Sega Dreamcast

[Chris V6 255]

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Ryan Geddes: There are editors at IGN who are for more into fighting games than I am. I'm the guy who picks a character, learns every move and then drives his opponents batty with the same set of moves over and over again. I'm not a fighting game strategist, and I don't know every character's backstory, weakness and special move by heart. That's because when I buy a fighting game, I usually buy it for the graphics. That's why I picked up Soulcalibur for the Dreamcast, and it was well worth the purchase. For my money, nothing looked better than Namco's 3D fighter at the time. And although there were games I spent more time playing than SC, it's the one I always pulled out to impress my jealous friends who were still putt-putting along with the PlayStation. The animations were smooth as silk, the characters' hair and clothes moved realistically (for the time), and when everything was in motion, you were guaranteed to see some jaws drop. For me, that was what Soulcalibur was all about – pure eye candy. Add that to the fact that it's simply one of the best fighting games ever made, and you have a top-5 game.

Levi Buchanan: I do not like The Offspring now. I did not like them in 2000. I would not like them in a box. I would not like them with a fox. However, within the vacuum-sealed, hellzapoppin world of Crazy Taxi, I cannot imagine a better soundtrack for blasting through traffic to deliver fares to baseball stadium while bringing them to the brink of heart attack. This arcade hit was a Dreamcast-seller, the kind of bizarre game that you could only find on SEGA hardware. The Dreamcast port of the game actually improves on the arcade release since it adds extra real estate to scream through at a zillion mph… while listening to the Offspring. But it still maintains those arcade roots as you cannot just jam on Crazy Tax forever. This is a skill game about not only getting from A to B as fast as you can, but also pulling off stunts in the interim to boost your bonuses. It wasn't until the casual/indie/XBLA revolution that you again found home games like Crazy Taxi that are designed for short burst thrills.

Erik Brudvig: It really isn't all that different from Pong, but man was the first Virtua Tennis ever good. I still laugh when I think about how Jim Courier's strength was listed as "Various Shots." In my mind, there still is no greater tennis player than King or Master. The multiplayer game was near perfect in its simplicity (assuming you didn't dive around too much). The single player game somehow made hitting tennis balls at targets and playing other goofy mini games seem natural. The Dreamcast was a very social console for me and that made Virtua Tennis one of my favorites to pull out and play with a few friends.

Levi Buchanan: The first time I saw Jet Grind Radio was at the 2000 spring Tokyo Game Show and I hovered over one of those kiosks like a bear that just found an abandoned honeycomb. This game still defines the Dreamcast for me -- and SEGA, too, in a sense. The level of risk-taking and inventiveness in JGR is just rarely seen anymore. It pioneered an entirely new art style that is still copied to this day. The music is as far out as Pluto; I've never heard a better game soundtrack since. The game itself, a graffiti revolution against Tokyoto's Orwellian overlords by hip cartoon heroes, is still as playable today as it was nine years ago (although the well-tuned Jet Set Radio Future on Xbox is just as good). Rocket-skating over crowded streets to spray messages of hope and freedom on the sides of skyscrapers is just a fun rush. And when SEGA let you import your own art for the sprays, well, I had a wonderful time making sure the good people of Tokyoto know that salvation against tyranny would come from the spread of Ernest movie posters.

Mark Ryan Sallee: What can I say about Marvel vs. Capcom 2 that hasn't already been said about Afghanistan? It's tumultuous and holy. The Dreamcast was a godsend to fighting game fans, and perfect home ports of arcade brawlers like Marvel 2 proved why. The game launched on Dreamcast and in arcades almost simultaneously, which fueled the briefly resurgent arcade scene that sucked me in. I met so many new people over matches of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. The Air Hyper Viper Beams, the Strider-Doom traps, and the guard breaks that cause online rage quits in today's disconnected multiplayer depression brought me and my buddies closer together in the years before Xbox Live. When I moved a thousand miles away from home after high school, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 eased the process of making new friends. True story, it's that good.

 

[Chris V6 255]

Where the f@!* is Shenmue!?


Why the fanboy favorite didn't make our list of the top 25 Dreamcast games.


by IGN Staff

US, September 11, 2009 -
If you're reading this, then you probably care on some level about Shenmue, SEGA and Yu Suzuki's wildly ambitious RPG/life simulator from 2000. You may have adored it, spending countless magical hours opening drawers and driving forklifts. Then again, you may have hated it, feeling it was a tragic failure that offered gamers nothing in its attempt to do everything.
Or, you may be ambivalent about Shenmue but remain curious about why we've shunned one of the Dreamcast's most famous games, leaving it off of our list of the Top 25 Dreamcast Games. Below, a few of our editors explain why they left Shenmue off the list, and one of our most vocal dissenters chimes in to defend the ambitious title.

Where should Shenmue be on the list of the Top 25 Dreamcast games?

Hilary Goldstein, Editor-in-Chief, IGN Xbox: I am a Dreamcast fanboy. Jet Set Radio is one of the great games of all times, SF Rush is an amazing experience, and Samba de Amigo is a better investment than a Wii. But Shenmue? No, that's just not a good game. Sorry, fellow fanboys. It's the truth.
Yu Suzuki started with a brilliant concept: Make a Virtua Fighter RPG. The end result, though, is a game with some great ideas, but is ultimately uninteresting. My fondest memory of Shenmue is finding a SEGA Saturn in a drawer, plugging it in and playing Space Harrier. Yeah, the best part of Shenmue is playing another game.
Shenmue didn't turn out well and didn't sell well either. And that's a shame, because the sequel is actually a fantastic game that fixed almost all the mistakes of the original. No one bought that either, but it's so much better than Shenmue. Fans of this mediocre title can rejoice, though. Shenmue brought a lot of good things to other games. Quick Time Events are incredibly common nowadays and Shenmue pioneered that. Open world? I think Shenmue showed a lot of the potential and pitfalls to other developers. So, Shenmue might have bored me, but it helped inspire others to make great games. Thanks for that!
David Clayman, Editor-in-Chief, IGN Insider: Not putting Shenmue in my top 25 Dreamcast games doesn't mean I dislike the game, it just wasn't one of my favorites. The brilliance of Shenmue exists on paper and in theory, in the minds of its fans and only partially in its sequel. But the game was never really executed properly and the logical part of my brain just can't ignore the fact that this overblown project was emblematic of SEGA's downfall. The Dreamcast was my first social game console. Almost every game on our top 25 list produced a lot of fond memories that were made with friends, not all of whom were necessarily gamers. Sure a lot of the titles were beyond quirky, but what made the console great were the quick bursts of fun it provided through arcade hits like Crazy Taxi and SoulCalibur. Shenmue was the opposite of these experiences. It was weighty, it was detailed, it was supposed to span many games. Unfortunately it just wasn't very much fun.

Are we having fun yet?
​

Peer Schneider, IGN SVP of Content: I enjoyed Shenmue – but I have to admit that it was more from a japanophile viewpoint and from a level of appreciation that SEGA was trying something different. I thought it was a cool experiment because it tried to give you a sense of freedom of exploration that extended to even the most unimportant things (like looking at the back of a Coke can) or letting you take part in menial tasks, like actually working.
I liked that it was trying to bring back the feel of traditional graphic adventures with elements from other genres mixed in, like fighting games. Unfortunately, while it tried a lot of things, it didn't master any of them. Also, I'm as amazed today as I was back in 2000 when we gave it a 9.7. It's obviously got a vocal fanbase, though – 5538 ratings on IGN averaging 9.7. Matt Casamassina, Editor-in-Chief, IGN Nintendo: I thought it was pretty cool, even if it was more of a technical demo than a coherent game. If you thought of it as a graphic adventure in 3D, it worked on some levels. It was ridiculously ambitious and beautiful for its day. Seaman, which did make our list, is every bit as clunky and flawed, but it had a unique gimmick. Shenmue's gimmick was cinema-quality storytelling – a goal it never really achieved.

Alright, that's far enough, Shenmue.

Another Take
Martin Robinson, IGN UK: Of course I'm shocked, appalled and not a little upset - no list of Dreamcast games can be complete without the console's most beloved child. Shenmue's stupendously large canvas, its superlative evocation of a time and place that to date remains alien territory to videogames and its unfading beauty all ensure it classic status, but it's some of the more heart-breaking factors that mean it will remain a cult favorite for countless years to come. Yu Suzuki's epic is interwoven into the story of the Dreamcast's demise – and given its reported 70 million dollar budget, it arguably played no small part in the console's downfall – but the ultimate tragedy is its lack of closure, with Ryo suspended in the cave that housed Shenmue II's finale seemingly forever, and the game's horde of devotees left to speculate on what might have been.
For me – and for countless others – it's a deeply personal game. My first memories of Shenmue are from the days after its release back in 2000, of getting lost in Ryo Hazuki's hypnotically humdrum world and later beneath the soaring towers of Kowloon that featured in its sequel. It opened my eyes to a whole new world for videogames, suggesting that they didn't have to be about shooting aliens in the face, rescuing the princess or slaying orcs for hours on end – they could be about real people in a real place. Although the main story is the soapiest of operas, it's the mundane moments that gave Shenmue its poetry, whether it was an early morning stroll to Dobuita's arcade or an afternoon wasted on the streets of Hong Kong manning a Lucky Strike store. But the sweetest memory came just this year, when on a trip to Japan with my girlfriend I convinced her to come with me to Yokosuka, the port town that stars in the original game and is only an hour's ride from central Tokyo. It's the ultimate Dreamcast fanboy's pilgrimage, and as I took my first steps down Dobuita Street and recognized locations I'd walked past countless times before – Kurita's Military Store, Mary's Embroidery Store and the parking lot where Ryo honed his fighting skills – I couldn't help but go a little dewy eyed. Detecting my sentimentality, my girlfriend – quite rightly – called me a prick. Next year we're going to Hong Kong; I'll try to hold myself together a little better then.