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SB Recommends Dreamcast Games
Sega's little white almost could. What an amazing selection of games were put out in its mere 20 months of viability.
Model 1 Dreamcasts will boot pirated and homebrew games off of burned CD-Rs (though a boot disc may be needed), model 2s have protection against this. Thankfully, model 1s are the most common. Look for the number in a circle on the bottom of your console. There is some debate over whether CD-Rs can wreck your Dreamcast's laser arm motor, however.
The Dreamcast can output crystal-clear video to computer monitors and HDTVs via VGA with a peripheral box. Official units are very rare and expensive now, but there are several reliable third-party boxes. Not all games support VGA.
Recommended
4 Wheel Thunder
Teflon: Cousin to RobotRocker's
Aquatic Thunder and the game
Excite Truck should have been. Incredibly fast once you learn to
abuse the boost feature, wide open tracks filled with crazy
Rush-style shortcuts. Few people know about this, and it's a shame.
Border Down (JP)
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Sniper Honeyviper: Don't really know what to think of this one. For starters, the graphics are polished to ridiculous levels–the opening flyby past a painstakingly rendered building interior is breathtaking–but like all of G.Rev's games, they suffer from a lack of creativity and vision. Scoring in BD is calibrated and balanced with the eye of a master craftsman, and the game actually understands that surviving a boss's onslaught through the length of the timer is harder than killing him from the get-go. But the bordering system is a retarded gimmick that kills the pacing and encourages you to one-life the game, an arduous task to say the least when considering the relentless difficulty and your huge hitbox. Can't say I don't enjoy suffering with it, though.
Dynamite Cop
Sniper Honeyviper: This is probably what
Capcom imagined
belt scroll beatemups would be like in 10 years when they made
Final Fight. The variety of weapons available is ridiculous, ranging from umbrellas to giant tunas to nuclear missiles. It's silly and over-the-top to an unprecedented level, with the only real flaw being that it's over too soon. Includes Sega's 1980 “classic”
Tranquilizer Gun.
Ferrari F355 Challenge
slipstream: It is the anti-OutRun.
!=: Excellent feel behind the wheel, constant and gradual progression, and computer controlled cars which actually [overtake]. However, one big flaw is the idea of always starting in the back..
Teflon: It's so strict you will literally become better at any game requiring precise and smooth analog input from playing it. Not to mention how after F355 you can basically rock Gran Turismo and Forza one-handed while having a sandwich.
Maken X
Sniper Honeyviper: Probably the inspiration for Zeno Clash. Run and jump around antiseptic corridors and crate mazes in first-person, slashing at grunts with a living sword. Based on a manga by Q Hayashida. Would have benefited from dual-analog, but stands as something more unique without it. Kind of suffers for not having a quick-turn button to keep up with the frantic pace of battle, though. Your sword will possess many different people over the course of the game, whose verb sets can vary rather dramatically. Fans of SMT will be interested to know that Kazuma Kaneko did character designs, and the graphics are very much a prototype for Nocturne's style.
Shenmue
Rudie: Still one of my favorite games! Walk around a perfect recreation of suburban Japan, Ask stupid stupid questions related to the plot, drink a soda, play
Space Harrier, and fight
Virtua Fighter style battles.
Sonic Adventure
Sniper Honeyviper: A pretty good licensed anime game with a pointless hub world that the sequel thankfully did away with. Worth it for NiGHTS pinball. The Gamecube version has a better controller and some unlockable Game Gear titles.
Rudie: I'd actually like a whole game that was the hub world that I could run around in and not fear falling off of. The actual stage design falls apart really fast. The fishing mission is not nearly as bad as it's made out to be. Chao raising could be your thing too.
Toy Commander
Teflon: I never got anywhere with this, it was just too tempting to fuck off and fly around the house.
DaleNixon: There's nothing like using cargo helicopters to lower giant marshmallows into mugs of hot chocolate. That and doing strafing runs on the family cat.
Under Defeat
Sniper Honeyviper: The Dreamcast's final swan song is an unpretentious, straightforward helicopter shmup with classy presentation, the best graphics on the hardware and just enough extra scoring mechanics to encourage repeated play. If only G.Rev had made more stuff like this instead of Senko no Ronde.