DREAMCAST
RETRO GAMING
It is really funny, but when Sega first released their Dreamcast
console back in 1999 or so, it originally left me cold. Quite
highly priced at that time, combined with the fact that I didn't
have a great deal of spare cash around at that stage, meant that
I almost ignored the machine itself. I was never into consoles
that much and had sold an Atari Jaguar console a few years
earlier, on the grounds that I had not used it much and that it
was taking up space at home at the time. These things happen ...
Fast forward some time to the second Jagfest weekend organised
in the UK. This particular gaming weekend was rather good in
that it mixed all of us general Falcon and ST users with Jaguar
gamers such as Linkovitch, Tyrant & Stone amongst others. Also
in the area was Mug UK and Nick Harlow, along with rather a
number of Dreamcast consoles set up for free play on, courtesy
of their various owners. I got sucked into this, and the rest is
history.
Jump a couple of months or so and within days of Gamestation
(our local retro gaming store that supports it to a good extent)
getting some Dreamcasts in stock, I bought one from them, paying
around 25 ukp for the console & all leads, including a gamepad.
The machine itself came with a copy of Chu Chu Rocket as well,
which was a personal choice from the games available on the
shelves at that point in time.
Realising that quite a lot of good games could be downloaded
from the 'net, this is mainly where most of my collection has
come from as a result. Partly, even though the general quality
on sale was ok, the better games simply were not available in
any form on sale locally. I have yet to try the distributors in
London, but Ebay tends to be a good bet to browse through
original stuff too, having obtained the composite video lead and
another 2 gamepads through the site.
The games that I have so far are classic ones, titles like Soul
Caliber, Gauntlet: Legends, Virtua Tennis 2, Sonic Adventure and
quite a few homebrew discs, including a rather good version of
MAME, the multiple arcade machine emulator, with around 300
games or so included on the disc. UAE, the ultimate Amiga
emulator, is also available on a CD with quite a good selection
of games, but this tended to be a bit buggy.
The Dreamcast itself has become a rather good retro console,
mainly because the quality of the releases was so high over the
time. Even now, in 2006, games are still being released, Radirgy
and Under Defeat are the newest games so far, I hope there will
be more in due course. It's a shame in a way that Sega decided
to stop producing the console, it could possibly have been a
worthy contender to the Playstation 2, had it been marketed
correctly.
I'm pleased with the console so far & may get some time to
compete in some gaming competition at future Jagfest events in
UK. We'll see what happens, eh ;)
Felice for Alive, 2006-07-30
|
