Interesting Dreamcast Tid-Bits And Stories

[Gunstar Green]

Fun Fact: There was huge defect in the manufacturing process of the launch run of Sonic Adventure resulting in thousands of defective copies.

I was one of the lucky guys going back and forth back and forth from my local GameStop trying to get a copy to work.

I've got a defective one, but 30% of the time though it works fine for whatever reason.

[mas]

I have a great story with a bad ending.
My buddy mike were childhood friends and as usual we grew apart. I saw him at a video store in 2002 and we hooked up again. I went to his house and we played my saturn and then he introduced me to the dreamcast for the first time. Sold a bunch of systems and games from snes,genesis,and saturn to funcoland to get a dreamcast and ten games. Fell in love with the thing.
Fast foward to 2009 or 2010 thanksgiving week. I had friends who worked at gamestop and I was calling other stores to transfer psone games before they got rid of them. One store told me all they had was dreamcast games. Now I sold my dreamcast for an xbox back in the day and I got curious. I asked what he had and he said about 20 or so games like mvc2,mvc street fighter and a few others. I told him to ship it and he said sure.
Two days later I got a call from my buddy at gamestop asking me what the hell did I transfer to his store? I told him just some dreamcast games. Well The store shipped everything. 3 systems, controllers, vmu's and over 200 games most of them all complete and even some new. I freaked the hell out.
I went to the store and it blew my mind. I promised the store manager I will buy everything out of his inventory. I started off by selling my ps2 and a bunch of games. Plus the dreamcast was buy 2 get 1 with 75% off plus an extra 10% with my card. I bought almost everything the day before thanksgiving and got almost every u.s title. Every rare gem on that system. I sold extra copies on ebay and pawn shops and got a chunk of my money back.
The sad news was I ended selling my collection in order to get a second car for the family. The car lasted over a year but damn trying to get these games back are harder and harder.
Right now though I play my dreamcast almost every day and every time i get a title now i get so excited and play the game till death. Long live the dreamcast.

[SaturnHST]

I bought an Asian Dreamcast that was sold as non-working on ebay. It works perfectly fine. It even had a region-free chip installed.

Then I bought another "non-working" Asian Dreamcast (from another ebay seller), and that one works perfectly fine as well. It ALSO had a region-free bios chip installed, and the console is one of the earlier ones that had the metal fan and heat pipes. The fan on this one is much louder than any DC I had before.

Pretty big coincidence. I didn't even realize I had 2 region-free DC's until I accidentally put a US disc in and it played. I now put my stock US DC away and just use the Asian one with the metal fan. I actually planned on sending my US DC to someone to install a region-free bios.

[BoringSupreez]

I became a Dreamcast owner much later than most of you, I think it was July 2007. I started turning into a retro gamer at a rapid pace once I became 12, and after reading old Dreamcast sections and looking at screenshots on Gamespot and IGN, I couldn't resist having one for myself. Sonic Adventure in particular looked awesome (keep in mind that I was too poor to afford to be a current-gen gamer back then). In fact, I bought Sonic Adenture a month before I had the money to get the actual console. I finally bought mine at a local independant used videogame retail chain, Slacker's, for $40 using money I had earned doing chores for my Grandma while visiting her. I got the system, a controller, and a VMU which seemed a totally rad concept to me. Flipping through the existing saves on the card itself, with no TV, was just about the coolest thing I had ever done. When I booted up Sonic Adventure, the opening act was almost as impressive to me then as it was to you guys back when it was new. The whale sequence in particular was intense. Sonic Adventure 2 did it all over again a month later, what with it's graphics being up to 128-bit standards.

Sadly though, my September 2000 DC seems to have a mild case of the rebootings. The system battery is dead, so I have to reset the clock every time I play. My VMU is unable to grab power from batteries; now it's little more than a normal memory card. Sonic Adventure no longer amazes me, and I see that it's a rough, glitchy first attempt at a full-3D Sonic game. I've spent so much time in Sonic Adventure 2 that I can't even bear to start it up anymore. THPS1 is hard to play on any system after spending so much time with THPS2 and 3.

Yet I still come back to my old worn out DC. It and the first handful of games I bought gave me many good memories, filling the first summer of my teens with something to occupy myself. And there is still more time to spend with the DC ahead of me, although I might need to buy a new unit first. I'd really like to play the original version of Shenmue 2 someday, and I just keep coming back to Rayman 2. I think I play through the DC version every year, it's the definitive version of what seems to be the best designed 3D platformer I can find and that alone makes the DC a must-own for me. While I'm one of those who thinks the PS2 was a better system, the DC has certainly been part of my childhood despite the fact I lagged 6 or 7 years behind the rest of you.

[SamuraiMegas]

I got my dreamcast a year ago so I'm lagging the farthest behind. I think I'm warmin my friend up to buy a dreamcast and start making him retro game.

[Gunstar Green]

I got my Dreamcast the Christmas of 2000 when it was still riding high and hype for Phantasy Star Online was building. I had played it all night at a friend's birthday party earlier that year and had my mind absolutely blown by Crazy Taxi, an arcade perfect Marvel Vs. Capcom and especially Soul Calibur.

I was less excited about Sonic because even back then I didn't like the thought of 2D franchises going 3D. I was probably the only person I knew at the time who didn't like Ocarina of Time. I had to admit that Sonic did look spectacular though.

I took the fall of the Dreamcast pretty hard. For a while I sort of plugged my ears and pretended all of the talk of the Dreamcast being discontinued were just rumors and it would continue to put up a fight against Sony and Nintendo. But after official statements from Sega and the games in EB being sold for a few bucks a piece there was really no denying things anymore, though at least I was able to build up a decent library on the cheap.

The Dreamcast still has possibly the largest percentage of games in its library that I absolutely love compared to every other console. Even throughout college me and my buddies played it more than anything else. It's a sad and amazing thing that such a marketing failure is such a high quality and popular device.

[Breetai]

Fun Fact: There was huge defect in the manufacturing process of the launch run of Sonic Adventure resulting in thousands of defective copies.

I had one of those. I rented a copy of Sonic Adventure from a local rental place, hoping it would work. When it did, I switched the disc with mine, used a Sharpie pen to write the rental number on my defective disc, took it back to the store and told them it wasn't working. They then let me exchange it for a different game, so I ended up with both a working copy of Sonic and got to rent a game I didn't already own.

I pulled the same stunt with a copy of Zelda II years before that didn't work with my Game Genie for some reason.

[mlavindude]

I pre-ordered my Dreamcast at Toys R' Us way in advance (maybe April or May?) I saved up all summer doing chores and mowing my gramma's lawn for the Dreamcast, an extra controller, a VMU, and three games (gosh that was a hefty chunk of change!

On 9/9/99 my mom took me out of school at lunch time and we drove up to the store to pick it up. I ended up getting Sonic Adventure, NFL 2k, Soul Calibur and my mom pitched in for a fouth game, Pen Pen TriIcelon (I wanted to have a fun multiplayer game). She took it home an dropped me back at school.

I had to wait what seemed like an agonizing 2 and a half hours to get home and unbox everything. Still the only system I've ever bought launch day.

She took you to you outta school to pick up your Dreamcast during lunch time!?
Your. . . Mom. . . is. . .a. . . BOSS!

I can't believe she let u do that, so cool

[mlavindude]

I have a great story with a bad ending.
My buddy mike were childhood friends and as usual we grew apart. I saw him at a video store in 2002 and we hooked up again. I went to his house and we played my saturn and then he introduced me to the dreamcast for the first time. Sold a bunch of systems and games from snes,genesis,and saturn to funcoland to get a dreamcast and ten games. Fell in love with the thing.
Fast foward to 2009 or 2010 thanksgiving week. I had friends who worked at gamestop and I was calling other stores to transfer psone games before they got rid of them. One store told me all they had was dreamcast games. Now I sold my dreamcast for an xbox back in the day and I got curious. I asked what he had and he said about 20 or so games like mvc2,mvc street fighter and a few others. I told him to ship it and he said sure.
Two days later I got a call from my buddy at gamestop asking me what the hell did I transfer to his store? I told him just some dreamcast games. Well The store shipped everything. 3 systems, controllers, vmu's and over 200 games most of them all complete and even some new. I freaked the hell out.
I went to the store and it blew my mind. I promised the store manager I will buy everything out of his inventory. I started off by selling my ps2 and a bunch of games. Plus the dreamcast was buy 2 get 1 with 75% off plus an extra 10% with my card. I bought almost everything the day before thanksgiving and got almost every u.s title. Every rare gem on that system. I sold extra copies on ebay and pawn shops and got a chunk of my money back.
The sad news was I ended selling my collection in order to get a second car for the family. The car lasted over a year but damn trying to get these games back are harder and harder.
Right now though I play my dreamcast almost every day and every time i get a title now i get so excited and play the game till death. Long live the dreamcast.

That sucks

[mlavindude]

I became a Dreamcast owner much later than most of you, I think it was July 2007. I started turning into a retro gamer at a rapid pace once I became 12, and after reading old Dreamcast sections and looking at screenshots on Gamespot and IGN, I couldn't resist having one for myself. Sonic Adventure in particular looked awesome (keep in mind that I was too poor to afford to be a current-gen gamer back then). In fact, I bought Sonic Adenture a month before I had the money to get the actual console. I finally bought mine at a local independant used videogame retail chain, Slacker's, for $40 using money I had earned doing chores for my Grandma while visiting her. I got the system, a controller, and a VMU which seemed a totally rad concept to me. Flipping through the existing saves on the card itself, with no TV, was just about the coolest thing I had ever done. When I booted up Sonic Adventure, the opening act was almost as impressive to me then as it was to you guys back when it was new. The whale sequence in particular was intense. Sonic Adventure 2 did it all over again a month later, what with it's graphics being up to 128-bit standards.

Sadly though, my September 2000 DC seems to have a mild case of the rebootings. The system battery is dead, so I have to reset the clock every time I play. My VMU is unable to grab power from batteries; now it's little more than a normal memory card. Sonic Adventure no longer amazes me, and I see that it's a rough, glitchy first attempt at a full-3D Sonic game. I've spent so much time in Sonic Adventure 2 that I can't even bear to start it up anymore. THPS1 is hard to play on any system after spending so much time with THPS2 and 3.

Yet I still come back to my old worn out DC. It and the first handful of games I bought gave me many good memories, filling the first summer of my teens with something to occupy myself. And there is still more time to spend with the DC ahead of me, although I might need to buy a new unit first. I'd really like to play the original version of Shenmue 2 someday, and I just keep coming back to Rayman 2. I think I play through the DC version every year, it's the definitive version of what seems to be the best designed 3D platformer I can find and that alone makes the DC a must-own for me. While I'm one of those who thinks the PS2 was a better system, the DC has certainly been part of my childhood despite the fact I lagged 6 or 7 years behind the rest of you.

I have the same system battery problem too, its a shame cause i just bought it three months back. Does anyone know how to fix it. (I'm kinda hopeless in the world of repairing things XD)