Come 9/28, Sega will end repair support for the Saturn and Dreamcast in Japan This isn’t so newsworthy here in the US or here on this blog… However, there’s a special place in my heart for the Sega Dreamcast.
I worked for a small company back during the Internet boom and a few of us pushed for (and were granted) a gameroom in the office. We painted it ourselves, assembled the foosball table, and stuck a few beanbag chairs in front of a TV with a Dreamcast. I spent countless hours kicking butt as Afro Thunder in Ready 2 Rumble and sliding around corners in Crazy Taxi… probably while billing our clients.
I also had a Dreamcast at home and the hardware was ahead of its time — Using the builtin modem, I was able to race my buddies Matt and Paul (hundreds of miles away) in Daytona or fire up a web browser. Heck, I even ran Linux off CD though I never could enable that soft modem (and I didn’t care enough to purchase the broadband adapter).
Too bad Sega couldn’t execute, from a business perspective, in the hardware market as they produced the best platforms of the time. Now all we have to look forward to are crappy Sonic remixes.
Dreamcast was the best system. Every so often, I’ll pull it out to play some Marvel vs. Capcom … great stuff.
(okay, maybe I should have said a great system … it probably wasn’t the best)