This game features a Risk & Reward scoring system based on enemy and bullet chaining. To chain means to hit an row of enemy and likewise soaking up bullets within a short time frame. You can use all your power to chain enemies, but be carefully with bombs and rockets as they might break your chain.



The power pod in front of the ship is able to soak up enemy bullets when blocking them directly and when Hyper Soaking is active, bullets even accalerate to fly to your pod like it was magnetic. You can use this feature to let bullets - which aren't very reachable and/or more on screen then you can handle at a time - heading to your pod to gain more score.



To activate Hyper Soaking just press R, then your soaking bar decreases to the minimum while soaking up bullets - mind, the more bullets you soak the longer the hyper soaking stays active. Furthermore, you can collect Soak Up items to increase your soak bar.

While hyper soaking, enemy bullets are harmless to you, so you can also use this feature as a bullet shield when playing for survival instead scoring. But be warned, enemies themselves and their lasers can still defeat you.



Sometimes you have multiple ways to destroy certains enemy types such as Bullies. This enemy just flies up and down and has its hitzone in the middle. Now you can just shoot the Bully up or fly behind it and shoot at it from there. The hitzone on its back is weaker and gives you more score to gain. To do this is pretty dangerous, but if you risk it you can get your reward.

Peter Moore thought he could win the console war with Dreamcast. He was wrong. Sony's ingenious PR foiled his plans, but for Moore, this was just the beginning. Part Two of our interview, takes him from the collapse of Dreamcast to the heights of Microsoft's ambitions for Xbox - ambitions that could well have destroyed the Nintendo we know today...

Keith Stuart: What was the key lesson you took out of the failure of Dreamcast?
Peter Moore: You know, failure's a tough word! It didn't quite get there. I was angry with Sony at the time, but in their shoes I probably would have done the same thing. They did a tremendous job – and it's a story they repeated in 2005 with Killzone – where they promised the consumer something they probably believed they were going to deliver, but they never did. PlayStation 2 - it was the emotion engine it was games coming to life, Real Player was going to be on there, a full network browser… and they just never delivered.

But what they did was place doubt in the consumers' mind. It was pre-emptive guerrilla PR, in the same way that three E3s ago I got lambasted for what I did with Xbox for 360, because I was determined we were going to show real footage even if it was alpha or beta. And then Sony came up with that Killzone video – and they still haven't shipped the game! Have you seen the video?! The game will never be the video! But what they did again was they placed doubt. I mean it's a classic PR tactic.

Stuart: So going back to Dreamcast vs PS2, you felt the impetus slipping away…
Moore: It was a horrible period because, all of a sudden, you could sense consumers thinking twice about Dreamcast. I was $199, it was the first online console, we had some great games – SoulCalibur, Sonic Adventure, Trickstyle, Ready 2 Rumble. When you look at them today, you chuckle, but they were on the cutting edge graphically at that time…

But [Sony] were brilliant at FUD – you know, fear uncertainty and doubt. It was a massive FUD campaign. The consumer thought twice and they started to read, 'can the Dreamcast make it?' It had a tough time in Europe, it had a really disastrous time in Japan. My job was… my personality was such that I'll go up and start being a little more on the front foot… It was like, 'well, what do you do?' You just do it yourself. You start talking, you don't wait for the Japanese to give you messaging – because PR is something they don't do very well, they just don't do that concept of messaging and having passion around the message – the only thing we could do was be passionate. But it was too little too late unfortunately.

Stuart: So you were at Sega for another two years after that…
Moore: Yeah, my job was to transition the company from being a hardware company, which it had been for two decades, and off I go to Nintendo and Sony…

Stuart: Was that a difficult time?
Moore: It was not optimistic. We had developers, Yuji Naka, Yu Suzuki, all these people who had never worked on anything other than first-party hardware. And now we're saying you need to go multi-platform, and it was just not comfortable for them whatsoever. You don't just one day say 'well we're just going to go from our Dreamcast dev kits to our PS2 or Xbox.' Microsoft set up a deal for us and we started to work on things like Crazy Taxi and bringing them over to Xbox – we did I think an 11 title deal.

Stuart: And in the end you fell out with your bosses in Japan, because they were still relying on arcade conversions when the rest of the world was playing GTA. But how did this lead to your arrival at Microsoft?
Moore: Robbie Bach called me to wish me a merry Christmas and asked how I was doing. I said I'm not too good, I'm fed up of trying to convince Japan that we need to either go off and hire western developers or really change what we're publishing and developing in Japan, because the western world is really starting to take over, and the Japanese developers were being marginalized. And Robbie said well if you would ever consider coming here, there's a home for you at Microsoft.

So in January (2003) I flew up there and had lunch with Steve Ballmer and you don't say no to Ballmer. We had a great lunch and he convinced me that Microsoft was going to take on Sony; so I get to put on my suit of armour, get on my horse and take on Sony again – but with a little bit more money this time! And I said yes.

I waited a bit to give others a chance to maybe reply about this before I give it the "nikon" treatment. Since nobody else has replied yet, I decided to just go ahead and post. Though instead of just hanging on the negative points only, I will also give its positives to be fair.



Notable Positives about the broadcast:

• This broadcast is long and probobly one of the few Dreamcast specific ones that you may ever hear that goes this indepth on so many facets of the Dreamcast. So, at the very least you get to hear a bunch of people talk about your favorite console for well over an hour and a half. (Which can be entertaining or enraging depending on your state of mind - see comments later on in my post...)
  
• Zombie Revenge - This game gets ragged on by a lot of people because they don't understand it is supposed to be a beatemup arcade game, and not Resident Evil. Jerry Holkins was quick to point out this point. This was good because more people need to learn to appreciate this great Sega arcade game.
  
• Skies of Arcadia Barai Edition - I was very proud that they brought this up, even though I don't think they ever referred to it as its true name "Barai Edition". Barai games were full games, that had only the first part of the game available to play. The rest was locked off. They were often included in magazines, or could be purchased for a few dollars. To play the full game you signed onto the Internet and purchase an unlock key that would make the entire game available.
  
• They were able to notice just how many creative titles were released on the DC and pointed this out numerous times throughout the broadcast.
  
• They noted there was a creative collapse after death of Dreamcast by Sega.
  
• They point out the Dreameye and the DC's connectivity with NGPC.

ok and here we go...

Notable Negatives about the broadcast:

• While talking about Skies of Arcadia Barai Edition, they start talking nonsense about what would happen if the VMU battery dies out and the unlock key was stored in the Game Save. They were all under the impression that the Dreamcast's VMU somehow gets whiped out after its CR2032 battery dies. This was red flag number 1 for, "I am just here for nostalgia and have no damn idea what I talking about because I havn't played a Dreamcast since 2002." Of course the saves are not eliminated once the battery runs dry. You simply cannot use the VMU as a standalone device, and have to put up with an annoying beep whenever it is accessed in game.
  
• Okay so they realise to some extent that the Dreamcast had large library of unique and original games. However the problem here is that they didn't come into the broadcast trying to prove this point. It was something they sort of "realised" while discussing it right there in the podcast.
  
• They noted the creative collapse after the Dreamcast faded from the commmercial market. This was true, to an extent. It didn't happen right after Sega went multiplatform. Remember Sega took all of their projects currently in development, and for much of 2003 they released these games across other systems. All of those games embodied everything the Dreamcast stood for. The real creative downfall at Sega didn't happen until the corporate restructuring of the Sega Sammy merger.
  
• At two points in the broadcast you hear people talking about how "they need to re-release this game so I can play it". For Zombie Revenge, and later on Shenmue. At first when I heard him bring it up for Zombie Revenge I blurted out "Just buy the ****ing thing." Then they say during Shenmue that