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Was the Dreamcast actually powerful at launch? Or the beneficiary of no competition?

Was the Dreamcast a powerhouse at launch?

  • No

    Votes: 89 10.4%
  • Yes

    Votes: 763 89.6%

  • Total voters
    852

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
I mean, sure you can't play GTAIII or San Andreas on Dreamcast at their wonderful ~20 fps as on the mighty PlayStation 2 since it was discontinued before AAA development really took off but you can play all these and many more gems so Dreamcast held its own while it lasted and holds up 🤷‍♂️

In retrospect there are many more excellent looking Dreamcast games, a short list doesn't really do the system justice. I've been changing mind about what to include rediscovering random games like Maken X or V-Rally many of which can be very impressive, these are but a starting point.

Edited the timestamps a bit, Crazy Taxi 2's last missions take you through a whole city (in impressive speeds & 60 fps), Skies of Arcadia's intro in the beginning of it is amazing but the timestamp shows one of many cool effects, F355's intro is sweet but so is the Long Beach course shown etc.

PSA: When looking for Dreamcast footage you must be mindful of the state of the hardware (or emulation which I avoid posting, I'm only not certain about Sakura Taisen 4 above but decent footage of those games is rare). A DOA2 video I've now replaced, either due to a worn drive or because of a modded Dreamcast with the loading issues some drive replacement devices have, often paused the image while taking longer than normal to load the next scene. It both looked wrong and the music got completely desynced so the last intro part was silent, here's Crazy Taxi chugging on a similarly problematic Dreamcast. I couldn't find a better quality or quicker Le Mans video showing all it has going for it with real time day/night cycles, lighting, flare, glowing, rain, lens, reflection etc. effects in 24 car races so that will have to do. Many more games look great, the Shenmues, Grandia II or Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2 or even some transformative PS1 ports or low budget/effort stuff like the Atomiswave's bootleg Initial D wannabe Faster than Speed look solid, showing it wasn't so hard to do well (some of the best graphics are in launch window games) but some companies didn't care.​

Random footage for the hell of it. I wonder how a 3rd game would have looked on Dreamcast, it seems the one engine flaw, that is the draw distance, Genki fixed for Daytona USA 2001 which has no real pop in while still looking great and slick, with detailed daytime backgrounds and 40 rivals too.

Just as the three Aero Dancing/AeroWings games improved over time on DC, a 3rd racer of this sort would have probably blown socks off (and if they brought back the drifting from Drift King '97 on Sega Saturn that would probably have made it one of my favorite racing games ever but oh well).​
 
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