John Zeitler

A lot of folks question my fond remembrance of the Dreamcast and its library of games. “It wasn’t that great,” they’ll say, or perhaps “the PS2 was better and had more support.” Both of those are, in point of fact, true… but at the same time, there were a few titles that just didn’t get brought over from the machine that I think should have. For whatever reason, I’ve often felt that the system’s version of the venerable Tetris game, The Next Tetris Online, was and is the best implementation of the game; Grandia II was ported terribly to platforms other than its native DC, rendering it virtually unplayable anywhere else; it took nearly ten years for a decent port of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 to be released; it has the only known console port of Railroad Tycoon II, etc. etc. The point is, for each one of these games, the argument that it has to be on the DC becomes increasingly subjective. When you get to some of its exclusives, like Evolution, Espionagents, or Super Magnetic Neo, you can find some genuine crap (even if Espionagents has a certain charm to it).

I still think the Dreamcast has an important part in gaming history. Even though it died early, it had some good games that got ported over, some that didn’t get ported over, and it launched a series or two that endure to this day. Without the Dreamcast, the 2K Sports series would not exist– they were originally Sega’s in-house sports developers. The DC also played host to the home adaptations of Pop’n Music in Japan, leading the way for the Playstation and PS2 versions. Power Stone created a genre of brawler; Rez introduced Tetsuya Mizuguchi to the world; the first console versions of Unreal Tournament, Quake III, and (almost) Half-Life showed up on the DC… the list goes on.

Really, this is all tangential to my basic point– that the Dreamcast, while not a particularly spectacular system, holds a place in my heart worth the effort needed to collect for it. Now, pardon me, but I’ve had this game of Tetris on pause for far too long…