Gaming

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 Shenmue may have been impressive against late day PSOne stuff, by the time Shenmue II launched it looked a generation out of date.