ItoBandito wrote Yeah Saturn could of been good.

I always say it like this. The JAPANESE Saturn is awesome, the AMERICAN Saturn sucks hard. When I start to buy the games I want almost all of them are going to be Japanese. We hardly got any of the good games here in America so I finally want to play them on a real system.

The Dreamcast is still my choice for arcade fighting games. Project justice, Capcom vs SNK 1&2, Street fighter 3 Double Impact,  and Third Strike, Soul Caliber, Marvel VS Capcom 1&2, Guilty Gear X, Street Fighter Alpha 3, King of Fighters Evolution (its really 99), Fatal Fury Mark of the woves, and King of Fighters 2002 (import).

I really liked this Gaming Historian about the Dreamcast. It was so sad to see the Dreamcast go away, it was such a good system and a potential killer. It had everything that has made Microsoft boom with their Xbox. A good online service. If people only were ready for online and if it was backed up by something like Halo, perhaps the Dreamcast would still be here today, and it's sequel, and perhaps we would have seen Shenmue 3.

That's one reason why I want to get my hands on a Dreamcast. Shenmue 1. Shenmue 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, but I have never played Shenmue 1, and seeing as there was 10 million units sold. It shouldn't be so hard (and expensive) to track one down with memory card and controllers, right? Shenmue can be kinda odd priced though, sometimes I find it super cheap, and sometimes super expensive. Perhaps because of it's cult status. I know it didn't sell well, but I doubt that it's rare. It just one of those games people want to own I guess, so you can bump up the price a little. :P

Good show anyway. Watching this I really wished that I bought a Dreamcast when I played Jet Set in the store around launch, it looked good, felt great. But I never took the plunge, and many more like me probably had the same thoughts, if we just had more money in our pockets, maybe Sega would still be making consoles.

But, it was probably for the better. Sega is better off making games. Do we really need more than a western gaming console? A eastern gaming console? And a eastern console more marketed as a toy and something everyone can enjoy? Ofcourse, I'm talking about the X360, PS3 and the Wii. The market is really kinda full of consoles anyway, and with most games going multiplat, I don't really think Sega could have survivde to this day, even if they did, Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft would have to step down, I don't think there would be room for 3 gaming consoles marketed towards the gamer audience in todays climate.

well, um, enough ranting from me. :P

Johanz wrote That's one reason why I want to get my hands on a Dreamcast. Shenmue 1. Shenmue 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, but I have never played Shenmue 1, and seeing as there was 10 million units sold. It shouldn't be so hard (and expensive) to track one down with memory card and controllers, right?

Yeah Sheunmue 1 was great, its pretty common here and on ebay.  There have bee rumors that they may port it to the wii.  Anyway, Norm, you did a great job with this man!

That bit at the end about how the Dreamcast was a gamer's console and a "breach of fresh air" is absolutely true, but I'm not sure why.

When I played games as a kid, I got hooked on the NES, SNES and Genesis because there was a freshness and excitement about them back then.  It was like exploring uncharted territory and seeing the emergence of new technology.  But as I got older, I got used to it.  By the end of the 90's, I think I was going through kind of a "bitter gamer" phase because games just weren't providing the magic that they once did.  I figured it was just because I was jaded and thought I had seen it all by then.

But then came the Dreamcast.  In the months leading up to its release, I sensed a hint of that old excitement.  I put down a pre-order two months before release, which was kind of a big deal since I was mostly a Nintendo fanboy up to that point. ()  But the system just brought back that freshness of gaming that I had been missing for the past few years.  Even at the time, I mentioned that the Dreamcast reminded me of the NES, but I wasn't sure why.  I'm still not sure why.

No gaming system since has recaptured that feeling for me.

I once wrote a quick article for a friend's website about how the DC was ahead of its time.  I came across some surprising stuff.  You could play online console vs. PC games with it, and Microsoft still can't get "Live Anywhere" off the ground.  It could connect with the NeoGeo Pocket Color long before Nintendo tried pushing it's GameCube-GBA connectivity.  Heck, the fishing rod peripheral was a full-blown motion sensitive controller more than half-a-decade before the Wii came along, and the games it was compatible with included Virtua Tennis, Crazy Taxi, and Soul Calibur.