25 Years of the Sega Dreamcast

This is a head gun podcast.

All right, Sega, it's been a tough year.

The PlayStation 2,

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.

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 going to 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 Samade 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, this is a good area to be thinking of.

You know, we have these, these, 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.

Bricklayer comes with a brick and a trowel.

You build a brick wall.

So it's it It comes with one brick and a trowel?

Is that that sort of pizza pie-shaped metal thing?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, that's the difference.

It could be multiplayer, though.

Like

if your friend buys the game, they have a brick too.

And then their own brick, they come over.

You can stack both bricks.

And you have your own trowel to do some scrubbing.

Okay, what is the video game component of this, though?

Because 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.

Just just an idea we're just getting started yeah yeah we're warming up it's early it's i got i got to okay great the game is called follow my wife all right oh oh oh scandalous okay

and

what you do in the game is you get in your car and you park outside your wife's work uh 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.

John.

And and then her boss showed up there too john uh

i 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 did it come with like a steering wheel or controller or something

okay and like maybe like a long lens camera long lens camera uh a box of tissues um 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, he's grappling with his wife's alleged infidelity and what that means for his reality.

What does he really want?

Yeah.

He wants revenge.

So my game is called revenge, and it comes with the implement for revenge.

What?

A brick.

Okay.

You come up behind whoever's wronging you and you hit him 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, could you tie a note to the brick and throw it through a window that says, stay away from my wife?

Absolutely.

Shatter some glass.

Okay, okay.

Make some noise.

I think I'm just going to announce that we're canceling the system.

Wait, wait, hold on, hold on.

Hold on.

It's gonna get rash here, all right?

Okay.

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.

Make two.

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 Play.

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 Weiger.

That's me, Nick Weiger, and I'm here with our third host, Matt Apodaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Premiere 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.

That's right.

Two years.

9-9.

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.

Yes.

And the Japan Dreamcast was released way back on November 27th of 1998, almost a full year earlier.

A whole year.

An incredible delay.

And then it was another couple months until it was released in Europe and across the world.

Wow.

Yeah.

North America, 9999.

I was there.

If you're a, if you're under 25,

i think that maybe you don't appreciate that that that 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 console.

And this would have been in 1997 that you would have 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 game console that you couldn't physically see with your own eyes anywhere.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was like, and you know,

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 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 I mean, like, yeah, it was,

and then forums were also a big thing.

I remember reading about like reading people like on, uh, you know, uh, back when the, uh, when Neo Gaff was the gaming age forums, and when that was connected to, I guess, a now-defunct website.

Like, I remember reading people who had, like, imported a Dreamcast and their first-hand impressions.

But, like, it was a lot harder

to get information.

But also, a lot of those impressions are without photos, without video.

Right, 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.

Am I supposed to send a pic of my hog to this girl I'm interested in?

I'm going to get this film developed.

That wasn't a concept then.

That wasn't a concept.

Put this in an envelope with a letter.

I no, I there's no fucking way they were doing that.

There's no take a picture.

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, but I think it was a lot less common.

I can guarantee it was happening.

Like that maybe not at this at the level and mastery of now at the convenience of the master.

Because mastery is the right word.

Yes.

I think when Thomas Alva Ederson first came up with the, like one of the first things he did was take a pick of his hog.

Why not?

Oh, yeah.

Well, it was him, right?

I'm just going to say it was him.

It probably also was like a radiation process at that time.

And so it's like,

he got like a bad rash after.

He's like, ooh, this fucking thing.

I've seen two inventors here.

Louis LePrince and Johann Zahn.

Guess what?

Who fucking cares?

I'm crediting the American guy.

That's right.

Louis LePrince and photos are Prince.

How about that?

That's.

I think it was him.

I think it was him.

I give it to him.

Tiebreaker goes to him.

Happy anniversary to the dream.

Louis LePrince out my hog.

I gave it to do the show.

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 then didn't take baths.

Why?

Why?

Stinky ass when I was taking a picture of it.

I could just

walk out.

I could just leave.

I can't Google on this computer who took the first hog pic,

but I can't look it up on my phone.

Yeah, you can probably find the earliest.

I mean, I bet an early example exists from like the 19th century or something.

And you know, one of those things associated for like, they like, you know, when people write letters, yeah, like you know, they'd be off tomorrow or whatever, they'd be like, oh man, I wish I could jump on my hog.

Like, they'd be writing stuff like that.

How long I was out, it could be an hour.

Dearest Mildred, I spent a fortnight in the trench.

I only wish I could show you a photograph of my hog.

Yeah, yeah,

dear Gertrude, the nights are long and hard, just like my hog.

I wish I could show you.

Love Obadiah.

Good, 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 at evil merchant what's going on i lost my shoe oh boy

it's always in the last place you look to 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 And I lost my shoe.

Now, you know, I would not, yeah, 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's, it can be often pretty polluted and, you know, kind of, kind of filled with water.

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 like where I could see the L.A.

River really good.

Me too.

And it was...

It was gorgeous.

It was terrible.

It was really scary, actually.

Yeah, but it was unbelievable.

I'd never seen, you know, been a Southern California kid in my whole life.

Have spent time near the L.A.

River, had not ever really seen that much water in it before.

No, it takes fascinating.

It takes almost a flood for the river bed to actually be filled up.

Otherwise, it's usually just kind of a thin trickle just sort of bisecting the city.

Yeah.

So your shoe's probably somewhere in there.

Is that what you're saying?

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 yeah

they usually don't sell 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 and Noah, best.

I do.

I've got a network, an underground network of merchants.

You know, shoes, like all kind of, like any sort of technology, any sort of innovation, it had periods where it, you know, 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 was a huge innovation.

It was pretty seismic.

What I was going to say...

It was pretty crazy when they did that.

It was pretty crazy.

You had, and, you know, again, we're talking about the Sega Dreamcast.

So, you know, 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 then at the tongue of your shoe and then you could use it to pump it up fill it up with air and and sort of tighten it uh the you know oh i thought it put air in the bottom so it may

you could adjust like uh 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 squeezed your foot yeah it just sort of like made the foot the the shoe fit a little bit more snugly

to hurt maybe if i had that i wouldn't have lost my shoe

that's true No, I was going.

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 shape food

for shoe for a different shape shoe for each foot.

Which foot did people have then?

Well, they still had two feet, but they were wearing one kind of shoe.

That like that that so it was like a little bit less ergonomic.

What was the prime shoe?

Why was the foot?

Like was it like, oh, I got two rights?

No, you had basically both, one of each.

Um, if you have both, if you're blessed to have both.

No, I mean, like, what, 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?

No, you because no, that well, God.

If you only got one shoe type,

but you have two of them.

Uh-huh.

What is the which foot is the one?

Which one is the original?

Hmm.

You know, Resident Evil Merchant.

Kind of a riddle.

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 i hate it i wish i hadn't had the thought

anyway i lost my shoe

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What are you playing, Nick Weiger?

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.

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, it is legitimately a great game.

I just, I don't, I don't know what people want anymore.

Because like here, if you, 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?

Yeah.

And it was in the Star Wars world and every corner of the 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 yeah i feel like the the the ubisoft brand doesn't hold the same good faith that it used to have of course right that sort of like and you know patching it before launch yep didn't did not they're not doing themselves favors.

Nope.

That is pretty common,

in all fairness.

But delete the same.

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...

The Ubisoft formula is kind of exhausted.

Yes.

You know, like something like the Avatar game came out last year that I think some people were like, oh, it's kind of good, actually.

And other people were kind of like, this is just, you know,

we're all used to this.

And I feel like also just like 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 if 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.

Yeah.

Because there's no, Assassin's Creed was more,

I don't know, the gameplay loop was designed to be be more addictive in Assassin's Creed.

Yeah.

And this is more exploratory, more conversational.

Uh, and there's more like

like you go, 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, is it...

There's 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 cats.

Have you seen Nick'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.

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, I mean,

he's amazing.

Because when you hear Matt Levs this game, it's like, there's got to 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 sort of, from, from where I'm sitting, there are three other things that are against it.

Before we leave Nick's.

Oh, yes.

So Nick's is the little pet, right?

Yeah.

Wait, Nicks and Nick.

I like one of them.

Being double here.

Wait a minute.

And I love the other one.

Oh, that's sweet.

I don't have that kind of love for a video game character.

But NYX 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,

NYX 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 like, yeah, maybe Sully's on the radio or something like that.

But with NYX, 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, Nick's.

I don't know.

We better stay quiet in this one.

Yeah, yeah.

Wait, does Nick's talk?

No, Nick's like a little dog.

Makes a little, like, you know,

yeah, that's pretty good.

That's pretty good.

Uh,

there are three other things I think that 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 dissimilar from what I'm thinking.

There's a lot of bad will towards the Star Wars.

There's a lot of bad will toward it, and people don't engage.

There are, I feel like, bad actors in the 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

the female protagonist is a big turn off for those people as well.

Yep.

The other thing,

the reviews 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 going to make you feel like you're having the same time over and over again.

You're going to have a bad time doing it because you're not really getting to explore the same in the same pace that we are.

I've done

three.

I've done almost nothing.

Like main missions and I've been doing exclusively signed 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.

Or I'm just like, oh, and then I'll forget that I can run.

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.

I like that.

I love to lean.

It's fucking awesome.

Yeah, you love to lean.

I hope you love to clean too, buddy.

What?

Doing a little too much leaning, I've noticed.

But part of my duties here?

Yeah, you gotta clean up.

But like,

and the stuff that you you can learn stuff while you're leaning, yep, like 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, where like, you know, you're this, 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 where it's like, the huts, well, they really call it like it is.

Yes.

But

it all feels really good and like super engaging and like just it 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 yep uh i i you sort of you just drop in and you feel like you're in it i haven't even i haven't even flown my goddamn ship yet you haven't no oh shit i'm like just i'm going so slow um and just like exploring and i've ridden the speeder i love riding the speeder yeah speeder's great great.

I'm having so much fun.

If this planet was the one planet, I'd be like, this is this is a game of the year.

This is so good.

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

like a stormtrooper battle in the middle of the fucking like plains there yeah and was like this is emergent like 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 I 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 huts, you get hut inspired fashion that's not like, oh, I've got a Jabba mask.

It's like, oh, this is kind of like how these fucking weirdos dress.

Yeah.

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 i think that's nice it's really really i fucking love it yeah that's fun i i i'm i'm i'm down for anything where you can join factions i love joining a faction uh i i'm i'm looking through the the the crit the the reviews it seems like the critics are maybe a little bit more favorable than the public at large it seems like the the metacritic is sitting around 75

cross-platforms, and the user views are closer to 50-50.

Maybe that could be some brigading, but I have also seen some complaints about bugs, which I'm not sure if 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.

But I know, I mean, I've seen people, you know, these same Star Wars people that are going straight for like the worst base, like type stuff, being like, the care, you can make a character look however you want, and the character is like not attractive.

And I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about.

Yeah, she's a pretty lady.

Hey, Ves is everything to me now.

Um, 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 ladder because there's kind of a yellow paint

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.

So 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 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.

Sure.

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 like black and white and it'd be like dead.

Yeah.

But it's not like I've died.

It's just that I'm not supposed to go that way yet.

Whereas like Baldur's Gate rewarded me every time I ended up in a place I wasn't supposed to be.

Sure, right.

Like, it feels like if I can sequence break

or even, not even intentionally sequence break, but just be like, oh, if you're going to 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, you, you, 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.

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.

Yeah.

That's that all of that like

sort of like boundary stuff is a little frustrating in an open world game.

I want to share just something that Matt said earlier, which was about you know, the, the, the, how broken the pipeline is for game reviews, because, you know, anyone who works on any of these sites will tell you that like the overwhelming volume of their views for a piece of criticism are launch weekend.

Like, 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, yeah, has to blitz through a game in a ridiculous amount of time and then try to come up with some sort of

informed

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, like reflecting on its overall

meaning as

a piece of media.

Like I feel like that's something that's so much more interesting, but that's not what the incentives are for if you're someone who like reviews games.

Like it's like it has to be out right away.

So 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 you can get a little bit you can still get the the hits you know the traffic on your website or whatever if you or you know to your uh paper of record or whatever it is you still get that coverage in there people are gonna 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 or 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

you know engaging with like an article on a website for a certain amount of time or whatever it is but it's really 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 to us the world could have been anything and it chose this yeah makes me sick we we made this we were like you know know what system would be great?

Yeah.

Is if we made these websites that were

that were penalized if you

did a complete job

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.

I mean, yeah, it's the

infrastructure of the of social media has kind of led to this.

Well, I mean, like, if Google hadn't been an ad-based revenue 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.

Yeah.

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.

So Ubisoft Connect?

Yeah, whatever.

Yeah, I just like it.

I was like, I'm going to sign up 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, like,

I will play it with an open mind.

My question is, do you think this is a thing we should cover?

Do you want to spend some more time in it and see what you think?

I don't want to 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 want to be pressured to push through this game because the very thing that made the reviewers hate it is the thing I don't want to 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.

Like, 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?

September, Los Angeles summer.

That is true.

That is true.

Hot week.

Hot week.

Hot week.

Green Day guys getting the good sleep in.

What?

I don't, I just want to know what it 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.

Yep.

It is similar to things also having an anniversary.

Yeah.

Yes.

I'm just saying if we're if we're saying like if we're saying

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 Days are kicking.

What a fucking summer that must have been for definitely maybe and Dookie to come out in the same summer.

Probably

not as hot, not as hot, probably.

But you mean like physically on Earth?

Yeah, yeah, no, definitely.

Not less hot.

But there's a song on American Idiot called 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.

Nice month-long slumber.

I love it.

Wake him up October 1st.

We took all that now.

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,

as a joke, I'm not sure that I appreciate it, but I do love the thought that went into it.

Like, it's a lot of information to pack into a single sentence that came off to me like nonsense.

That's kind of his style.

I fucking loved it.

Any other thoughts on Star Wars Outlaws?

Any other little guys we had?

And droids of note?

Sabak?

Any more insight into Sabak?

I fucking love Sabak so much.

I'm sorry.

I love it.

I fucking love it.

I love Sabak.

I helped a droid with a 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.

Yeah.

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 a 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 tattooing'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.

It didn't happen, but.

Yeah.

It didn't happen.

It's weird that they would.

I don't know.

I saw it.

Saw Grito say McClunky.

That's hung in the bar, his last words.

This is an absolutely true story.

One time I was in Japan and I had my cell phone with me, but I was

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That's a true story.

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I eventually got off that roof when the sun rose.

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Nick, what have you been playing?

I'll talk about the Shadow of the Erd Tree DLC a little bit.

There we fucking go.

So I was, you know, 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 like kicking the shit out of me, which, you know, I'll happen in these games.

But I was just like, like i this i was really struggling with this guy as when i got to a second form i was like i feel like i have no shot at all and i have not been looking up anything in this game i've not i've been just sort of like wandering around taking stuff in uh exploring spots can you tell us this boss well here's the thing okay i i looked this up and i checked a guy i was like how what's what's the how do i how do i beat this boss and i just looked up a guide real quick and i found out it was the last boss and i was like oh i accidentally got to the final boss a little bit too early oh my gosh so i i i was just that was like 10 hours ago in my play my play play session.

So I just walk, I was like, I got to leave.

I'm in the wrong dungeon.

And I just, I just left and I went exploring a bunch of other places.

That big boss,

I got to go.

Well, from his perspective, he's like, oh, the fuck is going on?

I want to kill him.

Kicking the shit out of him.

They just left.

Sitting everyone kicking my ass.

It's a really funny Elden Ring

feeling that they must get.

Like, Melania sees people come and come and come and come.

And then one of them is just like, fuck this, and leaves

this guy

jar on his head and a diaper beat the shit out of me

uh so i you know i've talked about the level design a bunch of me matt we were talking we're texting more about this but like the ruins areas like First off, it's just like kind of like this, the this this maze-like construction, but in like an open sort of space.

Like that's like, I don't know, just like really cool geometrical to figure that out, but also just the art direction of it.

It's just like really,

those ruins that you find.

And I think I find the quest like 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 Messer 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, incredible character design.

Great, great boss fight.

And it's a super fun fight.

Yes.

And it's really challenging.

The buttrescence tonight, I'm not sure if you got to that guy who you just 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, whatever people were writing.

And I was just like, all right, fine.

And then you just jump and you fall forever.

And he's this big, stinky guy who's got like an insane attack sequence.

And it is one of those things that I start to feel.

And I've read some, you know, reactions to the DLC, which are like,

we've you this is turning into such like a waiting game now like like a like a boss will have like a you know like a six hit combo that you can't interrupt and so it's just like a 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 that is definitely a boss where he's like he's got this insane thing he just kind of keeps going at you um he's putting you to sleep he throws his horse at you at a certain point there there's just like so many attacks that are coming in a sequence um and 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 became this has become one of my main things that i use along with that anvil um that big anvil hammer uh that you know 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.

Like, 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 because of these 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,

I think it was 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

gotten

the map piece for.

I've not found the map yet.

And so I have just huge sections that are just kind of fog of war.

And I still, I've heard about the Bale guy and Bale, and I still have not found Bale.

You haven't gone to that 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 that's really why yeah because i haven't done the putrescent night either yeah that guy i hey look i i'd i'd seek that guy out that was a lot of fun um uh but too scared to go back but i yeah i ended up beating the saint like romina the saint of the bud like i think pretty early because i was like i i went after her and then i like later went back to i think i did her maybe even before mesper and some other other some other fights um anyway uh the you know that there are some some performance issues on PC, which I know a lot of people have encountered.

And I just, I wish it was,

this is like one of my favorite games.

And so I wish it 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 that 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 got you playing the base game.

You got the Jar guys.

You get the Jar Alexander.

These cute little guys.

You've seen them around.

So like, yeah, okay, sometimes you fight one and you kill him, 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

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.

Really disturbing.

When I got to that section, it was

in a game full of...

gigantic bummers.

Yeah.

One of the bigger bummers in the game.

It fucking sucks.

I was like, I hate this.

It's nasty.

It's fucking.

I like to look at this.

I like to know this.

And like the, yeah, like the, when they crack and like the creatures are sort of like half in, they look all fucking gross.

Awful, awful shit.

But an incredible game.

I'm looking forward to finishing.

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, 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 is 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 Dreamcasts, 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 was 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 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 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 Dreamcast is really cool.

I liked it a lot.

I didn't have as much time.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it was good, though.

It was good.

I liked it.

Can we play the Dreamcast startup sound?

Are you asking me?

I don't have have that prepped.

No, I was asking like just the room.

Could we?

Can we?

Yes, we can.

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.

Yeah.

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 ports that looked as good.

Like still, arcade cabinets for the most part were outstripping everything but high-end PCs.

Yeah.

And,

you know, but then you had like the

Naomi hardware that was in a lot of

Sega cabinets was the equivalent to the guts of the Dreamcast.

So it was, you were just getting arcade perfect ports anyway, even though that was a Namco game.

But I was going to say is like, 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 textures are smoother and that there was more filtering and shaders, but it was like.

I want to say the thing that the

everything was so low poly just like that.

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 9 and you'd wonder what they were supposed to look like.

Yeah, it was still in the same way that sort of like, you know, you'd look at the pixel art of a, just to give you on Final Fantasy, look at the pixel art they really like,

but but of a character in Final Fantasy IV, and then you look at the manual to see Yoshitaka Amano's character designer, it'd be like, okay, this is like representative of that.

This is trying to accomplish that.

It was the same sort of thing, but in 3D, whereas now 3D is like, you know, trying its best to,

you know, represent either reality or something, or like some sort of stylized, you know, world.

Yeah, it, it, it's, it, it was, 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 use 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 you'd be like, wow, that's the peak of graphics.

That's incredible.

And then you would see the face on a Shen Mu 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, you know, smudgy, low-res texture.

Um, yeah, I mean, I mean, like,

it is crazy how much of a jump, because, like, where were we at 10 years ago in gaming?

Where, what, what, what hardware generation were we on?

Was PlayStation, PlayStation 4 was out, right?

Like, we're, yeah, so we're dealing with PlayStation 4

versus PlayStation 5 now.

You know, things were kind of like roughly in the same place.

Obviously, we've got more powerful hardware now, but it was like, you know, that there's not the seismic gap versus like 1989, we're talking about like 8-bit any like hardware, you know, console hardware.

And then to 1999, 10 years, we've got like two generation, 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 a crude 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 Shen Mu 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 like a pretty high-def uh version of uh Shen Mu for the Sega Dreamcast, but they're obviously two different styles at that point, but it looks like a huge leap forward.

Yeah, and it really, like when you would see,

say, Virtua Fighter running on the 32X,

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.

Like 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 is a last-gen game.

And if you play a game now, it's not, you're not like, oh, this looks so much better than Death Stranding.

Yeah, I'm like convinced unless we start playing

like

actual people, like filmed people in video games, we'll never be impressed

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 they, as you turn them, they chunk into the next spot.

Yes.

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, 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.

Um, I, I, there, there's a time when Dreamcast is out, right?

And they're, they're about to get

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 a was about to thunder into the room.

And I, my, my pet head canon, 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, if you, there, there are games that came to the West like C-Man.

Yeah, C-Man is what I was, 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 are 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,

you know, that there's a Peter Moore

who is president of Sega America for a time.

And there's an article from a few years ago on the, I mean, the headline is Peter Moore and Why the Plug Was Pulled on the Dreamcast.

And part of the quote here is

redirecting that, or is directed at that.

Oh, really?

Well, to some degree, but kind of from a slightly different angle.

One of the things that Sega had, I'm reading this, Peter Moore quoted on Games Radar 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.

Again, 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 into gear, despite the initial controversy, that this was the way the industry was going, but our content at Sega was still very much Japanese.

You know, everything involves samurai swords or ninjas or fish or fantasy.

Yeah, well, we certainly saw it coming.

So, yeah, I think that that, you know, that's he's not sit using the word weird there, but he is talking about like stuff that is 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, 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 the, you know, on PlayStation 1 because that did have like a fully 3D environment.

And some of the games that we were talking about earlier, you know, 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 limitations of the hardware by using these pre-rendered backgrounds that could have, you know, that could be really gorgeous, but then the camera was fixed in place.

Um, and you had like a

relatively,

you know, low-fidelity character model existing within that reality.

It's pretty crazy that we no longer ever talk about, I mean, maybe you do with the Xbox Series S, but nobody has to talk about the hardware limitations anymore.

Like, 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 need it to be and able to achieve these effects.

Or

when

EECO 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

content on the scale now that, yeah, that's, it's, it's, 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 2.

Sure.

Like, that game came out in 2020.

Yeah.

And they, have they released any original title since then?

I mean, if you want to call The Last of Us Part 1, the Remastered?

If you want to 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, 8, and 9 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, the death knell for this.

I really feel like that was the thing.

Because

like you were saying, a lot of people were, their PlayStation brand loyalty from PlayStation 1.

So they had that.

So they already were like 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.

That was a rarity, the 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 this.

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 going to make it the PlayStation 2, and we're going to 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.

And then later TV 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 it's 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 the media.

But it's interesting that the dv like not having the dvd

uh capability killed the dreamcast because

nintendo's never had that they just like they have never been able they've never compete 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 that, the N64 would have killed a lot of hardware manufacturers.

Like, that in and of itself was like, this is so fucking weird.

You were, you're stubbornly sticking to cartridges, which are like 10 to 20 times more expensive than discs.

Like, like, you're sticking to that.

And still, the games you come up with, like, your, your triple-A titles, uh, Mario 64 and Ocarine of Time are so good, and Mario Kart 64 that people will just like still buy this thing in droves.

I think that part of until the 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 and you like if you if you fuck like if you wanted to fuck with that shit you had to get an n64 it was like the the four gaming experiences sold the console to you yeah 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 want to try the bowling game.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's like, it's, it's kind of like, oh, what you're speaking to is that, 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, these incredible brains and these incredible artists who are making this content that just is that people don't want to 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?

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?

He's talking about the incomprehensible

console.

I think 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.

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.

Yeah.

I mean, like again the wii you should have been would have been another thing that would have killed like any other hardware company but nintendo survives

they win the next generation it's crazy uh just just to just to talk about some some wii you exclusives uh so people don't shout them at us breath of the wild technically was a wii you game although you know it came up the switch at the same time super mario 3d world i mentioned pikmin 3 uh 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, you know, like Donkey Kong, Tropical Freeze.

Captain Go Treasure.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker.

There were some good games.

And, you know, like, 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 going to make any any Dreamcast games.

And, and, you know, none of us are really, I'm the one Sporto here, but I, and I played some sports games.

I don't really play sports games anymore.

Sports games are a gigantic 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 have been the last one they made.

But the ones they made for the Dreamcast were so much better than what Madden was doing at the time that EA was like, we got to do something.

And what EA did is they bought exclusivity to the NFL license.

So the NFL 2K games could no longer exist.

And 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 going to 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 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 like you're you're not cheating off of my screen right but you could at any time just see what the other 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 i i think that there were

There's definitely a multiverse where the Dreamcast succeeds and say the GameCube absolutely fails, right?

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 go to war 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's still choked on a pretzel in this alternate reality.

Remember when my dad threw up?

So there was a time when

the Dreamcast has the four ports.

If you have 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.

This, again, remember, this looks like an arcade game.

Like, that's just

when 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 PowerStream, 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 attendance.

And you get people to come over.

then everybody is excited and they and they want the Dreamcast.

But it's only for this very, very

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,

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, you know, like the way it was, the grips were not aligned with your wrists.

So you had to like turn your hands at kind of like an odd angle to hold it.

And so for like 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 like that.

I was a fan of that controller.

I love the 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.

Like, so I love the controller.

What I'm shocked by is that I think

the first dual analog controller 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 Streamcast.

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 look that up so I know I'm not talking out of my fucking No, I know what you're talking about the the the the dual analog stick and then the dual shock came out afterwards and yes, those both

PlayStation one I remember that I owned it and it would it had the weird thing where it was like it had the concave

analog sticks.

So they had they had a weird feel to them.

It was released in 1997 27 years ago.

So it's surprising to me that that Sega didn't see this and be like oh we should cop that form factor and put a dual analog stick 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 to maybe inject a little positivity in this conversation?

I mentioned Soul Calibur.

Because I didn't have one of these, but my uncle had one growing up, and I was fascinated by it.

Because

at this point, I probably didn't even have a, I must have had a PlayStation 1 at this point.

But I remember just being blown away by it.

And one of the games that I loved on this, my uncle worked at a video game, or not a video game, like a movie rental place that rented video games also.

So he would always come home with a bunch of games.

And sometimes there would be one in there for me.

So

I could see what was going on.

Looney Toon Space Race.

Looney Toon Space Race is one of the great kart racers, and it is completely forgotten.

Yeah,

it's so good, and it is so funny.

Because it's 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.

Like, that's good.

That's fun.

That's really funny.

I loved that.

I obviously loved Marvel vs.

Capcom 2.

And I had experience with C-Man, which we did an episode on in our early format in the very early goings of the show.

But I remember being compelled by Shen Mu for some reason.

Shen Mu 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.

I'd be like, oh, this one's boring.

I'm out.

But for Shen Mu, I was like, I'm going to sit here and watch Shen Mu.

I was hyped for Shen Mu.

The wildest part part about Shen Mu to me at the time was that you could walk into an arcade and play other games in your game.

Yeah, I like that.

And I was like, what the fuck is this?

Like, that was so crazy to me at the time.

Yeah,

I mean, like, it had some real novelty to it.

It's, I think, a wildly ambitious game that even at the time didn't really work.

It's like, this is kind of, you know, kind of clunky.

This is kind of a mess.

And I think this is, that was one where, like, the technology wasn't quite there.

But I also, I think, like, they just hadn't figured out how to do one of these games.

I think they needed to iterate it on a little bit more.

But I mean, obviously we don't get the Yakuza like a Dragon series without Shen Mu.

I'm going to shout out some games here.

Yeah, please.

Project Justice, which is the 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 C-Man.

And also just that they had a keyboard peripheral, which was partly for Phantasy Star Online, which I never got into, but I got the keyboard for Typing of the Dead, and I loved it.

Street Fighter 3 third strike best port at the time of Street Fighter 3.

I want to shout out Ikaruga, 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.

Schmupp.

Yeah, Ikaruga 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.

I thought Powerstone 2 was amazing.

I thought Sonic Adventure was fun.

I thought Shen Mu was weird.

I thought Soul Calibur was amazing.

And I put more hours into Marvel vs.

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.

Yeah.

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 saw some others.

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 rollerbladed around town and spray painted and did tricks, and it was super duper fun.

It had a great sense of movement, great running around.

Virtua tennis, I mentioned.

I'm not a tennis guy at all, but like that was just like a really cool looking and really just like a great playing just tennis game.

And look, there's something like very fundamental about like a tennis game because it just it takes you back to pong or it takes you back to table tennis.

Like this is an elementary sort of competition.

Yeah.

Um and that was really well executed.

Uh Space Channel 5.

Yep.

Very brief game, didn't have a lot to it, but it was a really fun rhythm game with a really cool aesthetic.

Oolala, really cool character.

Samba de Amigo, I've mentioned before.

I just

get another insane peripheral, Maracas peripherals that existed for it.

And then you know what?

Powerstone, in Powerstone 2 we talked about Dead or Alive 2, another fighter, which is more of a casual fighter, but that was another one that like liked Soul Caliber.

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 going to, like, if I can get air conditioning

in a place where I can play video games, then I'm going to play these old, I'm going to 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.

Cause 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 a Chrono Trigger episode, and it was just like, you know, once, once in the 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 playing a JRPG, I'm just playing it to vibe.

And so, like,

the random encounters are kind of just part of the experience of like, I'm going to play this for like a half hour and I'm going to beat some guys and then I'm going to save and then I'm going to turn it off.

I don't know if the,

what else to say about the old Dreamcast.

I mean, really, really cool system.

Neither of you played Looney Toon Space Race?

I did not play Looney Toon 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 sell shaded, it looks great.

It looks like it looks pretty good no that's a good looking screenshot god those old crt you get a CRT look at your fucking cool let me see let me see

oh my god it looks this well Dreamcast also had a VGA output yes right you could plug it into a monitor so you it looked high like you could play it on a high def monitor a monitor that had

because people didn't have HD TVs yet right 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 like your Sony Trinitron or whatever.

You're still watching it on.

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 L C D 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.

Wow.

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.

Yeah.

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 weren't previously even released for the Dreamcast, you can direct arcade port now to a Dreamcast with

like a

without the disk spinner.

What do you call those?

Where you don't

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 disk 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 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, Sega 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 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 and 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 get a fucking CRT.

I think I figure 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, it's just everyone was super hyped for.

And even though it was viewed as something of a disappointment at the time, I love that game.

I'm a defender of that game.

I love it too.

But yeah, people were,

I fucking knew people who were getting finalized as like final visiting.

Hey, I'll play that instead of getting a Dreamcast.

Yeah, they got completely cucked.

But, you know, whatever.

That's Sega for you.

Jesus Christ.

Sat in a chair while Sonny railed their wife.

What?

Matt, we get a segment.

Yeah,

it's time for a pixel chart.

It's our

video game sales chart segment.

Yeah, our video game sales chart segment.

And this this time,

we're going to be talking about the top 10 highest-selling Sega Dreamcast games.

Okay, now is this worldwide?

As far as I know, yes.

And these figures were updated as of February of this year.

Because they're still selling Dreamcast.

I don't think that's true.

Okay.

So 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 is.

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 going to 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 going to say Sonic Adventure has to be on that list.

Sonic Adventure is on the list.

Number one with 2.5 million copies.

Is its 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.

Oh my God, that made me so sad.

A quarter of the sales.

That makes me sad.

That must have been around the time they were.

But also, 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 Concorde.

We don't have time.

Real bummer for those developers.

Yeah.

It's just, you think about that.

It's just like, I know what the development's like,

how much time people spend on that.

It's just, it's just a bummer.

Because it does feel like it's a thing that Sony mishandled.

Yep.

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 going to guess Soul Calibur is on that list.

It was a launch title, high-profile title.

Soul Calibur is number seven on the list with a million copies sold.

Okay.

Pretty good for Soul Calibur.

Not bad.

Bring Soul Calibur back, why not?

They made Soul Calibur six.

It was recently pretty recent.

Can they keep coming?

I don't actually, I don't actually won.

You know, thinking back on when I was was watching Evo, I don't know if there was any Soul Calibur 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 is not on the screen.

Marvel Capcom is not on the list.

It's not in the top 15.

That's as far as I got here.

Yeah.

wow uh

looks like you got taken for a ride there i did i got taken for a ride

i'll go over some games we've already mentioned is crazy taxi on the list it's number five on the list with 1.11 million copies so we have one point we have we have four out of the top five we're missing number two uh 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 not is number two is that third party or is it first party?

It is first party.

Okay, first party.

Uh uh uh uh uh uh

first party Sega game that is underneath Sonic Adventure.

Is it is Shen Mu first party?

Shen Mu 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.

Um, okay, what else?

What else?

What, put, put it, was NBA 2K on Dreamcraft?

Yeah, 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.

Oh, it's number four.

Oh, wow.

2.13 million.

And is that just 2K?

Just the original.

Would you like to guess 2K1?

Is 2K1 on the list?

It's number 6 with 1.01 million.

I got to do it.

2K2?

Not on the list.

You fool.

Yeah, but I thought people were like burning their Dreamcraft.

wait is is uh so there 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 i did they not release an nba 2k it might not have come out till 2k 1 i wonder it would make sense that football was first and then they're like let's do basketball two 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 think 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 have been fun.

Is it C-Man?

C-Man is number 10

of the all-time highest-selling Sega Dreamcast game.

But the number is sad

with 399,342 specifically.

I like that.

That makes me happy.

One of them is mine.

You're amongst them.

Read down the top 10 one more time.

Okay, starting at number 10, we have Seaman.

See Man.

Sonic Adventure 2, NBA 2K1, Soul Calibur, NFL 2K1, Crazy Taxi, NFL 2K, Resident Evil, Code Veronica, Shen Mu, and Number One, Sonic Adventure.

Wow.

That was fun.

Some interesting.

I was baffled by this list.

I wish 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 HD TVs 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 going to 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 the modern era.

And that's, that bums me out a lot.

Yeah, you got to wait for them to make the mini version or whatever.

Yeah.

What are you going to do?

Hey, that's this week's Get Played.

Our producers are Chen.

Hello, who gives a shit?

He just started smoking a cigar.

Look, it's, 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, Ranch Yard underscore underscore starter.

Music is by Ben Prunty, BenPruntyMusic.com.

Our art is by DuckBrigade Design, DuckBrigade.com.

And hey, check out our Patreon, patreon.com slash get played, where you can find our entire pre-head gum back catalog, plus ad-free main feed episodes.

And also on our Patreon, patreon.com slash get played, You can get our Patreon exclusive show, get animated.

Matt, what's up this week?

Oh, this week, Violet Evergarden.

And I'm not going to tip the hat.

I'm not going to say what we're thinking about this one.

You just got to tune in and find out for yourself, don't you?

Tune in, find out.

Was that your Violet Evergarden?

Yeah, that was really good.

I guess

I got played.

Got played?

That was a head gun podcast.