and sound. Yeah, because if you were looking at, again, those Final Fantasy IX characters, and I used Final Fantasy IX because it was like, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy IX, that era of gaming, Squaresoft's games were the, like, quote, the beautiful games, right? So you would look at these games and be like, wow, that's the peak of graphics. That's incredible.

And then you would see the face on a Shenmue character, and you'd be like, holy shit, I know what they're supposed to look like. And when they're standing still, their face isn't like shifting around all over the place on their own head, which was something that the PlayStation games would do. Even like a game as drop dead gorgeous as Vagrant Story,

which was like, you would stare at, it was moody lighting and like all of this incredible art design. But when you would look at the faces of the characters, it would look like kind of like a gummy mess. Yeah, it was a really smudgy, low-res texture. Yeah, I mean, it is crazy how much of a jump, because where were we at 10 years ago in gaming?

What hardware generation were we on? Was it PlayStation? PlayStation 4 was out, right? Like we're... So we're dealing with PlayStation 4 versus PlayStation 5 now. Things were kind of like roughly in the same place. Obviously, we've got more powerful hardware now, but it was like, you know, there's not the seismic gap versus like 1989 we're talking about like 8-bit and like hardware, you know,

console hardware and then to 1999, 10 years we've got like two genera- we've got a 16-bit generation and two generations of so like a much better 2D, like a perfected 2D with 32-bit machines and then accrued first, you know, first go at 3D and then like a second gen of 3D. Like that all happened like in a 10 year span and that's kind of crazy to think about. I was looking for right now on my computer just like a graphical difference

between the Sega Dreamcast and the previous console, the Saturn and discovered that Shenmue was actually developed for the Saturn in mind which I did not realize. And I'm looking at this screenshot right now, and it is a significant leap. Like, that's like pretty nuts. I don't know how this leads to like a pretty high-def version

of Shenmue for the Sega Dreamcast, but there are obviously two different styles at that point, but it looks like a huge leap forward. Yeah, and it really, like like when you would see, say, Virtua Fighter running on the 32X. Yeah. It was you were like, oh, it kind of reminds me of the arcade game. And then you would see Virtua Fighter 2 on the Dreamcast and you'd be like, holy shit, that's the arcade game. Virtua Fighter 2 on the Dreamcast, and you'd be like, holy shit, that's the arcade game.

Pants on a character would look like pants. And I know that sounds ridiculous. No, I know what you mean. Because like 10 years ago, let's say you're playing Death Stranding, right? Death Stranding is a last gen game, and if you play a game now, it's not, you're not like, oh oh this looks so much better than Death Stranding

Yeah, I'm like convinced unless we start playing Like Actual people like like filmed people in video games will never be impressed. Yeah Anymore like we I think we've reached the apex of being impressed by how good the graphics are in something. Yeah, I feel like the adjustments are like the difference between... You know, you ever seen a knob on like an amplifier or something? And there's two kinds of knobs. There's the knobs that like you click.

And as you turn them, they chunk into the next spot. And that feels like the difference in graphical and fidelity upgrades between 1989 and 1999. And now we're on an analog dial and those, we're making very fine tuned adjustments and they aren't like step chop, they're not like huge chunky choppy steps. They're little mild like, like oh yeah,

there's more particles, yeah, there's ray tracing. Yes, the lighting looks good in this. But like, I don't know man, Cyberpunk looked good then, it still looks good now. Yeah, it's, graphics were not one of the many, many problems that the game had when it came out. There was a time when Dreamcast is out, right? And they're about to get fucking just destroyed by PlayStation 2.

And I wonder if there was an internal discussion about how they could position the console to make it stand out still in a world where the PlayStation 2 was about to thunder into the room. And my pet headcanon, my pet theory, is that for a moment Sega was like, what if we're the weird guys? What if we do weird stuff? Like, there are games that came to the West like Seaman.

Yeah, Seaman. Yeah, Seaman is what I was thinking of when you were just saying that, but keep going. Which were the kinds of games that wouldn't have been released here during the PlayStation 1 era or the NES era. Those very specific, strange games. And I feel like Dreamcast was bringing those games, those console titles over here to show us weird shit

in the event that maybe that's the way they could position the console moving forward. That PlayStation 2 would be the place that you go for like the bouncer. But if you wanted to play like a game where you were simulating somebody cleaning a kitchen, you'd do it on the Dreamcast. Yeah, I mean, there actually is a, you know,

there's a Peter Moore, who was, you know, president of Sega America for a time, and there's an article from a few years ago, I mean, the headline is, Peter Moore and Why the Plug Was Pulled on the Dreamcast. And part of the quote here is directing that, or is directed at that. Oh, really? Well, to some degree, but kind of from a slightly different angle. One of the quote here is directing that, or is directed at that.

Oh, really? Well, to some degree, but from a slightly different angle. One of the things that Sega had, I'm reading this Peter Moore quoted in GamesRadar here. One of the things that Sega had done successfully was open up through online gaming a broader demographic, a more mature demographic, and it was very clear to me as graphical fidelity was improving, you were able to create more movie-like content. And so when the GTA phenomenon started to kick in, it was clear. The Sega Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2 at launch predated Grand Theft Auto as we know

it now, although there were a couple of early Grand Theft Auto games that are very different. But when the GTA phenomenon started to kick in the gear, despite the initial controversy, that this was the way the industry was going. But our content at Sega was still very much Japanese. Everything involves samurai swords or ninjas or fish or fantasy. Yeah, well, we certainly saw it coming. So yeah, I think that he's not using the word weird there, but he is talking about stuff that is a little bit more niche for a Western audience. And I think that is kind of the thing of like, that's both why the Dreamcast was beloved

and a commercial failure is that it had stuff that you could, it had some very specific content, but stuff that just did not have, was not going to break through to the mainstream. It's strange that Grand Theft Auto was such a giant, like, I mean, it's because it was an open world environment where you could, like, commit crime, right? But the idea that you would be running around in a three-dimensional environment, it's like a launch title of the Dreamcast. Like, Sonic Adventure is,

you run around on islands and you can explore wherever you want to go and you're not, like, locked into this two-dimensional, like, you have to go left or right with Sonic. Yeah. And there were also, you know, like Silent Hill on the PlayStation is a three-dimensional town that you can investigate, although it was like rudimentary and kind of weird. Like, it was still like three-dimensional exploratory environments predate Grand Theft Auto. Well, yeah, and Metal Gear Solid is what I'm thinking of on PlayStation 1, because that did have a fully 3D environment.

And some of the games that we were talking about earlier, the Final Fantasy games on PlayStation, certainly the Resident Evil series, those used a lot of them. Those came over the limitations of the hardware or fought against the limitation of the hardware by using these prerendered backgrounds that could have, you know, they could be really gorgeous, but then the camera was fixed in place and you had a relatively low fidelity character model

existing within that reality. It's pretty crazy that we no longer ever talk about, I mean, maybe do with the Xbox Series S, but nobody has to talk about the hardware limitations anymore. Nobody's like, oh, there's something we want to achieve on the PlayStation 5 that we can't achieve because of the architecture of the PlayStation 5.

Whereas, like, with the Saturn, it was like, ah, the 3D engine isn't quite where we needed to be and able to achieve these effects. Or when... when, uh, ICO was being developed for the PlayStation and ended up having to be a PlayStation 2 game because they were like, yeah, we can't make this work

on this older hardware. And now I feel like the thing that's limiting games is just, is literally nothing. It's like the imagination of the developer. Well, I think that the limitation now is budget and labor because it is so much work to make these you know extraordinarily high-res detailed art assets and if it's a character having like a ton of distinct animations like it is just so much labor to produce this this the

content on the scale now that yeah that's it's it, I think why a lot of games are choosing, or a lot of indie games have an intentionally retro aesthetic. It's insane that there have been so many years since, say, The Last of Us Part II. Sure. Like that game came out in 2020. And have they released any original titles since then? I mean, if you want to call The Last of Us Part One,

the, you know. Remastered? If you wanna call that one. I don't feel like I need to call that one. Yeah. Like it's been four years, and like in the PlayStation era, Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX all came out within, I think, four or five years.

Yeah, I think games just take like five, six years now to develop. They're just enormous, enormous endeavors. Anyway, going back to the Dreamcast, the lack of a DVD player, which you mentioned, was the death knell for this. I really feel like that was the thing, because like you were saying,

a lot of people were, they're PlayStation brand loyalty from PlayStation 1, so they had that, so they already were in the PlayStation ecosystem. They wanted another PlayStation. They knew the PlayStation 2 was on the horizon. There were still good games coming out for the PlayStation 1 when the Dreamcast was out.

And the PlayStation 2 played PlayStation 1 games. And it played PlayStation 1 games. It was backwards compatible, which was something of a novelty at the time. There was a rarity, backwards compatibility. But I do think a lot of people, I mean, I remember the time. That was a rarity, backwards compatibility. But I do think a lot of people, I mean, I remember the time people saying that, I'll just wait for the PlayStation 2

because this can't play DVDs. Even if they were playing Soul Calibur on my Dreamcast in my dorm room and saying this was cool, they still were like, eh, but I can't play a DVD on it. Yeah, Sony was like, okay, if we make it backwards compatible, then nobody has to let go of their favorite PlayStation 1 games, and we're gonna make it the PlayStation 2,

and we're gonna make it a DVD player. It felt like you were getting three consoles, three items in one. Like, I didn't have a DVD player before I had the PlayStation 2. Yeah, me neither. I love being a fucking million years old, because I'm just thinking back on that

and just how insane that sounds now Just like people were waiting for a set-top box so they could buy Physical discs to watch movies on yeah, and then later TV shows which they hadn't even thought about yet the idea that like oh wait I can watch a TV show not when it's on TV I can have like a piece of media that I can watch this TV show at any time. And now you just think of it like all, everything is so on demand and these huge libraries of content

are available with their streaming services. I'm not saying anything new here, but it's just like, it's so completely different. And again, 25 years, that's like not a huge stretch of time for the landscape to be completely reworked, not just for games, but for all of media. But it's interesting that the DVD,

like not having the DVD capability killed the Dreamcast because Nintendo's never had that. They just like, they've never been able, they've never tried to even compete on the same level as that, but maybe that is to their strength and to their benefit. They have always not done what everybody else is trying to do, and I think in turn became the quote-unquote weird ones. Nintendo's survival, you are right, they are the weird ones. Nintendo's survival really makes no sense.

Because you look at the N64 would have killed a lot of hardware manufacturers. Like that in and of itself was like, this is so fucking weird. You're stubbornly sticking to cartridges, which are like, like 10 to 20 times more expensive than discs. You were sticking to that, and still the games you come up with, like your AAA titles, Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are so good and Mario Kart 64, that people will just still buy this thing in droves.

I think that part of, until the Switch, right? Part of the success of Nintendo at any given time after the NES is that they have three things that you absolutely have to play. And for the N64, it was Mario, Zelda, and GoldenEye. Yeah, GoldenEye, right. And you like, if you wanted to fuck with that shit, you had to get an N64.

It was like the four gaming experiences sold the console to you, whereas all the rest of the consoles you bought in order to see what might come out for them. And the same with the GameCube. Like if Smash hadn't come out for the GameCube, if Resident Evil 4 hadn't come out for the GameCube, like that system would have collapsed.

Like that was long into the life cycle of that system before people were like, oh shit, you have to play Resident Evil 4, it is so fucking good. Or oh shit, Smash is so fucking good. Like the Wii sells not because of the Nunchuck or the Wii remote, it sells because of Wii Sports. And everybody's like, I wanna try the bowling game. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's kind of like, what you're speaking to is that the individuals

involved matter, that like talent is still like kind of king because you are making content and like having, you know, these incredible developers in-house like Shigeru Miyamoto and Masahiro Sakurai, among many others. It's just like, oh, you have these incredible brains and these incredible artists who are making this content that just is, that people don't wanna miss. I think the Wii U would have sold

if they had had one game on that system that you had to absolutely play. But I can't think of a single title that is a Wii U exclusive that would have sold the system. God, what the fuck was good on Wii U exclusive that would have sold the system. God what the fuck was good on Wii U? I mean the you know Mario 3D world was originally on Wii U and that was that's a fucking great game. That's a great game wasn't Bayonetta on

the Wii U. Was that originally a Wii U game? I don't remember. Why are we talking about the Wii U? I think the Wii U is similar to the Dreamcast in that it was like a huge number of crazy ideas all smashed into a white box. Yeah, right. The VMU is the handheld gamepad that also has a screen on it. You're like, what am I supposed to do with this thing that should really, really be cool? But where Sega couldn't recover, Nintendo was like, this next one has to be ubiquitous or we're fucked. Well, I've also heard that, and maybe this is anecdotal or maybe I misread this, but I've heard that part of Nintendo's success is that they only sell at profit.

So like, the reason the Wii is underpowered is because they could sell the system at profit on day one. The reason the Wii U is like just a fancier Wii is because they could sell it for a profit on day one, that the Switch is underpowered when it's launched because they can sell it for a profit. So they're never actually, they're not risking the whole, the shirt off their back. Right. Yeah, I mean, like again, the shirt off their back. Right, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, like again, the Wii U would have been another thing that would have killed like any other hardware company, but Nintendo survives. The Virtual Boy should have killed them. They win the next generation, it's crazy. Just to talk about some Wii U exclusives so people don't shout them out at us. Breath of the Wild technically was a Wii U game,

although it came out the Switch at the same time. Super Mario 3D World, I mentioned Pikmin 3, Bayonetta Bayonetta 2, like you were talking about. Wind Waker, the HD remake, which was, hey, that was really cool. I think the only place you can play that, right? Yeah. And then Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker, there were some good games. And Dreamcast, again, were some good games. And you know, like Dreamcast again, had some good exclusives, but part of the issue was that you had a company like EA just choosing to completely opt out of the Dreamcast. Like they're just like, we're just not gonna make any Dreamcast games. And you know, none of us are really,

I'm the one sporto here, and I played some sports games, I don't really play sports games anymore. Sports games are a gigantic part of the market. And if you're in North America and you don't have Madden, it's like, that's a real, real tough, a tough hurdle to get over. Now, the thing is they did have NFL 2K. NFL 2K was so good and so much better than Madden and 2K1, 2K2, I think that might've been the last one they made, but the ones they made for the Dreamcast were so much better than Madden. And 2K1, 2K2, I think that might have been the last one they made,

but the ones they made for the Dreamcast were so much better than what was Madden was doing at the time, that EA was like, we gotta do something. And what EA did is they bought exclusivity to the NFL license. So the NFL 2K games could no longer exist. So EA is like, instead of making these games any better

and upping our game and over, you know, beating the competition on its merits, we're just gonna buy the exclusive license to this and now you can't make it anymore. I think 2K was one of the best uses of the VMU, if I'm remembering correctly, because you could choose your plays on the screen on your controller.

And unlike when you were playing with friends before, where you would have to tell, you'd have to show them what plays you were choosing. Yeah, it was kind of like the honor system in the same sort of way, like a split screen FPS game was of like, you're not cheating off of my screen, right? But you could at any time just see what the play the other person was calling. And so yeah, calling it off the VMU,

it was kind of a novelty because it was text-based, but it was fun to mess around with. Yeah, I think that there were... There's definitely a multiverse where the Dreamcast succeeds and say the GameCube absolutely fails, right? Yeah, Al Gore becomes the president. But there's like a small window when... And everything else is the same.

Everything else is kind of the same. Still got to work with Iraq. He doesn't make that documentary, I guess. He doesn't have time to do that. W makes his own documentary. That pretzel tried to kill me. So he still choked on a pretzel in this alternate reality? Yeah. Remember when my dad threw up?

There was a time when the Dreamcast has the four ports. If you have a Dreamcast has the four ports, if you have a Dreamcast, you get people who don't know what a Dreamcast is into a room, and it's enough of a step up that for a short time, people are like, holy shit, this is incredible. Again, remember, this looks like an arcade game.

Like, that's just, oh, that was still a thing when arcades looked better. It also wasn't brutally expensive. It wasn't like the launch of the PlayStation 3 where people were like, how much does this fucking thing cost? It was like, it was console priced at the time. So there's a short time when, if you have Crazy Taxi,

if you have Power Stone, if you have Soul Calibur, if you have Marvel versus Capcom 2, in your room, in your dorm room, in your apartment, in your house, wherever the fuck it is that you have Dreamcast. Virtua Tennis, another one. And you get people to come over, then everybody is excited and they want the Dreamcast.

But it's only for this very, very brief, brief window before Sony starts running ads for the PlayStation 2. I guess we should talk about the controller a little bit. I do like the Dreamcast controller. This was like one that, it's so strange, thinking back on it, how like a wired controller was just the default for so long, and we just always expected to have to plug these things in.

But you know, a good wired controller, ergonomically a little bit, the way it was, the grips were not aligned with your wrists, so you had to turn your hands at an odd angle to hold it, and so for long stretches of gaming, I found it got pretty uncomfortable, because it's just kind of at right angles on the sides. But I always liked that, I was a fan of that controller. I at right angles on the sides. But I, you know, I always like that. I was a fan of that controller. I love the give of the triggers.

I love the controller. I love the gimmick of having the VMU or a mic or whatever snapped into that top slot. It took us a page from the N64 controller, which has that expansion slot built in. So they're like, oh, we should do this, but we should also make it a little bit better. So you can have this visual memory unit and maybe take your little game on the go. So I love the controller. What I'm shocked by is that I think the first dual analog controller comes out for the PlayStation One before the launch of the Dreamcast. comes out for the PlayStation 1 before the launch of the Dreamcast.

The Dreamcast controller is clearly based on the 3D controller for Knights, because Knights launches on the Saturn and there's no analog control, so they pack in a controller, which is a circular-shaped controller just like the Dreamcast. So I feel like they were like,

oh, this works for this game, let's just bring the analog controller and form factor to the Dreamcast. But the PlayStation has a dual analog stick already. And it's wild to me that they didn't include that on the Dreamcast controller. Yeah, I think it was also just like, it was, it was just before we'd, you know,

before FPS games had become so like standard on the console. But that was another thing where it was just like they weren't really anticipating where Western tastes were going to go. And like there were going to be so many people wanting to play games like Halo. And you know, I don't even know if they had any first person shooters of consequence on Dreamcast. I can't think of any. I still think that the dual analog stick is great for a game like Sonic Adventure. It's weird that they didn't look at the problems

of the Mario, the Super Mario 64 camera. Yes, right. And then also look at the PlayStation dual analog. Can you look that up so I know I'm not talking out of my fucking ass? No, I know what you're talking about. The dual analog stick and then the dual shock came out afterwards.

And yes, those both had- But there was a dual analog stick for the PlayStation 1. There was a dual analog. I remember that I owned it. And it had the weird thing where it was like, it had the concave analog stick. So they had a weird feel to them. It was released in 1997, 27 years ago. So it's surprising to me that Sega didn't see this and be like oh we should pop that form factor and put a dual analog stick on our on our system

since PlayStation 2 comes out with it, Gamecube comes out with like a kind of version of it, Xbox comes out with a version of it. It's just weird to me that they weren't like oh let's make a dual analog controller. Well, historically up until this point, it is clear that Sega doesn't learn from mistakes. They also, they had virtual on in our case. Oh yeah. So they already have a game that requires the conceptual use of two analog sticks.

It's just, it's a surprising misstep on a console that everything else was so forward thinking. Do we have any favorite games on the Dreamcast and maybe inject a little positivity in this conversation? I, you know, I- You mentioned Soul Calibur. So I, cause I didn't have one of these, but my uncle had one growing up and I was fascinated by it

because I, at this point, I probably didn't even have a, I must've had a PlayStation 1 at this point But I remember just being like blown away by it and one of the games that I loved on this my uncle worked at a Video game or another video game like a movie rental place that rented video games also So you would always come home with a bunch of games and sometimes there'd be one in in there for me So yeah, so I could see what was going on Looney Tunes Space Race? Looney Tunes Space Race is one of the great kart racers and it is completely forgotten.

It is so good and so funny. Cause it's just like, it's, you know, instead of items like your mushroom or your, you know, red shell, you get like Looney Tunes items, like a little hole. Like you could drop a hole. That's good. That's fun.

That's really funny. I loved that. I obviously loved Marvel versus Capcom 2. But first, and I had experience with Seaman, which we did an episode on in our early format in the very early goings of the show. But I remember being compelled by Shenmue for some reason. Shenmue is not a game that I would necessarily be interested in back then,

because it was just, you know, this guy's just kind of walking around trying to see what the hell's going on. But I was fascinated by it for some reason. In the same way where I wasn't fascinated by Even like a Final Fantasy it'd be like oh, this is one's boring. I'm out but for Shen for Shenmue I was like I'm gonna sit here and watch Shenmue I was hyped for Shenmue the wildest part about Shenmue to me at the time was that you could walk into an arcade and play

Other games in your game. Yeah, I was like what the And I was like, what the fuck is this? Like that was so crazy to me at the time. Yeah, I mean, like I had some real novelty to it. It's, I think, a wildly ambitious game that even at the time didn't really work, because like this is kind of, you know, kind of clunky, this is kind of a mess. And I think that was one where like the technology wasn't quite there, but also I think like they just hadn't figured out how to do one of these games.

I think they needed to iterate on it a little bit more, but obviously we don't get the Yakuza Like a Dragon series without Shenmue. I'm going to shout out some games here. Yeah, please. Project Justice, which is a 3D Capcom fighter. Love that fucking game. Typing of the Dead, which we've covered on this show, is fucking weird as shit and can't exist on any other system, same with Seaman. And also just that they had a keyboard peripheral,

which was partly for Phantasy Star Online, which I never got into, but I get the keyboard for typing of the dead, and I loved it. Street Fighter III, Third Strike, best port at the time of Street Fighter III. I wanna shout out Icaruga, which I've also championed on this show before. I had that game and I was like,

this is fucking best shooting game I've ever played. Like, this is incredible, shmup. Yeah, Icaruga did not get a North American port until I think it was re-released. Was it re-released on the GameCube? I don't remember what it was, but for Dreamcast, they never ported it to North America. Really?

Yeah, I mean, you probably had an import copy. Oh, I guess I had an import copy. Unless I'm wrong, I'll look it up. I thought Crazy Taxi was amazing. Yes, of course. I thought Power Stone 2 was amazing. I thought Sonic Adventure was fun. I thought Shenmue was weird. I thought Sonic Adventure was fun. I thought Shenmue was weird.

I thought Soul Calibur was amazing and I put more hours into Marvel versus Capcom 2 at the time than any other game on any other system for that entire generation. We've covered a lot of Dreamcast games on this show. Well, maybe these are games that I think make it, again, because what Heather was saying earlier, they're really distinct.

And yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's like they stick with you if you played them. And it's kind of a bummer that they weren't, you know, a lot of them weren't experienced by a wider audience, but I'm glad there's still a fandom that lingers. Soul Calibur I mentioned, I just said smothers jet set radio Which was released as jet grind radio at first, but jet set radio was a really cool design Also like cell shading was still a novelty and the cell shaded character designs looked really cool If anyone isn't familiar with this game you

Rollerblade bladed around town and spray painted and did tricks. It was super duper fun. Had a great sense of movement, great running around. Virtua Tennis, I mentioned. I'm not a tennis guy at all. But that was just a really cool looking and really just a great playing tennis game. Look, there's something very fundamental about a tennis game because it takes you back to pong or it takes you back to table tennis. Like this is an elementary sort of competition and that was really well executed.

Space Channel 5, very brief game, didn't have a lot to it but it was a really fun rhythm game with a really cool aesthetic, ooh la la, really cool character. Samba de Amigo I've mentioned before. I get another insane peripheral, maracas peripherals that existed for it. And then, you know what, like, Power Stone, in Power Stone 2 we talked about, Dead or Alive 2, another fighter,

which is more of a casual fighter, but that was another one that like, like Soul Calibur, like it looked great, and it was a really, a game that you could get like, like casual gamers in on playing. But Skies of Arcadia, incredible JRPG. I still have Skies of Arcadia unopened and sealed for my Dreamcast because whenever it came out,

I just didn't get around to playing it. And so in my collection is this sealed version of Skies of Arcadia that I'm like, well, at some point I'm gonna, if I can get air conditioning in a place where I can like, well, at some point I'm gonna, like if I can get air conditioning in a place where I can play video games, then I'm gonna play these old, I'm gonna play Skies of Arcadia.

It's interesting. I wonder how it aged. I have not looked up if they've done any sort of remaster or sort of modern port that has some modern conveniences because like I will remember, I do feel even at the time, I was kind of powering through that it had random encounters, which feel very dated.

And we just did our Chrono Trigger episode, and it was just like, you know, once, and then post Chrono Trigger, anything that had random encounters, including those PlayStation Final Fantasy games, all felt a little bit retrograde. But it was a really, really cool JRPG. I'm a random encounter apologist.

I like a random encounter because I feel like, for me, when I'm really cool JRPG. I'm a random encounter apologist. I like a random encounter because I feel like for me, when I'm playing a JRPG, I'm just playing it to vibe. And so like- Oh, sure, okay. Goodbye, that. The random encounters are kind of just part of the experience of like, I'm gonna play this for like a half hour

and I'm gonna beat some guys and then I'm gonna save and then I'm gonna turn it off. I don't know what else to say about the old Dreamcast. I mean, really cool system. Neither of you played Looney Tunes Space Race? I did not play Looney Tunes Space Race. I did look it up. There was a PlayStation 2 port

that apparently was not as well received. The Dreamcast one is also, speaking of cell shaded, it looks great. It looks pretty good. No, that's a good looking screen. God, those old CRTs. You get a good quality CRTs. Look at that. Look how fucking cool that is.

Let me see, let me see, let me see. Oh my God. It looks, this is so nice. Well, Dreamcast also had a VGA output. Yes, right, you could plug it into a monitor. So it looked hot, like you could play it on a high def monitor that had, because people didn't have HDTVs yet.

So if you wanted to play Dreamcast at a higher resolution than you could on your television, I think you could output it to a regular computer monitor. Unbelievable. Which is fucking crazy. But it couldn't play DVDs, so it's over. Which you were still watching on your Sony Trinitron or whatever, you're still watching on CSG.

I also want to shout out that this is a, that the Dreamcast still has fans. So right now it's the year 2024, and there are still enough fans of the Dreamcast that a third party company manufactured a new VMU, and that's the visual memory unit for the Dreamcast. What they added was a monochrome backlit LCD, because the original VMU doesn't have backlight,

a higher screen resolution, micro SD storage, internal storage of 128 kilobytes, and a USB-C port to charge the new high capacity battery. Which means that one of the problems with the original VMU units was they would eat batteries over a course of time. But this new VMU2 that just came out less than a year ago, you can charge with USB-C.

I have one in my house. But I just want to say that like, there's still enough fans, before it was even a 25 year old console. There are still enough fans that people are still developing stuff for the Dreamcast. There was a port that I don't quite understand about how they finally back channeled the Naomi board or something.

So a ton of games that were like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't quite understand about how they finally back-channeled the Naomi board or something, so a ton of games that weren't previously even released for the Dreamcast, you can direct Arcade Port now to a Dreamcast with like a, without the disc spinner, what do you call those? Where you don't have- Disc drive?

Yeah, without the CD-ROM drive. So there are Dreamcasts that you can purchase that have effectively a hard drive in them that emulates the disc drive. Wow. And those Dreamcasts can run arcade games that were never even made for the Dreamcast because they ran on the same board.

Yeah, I always thought it was hoping there'd be like a Star Wars arcade port to bring it back to Star Wars games. Like that was not like a great game, but you know, just again, because they could say it could do these arcade perfect like, it was just like, it'd be kind of cool to have a version of that on the home console. Yeah, and you know, speaking of the disk drive, it was a proprietary GD-ROM. It was like its own thing,

because they didn't have a DVD drive. Also forgive me if I got some of the details in what I was just talking about correct. You can look up Dreamcast running arcade games that weren't originally released for the Dreamcast, and you'll understand why I was so excited. Yeah, I've thought about that. It is cool that you can just have one of those

with a hard drive. Like that is just like a badass thing to own. But then you gotta fucking CRT, and you gotta forget where to put everything. No, you don't, because it's got a VGA out. Yeah, I guess so. I have the Dreamcast disc spinning, and a Saturn, and a Sega CD.

A VMU with a USB-C port. Yeah. If you guys want to come over, we can all just play Sega games. I looked it up. I saw what it looked like. What? The VMU 2. I love Sega. 9999, a day which will live in infamy. What a moment it was when the Sega Dreamcast

was unleashed on us here in the States and up in Canada. And all of this is also needs to be asterisked because the way that Sony tried to bury the Dreamcast on launch day was that they released a Final Fantasy game the same day. Yeah, Final Fantasy VIII, which again, everyone was super hyped for, and even though it was viewed

as something of a disappointment at the time, I loved that game, an offender of that game. I love it too. But yeah, people were, fucking new people were getting Final Fantasy, I was like, Final Fantasy, yeah, you know, play that instead of getting a Dreamcast. Yeah, they got completely cucked.

But you know, whatever, that's Singapore, yeah. Jesus Christ. Sat in a chair while Sony brailed their wife. Um yeah, they got completely cocked, but you know whatever that's that's a good for ya Sat in a chair while sonny brailed their wife What Matt we get a segment yeah, it's time for a pixel chart star Well, how do we steal a game sales chart chart segment? Yeah, our video game sales start chart segment And this this time it's we're gonna be talking about The top ten highest selling Sega Dreamcast game. Whoa. Okay. No, is this worldwide?

As far as I know yes, and this okay speakers were updated as of February of this year As they're still selling Dreamcast I don't think that's true. Okay. I have 10 right here with the name of the game. Wait, no it is true. It is true. What's that? Because out of this world for the Sega Dreamcast

came out like three years ago. Okay. They are still releasing games for the Dreamcast. That's how much people like this system. Well. Myself included, because I bought Out of This World. I was like, wow, a Dreamcast game in the year 2021, oh my God.

Is that one still wrapped up? Out of This World? No, I popped it in. Okay, I'm curious. Out of This World not on the list, by the way? I wonder if the split. Of course not. It sold five copies. I wonder what the split is of exclusives versus third party.

That's the big thing I'm mulling over in my head. But I am gonna go third party and I'm going with a big franchise that I bet has snuck its way into the top 10. Resident Evil Code Veronica. 1.14 million copies, number three on our list. Number three, okay. Ooh, okay, I'm gonna say Sonic Adventure

has to be on that list. Sonic Adventure is on the list, number one with 2.5 million copies. There we go. Is it's direct sequel Sonic Adventure 2 on the list? It is on the list, number nine on the list with 500,000 copies. Yeah, a bit of a drop off there.

My God, that made me so sad. A quarter of the sales. That makes me sad. But that must have been around the time they were like, we're done with this, right? But also 500,000 copies of a game now, people would be like, get the fuck out of here. We're shutting the studio down and making sure

everybody that works here never works in video games again? Man, we didn't even talk about Concord. We don't have time. Real bummer for those developers. It's just you think about that, it's just like, I know the developments, like how much time people spend on that. And it's just a bummer.

Cause it does feel like it's a thing that Sony mishandled. But yeah, we don't have time for that. Okay, so we got Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, Resident Evil Code Veronica, there's seven left. That's right. I wonder if a 2K game is on there, but because it's worldwide

and because the NFL is so American specific, I'll wait on that for now. I'm gonna guess Soul Calibers on that list. It was a launch title, high profile title. Soul Calibers number seven on the list with a million copies soul. Okay. Pretty good for Soul Calibers. Yeah, not bad.

Bring Soul Calibers back, why not? They made Soul Calibers six. Was that most recent? I guess it was pretty recent. Yeah, they keep coming. I don't actually want it. I was thinking back on when I was watching EVO. I don't want actually I don't actually want it I'm thinking back on when I was watching evil I don't know if there was any soul caliber being played there must have been some but I don't I didn't catch any I bet I bet

that Marvel Capcom 2 is on this list you could bet that and you'd Be placing a losing bet. Wow. Wow. Let me see where it is on the list, because that could be interesting information. Jesus Christ. Marvel Capcom 2 not on the Dreamcast list. Not even in the top 15. That's as far as I got here. Holy shit!

Wow! Okay, uh, blub blub blub blub blub blub blub blub. Looks like you got taken for a ride there, Cam. I did, I got taken for a ride. Dun dun dun dun, dun dun dun dun. I did, I got taken for a ride. I'll go over some games we've already mentioned. It's Crazy Taxi on the list. It's number five on the list with 1.11 million copies.

So we have four out of the top five. We're missing number two. We're missing number two and number four. Oh, so we only have three out of the top five. Okay. What the fuck could number two be? Is number two, is that third party or is it first party? Is first party.

Okay, first party. First party Sega game that is underneath Sonic Adventure. Is Shenmue first party? Shenmue is number two on the list with 1.2 million copies. I think that did sell like gangbusters in Japan. So that makes a lot of sense. Okay, what else, what else? Was NBA 2K on Dreamcast?

NBA 2K was, I mean, like, let's just, let's guess them both. Is NFL 2K or NBA 2K on this? NFL 2k is Number four it's number four. Oh wow okay 13 million and is that to just 2k just the original would you like to guess 2k one is 2k one on the list It's number six with one point zero one million. I gotta do it 2k two not on the list People are like burning their DreamCraft.

But there's no NBA 2K on there? Not NBA 2K. NBA 2K1? It's on there with 504,000 coffees, number eight on our list. So did they not release an NBA 2K? It might not have come out till 2K1, I wonder. It would make sense that football was first, and then they're like, let's do basketball too,

and then for the next year they did it. All right, how many we got left? One more, number 10 on the list. That's the last one. Yeah, and I think this is insane. All right, I'll guess then I have an insane one. Is the Sega bass fishing game that came with the fishing peripheral on the list?

That is not it, no. That would've been a fun one. Is it Seaman? Seaman is number 10 on the list? That is not it, no. That would've been a fun one. Is it Sea Man? Sea Man is number 10 on the list of the all-time highest selling second Dreamcast game. Barrocks. Barrocks.

With, but the number is sad. With 399,342, specifically. I like that. That makes me happy. One of them is mine. Yeah, you're amongst them. Read down the top 10 one more time. No, okay.

Starting at number 10, we have Seaman. Seaman. Sonic Adventure 2, NBA 2K1, Soul Calibur, NFL 2K1, Crazy Taxi, NFL 2K, Resident Evil Code Veronica, Shenmue, and number one Sonic Adventure. Wow. That was fun. Some interesting, I was baffled by this list.

I wish that there wasn't, okay, here's the thing I wish hadn't happened. I wish that CRTs had run on the same input system as HDTVs because I feel like I can't recommend to people, hey, if you're at a thrift store, if you're at a used video game store and you see a Dreamcast, pick it up because it's gonna be not that expensive and you can throw a couple games in that bad boy

and have a good time. But the problem is you can't do that anymore. There's like a hard line in between certain consoles and modern era. And that bums me out a lot. Yeah, you gotta wait for them to make the mini version or whatever. Yeah.

What are you gonna do? Hey, that's this week's Get Played. Our producer's a real champ. Oh, fuck. Ah, well, who gives a shit? He just started smoking a cigar. Look, it sucks. I think from a preservation standpoint, you want all this stuff to be available. You want it to be playable on original hardware as close to original hardware as

possible. And yeah, because of the way technology is iterated, unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is on the verge of being lost. Producers Rochelle Chen, ranchyard underscore underscore starter. Music is by Ben Prunty, benpruntymusic.com. Our art is by Duck Brigade Design, duckbrigade.com. And hey, check out our Patreon, patreon.com slash get played where you can find our entire pre-Headgum back catalog plus ad free main feed episodes and also on our Patreon, patreon.com slash get played and get our Patreon, patreon.com slash get played.

And get our Patreon exclusive show, Get Animated. Matt, what's up this week? Oh, this week, Violet Evergarden. And I'm not gonna tip the hat. I'm not gonna say what we're thinking about this one. You just gotta tune in and find out for yourself, don't ya? Tune in, find out.

Was that your Violet Evergarden? Yeah, that was really good. I guess That was a hate gum podcast Hi guys, I'm a go Wodim check out my new show. Thanks dad now on head gum That was a HeadGum Podcast. Because on my new podcast, I sit down with father figures like Bill Burr, Kenan Thompson, Adam Pally, Hassan Minaj, Tim Meadows, Andy Cohen, and many, many more. I get to ask them the questions I've always wanted to ask a dad like, how do I know if the guy I'm dating is the one? Or how can I change the oil in my car? Can you even show me that?

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