Was given a dreamcast! What games should I get?

[Espio 1919]

Street Fighter Alpha 3, and all of Resident Evil 2, 3, and CV are solid additions to your collection. I'd also recommend Headhunter if you can manage to track down a copy; not super expensive, but it is fairly rare, I believe. Also, Ooga Booga is an awesome game if you want pure, unadulterated, multiplayer goodness.

[Original_Name]

Going through your list, first I'll throw a massive thumbs up to Ikaruga (one of my all-time favorite games), Under Defeat, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Capcom vs. SNK 2, and Guilty Gear X -- but a shmup and fighter (respectively) you MUST get are BORDER DOWN and FATAL FURY: MARK OF THE WOLVES.

Many of these have been mentioned, but outside of those games in your list, these are favorites of mine -- if they're repeats of others' recommendations, just count them as doubly-awesome:

Rez, Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, Skies of Arcadia, Seaman, The Typing of the Dead, Samba de Amigo, Power Stone 2, Toy Commander (a true hidden gem), Ecco the Dolphin, Sonic Adventure 2, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, ChuChu Rocket!, Space Channel 5: Part 2, Metropolis Street Racer, and a slew of Sega arcade ports which are great if you played the original, like Daytona USA 2001, Sega Rally 2, Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram, and Virtua Tennis 2 (awesome multi-player!)

[Ziggy]

Oh, definitely get Typing of the Dead. That game is so much fun. The bad news is you would need to buy a Dreamcast keyboard to play it. But if you do, I recommend getting two keyboards to play with some one else. That game is a lot of fun.

[Anthony817]

Dreamcast Junkyard top 100 Dreamcast games as voted for by you.

http://the-dreamcast-junkyard.blogspot. ... y-you.html

Definatly has helped me decide what game to get next. Everything in the top 20 is a must get.

[scarper]

Also, what about homebrew on the Dreamcast? Anything that's really worth a look?

Definitely the Beats of Rage series, along with its seemingly countless spinoffs. Ports of older games like Doom and Duke Nukem are definitely worth a look.

And the emulators. Ooooh yes. NES, Genesis, SNES, all the Game Boy's, etc. They all work fairly well. Just keep in mind that the menus take forever to scroll through, since they put pretty much every PAL game released on the console into the disc image. There are ways to make your own ROM directories (that self boot) but that's currently beyond my knowledge.