this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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A dvd player wasn't going to fix the internal dysfunction at Sega.
Or the weirdly anachronistic mess that is the Dreamcast in general. I mean, it's not easy to visualize today because a lot of the "just a tiny underpowered PC thing" approach ended up winning the day, but the Dreamcast made no sense whatsoever at the time and produced entirely absurd looking games.
Maybe you could try to rationalize the 480p thing as an advantage today, but at the time screenshot comparisons looked a generation apart next to the PS2.
... what?
Everything was limited to 480p. HDTV barely existed, and even VGA-out was a luxury. Yeah, the PS2 technically supports up to 1080i, but almost nobody used it, even when annual sportsball releases dragged on into the 2010s.
Meanwhile, screenshots were the worst way to see PS2 games, since its anti-aliasing was nonexistent. Some of its obscene fillrate comes from only emitting whole pixels. The Dreamcast's goofy tile-rendered PowerVR thingamajig only looked silly insofar as character animation tech was still mediocre. Blue Stinger has the same intersecting-blobs setup as Metal Gear Solid, minus the deliberately low-detail models that left everything to your imagination. Seriously, Snake doesn't have eyes. To the extent the Dreamcast has A Look that's distinct from the PS2, it's because Sega themselves were forced to make half the library, and they were cranking 'em out left and right.
If anything - the Dreamcast is extremely of-its-era. Sega was always an arcade company that stumbled into a home-console rivalry against an 800-pound gorilla wearing a red tie. Their games are very action-heavy, even years after Mario 64 embraced contemplative playground spaces. There's a very go-go-go atmosphere. They eventually chilled out a bit and made Shenmue, famously the inspiration for a decade of open-world games... including their awful gameplay and ballooning costs.
Also they included a modem as standard. They were really trying. It just did not work out.
Well, yeah, we're not disagreeing here. That's a great example, with the modem being in there in a world where a bunch of people barely had access to semi-functional Internet, let alone the willingness to surrender it to a game console for online gaming. And that's what I mean about the VGA out and HDTV support. Today both of those seem like forward looking thing if you squint hard enough, at the time they were irrelevant tech quirks.
And on the flipside, Sega sticking to the weird approach of still filling that library with arcade ports all over the place just as arcades were becoming irrelevant. Again, we're not disagreeing on that.
I'm going to disagree about how well the PS2 presented in screenshots, though. I remember looking at printouts of stuff like GT3, Silent Hill 2, GTA III or MGS 2. The launch lineup was one thing, but that second batch looked insane on print. I remember laughing off the screenshots of Silent Hill 2 showing their projected shadows and calling my friends gullible for thinking any of that would be realtime. Turns out, it totally was. Once that stuff hit gaming magazines the Dreamcast may as well not have existed. Shenmue may have been impressive against late day PSOne stuff, by the time Shenmue II launched it looked a generation out of date.
Which 480p thing? GameCube, PS2 and Dreamcast all output at 480p. Some games on the PS2 can upscale. But they render at that resolution.
Specifically the VGA 480p output, which was a big deal for most use cases.
I imagine there is some regional differentiation here based on HDTV adoption and SCART vs component, but for reference VGA out was still the sole way I had to get any progressive signal for gaming all the way down to my day one Xbox 360 in 2005, which did not have an HDMI out (not that I had any displays with an HDMI in, for that matter).
I see, though in fairness, most users probably didn't use their consoles on screens with VGA input.
Anyhow, nowadays, if you're willing to shell out the cash and mod your Dreamcast, it too can have HDMI output ;)
Yeah, that's the thing about it, right? It has all the pieces of the architecture of a modern console in a world where none of them make sense. Even with the 360 I was probably an outlier, and the reward you got by being able to access 720p video on a CRT PC monitor was much higher compared to a SDTV.
That's a normal architecture though, all consoles of that generation and at least the one before create the image digitally and just in the last step convert to analog so that the TVs from that time can display an image. The Dreamcast isn't an outlier in that regard. It made sense to use these components; the strength of the Dreamcast from my point of view was that it was a very complete package at the time. Sure it couldn't play DVDs, but it was quite earlier than the PlayStation 2, which came in more expensive with subsidies from Sony who as a member of the DVD Consortium (later DVD Forum) and movie studio had a vested interest in broadening the install base for DVD players. Plus Sony manufactured the drives themselves, which have them the numbers, there was no such option for Sega at that point in time.
Anyhow, I liked the Dreamcast for having 4 controller ports like the N64 instead of 2, and I also liked the selection of games because it was very arcade-y, but I had no arcades close by. But I also enjoyed the Sonic Adventures back then (not sure I still would though), Shenmue and Headhunter.
Personally I wouldn't call the Dreamcast revolutionary, even though it's my favorite console is all time. My biggest gripe with it isn't the lack of a DVD drive, this is completely irrelevant nowadays with SD card loaders, but the rarity of Ethernet adapters because of the piracy issue. But it was a good package (I still can't believe how good SoulCalibur looked back then, it agreed really well which is rare for 3D games from that time) for a fair price and a library that I really enjoyed.