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 they need to re-release it because the Dreamcast is technically no longer compatible with his TV. Yea. Yet another case of people buying HDTV's rendering 95% of the game consoles ever released, including the Dreamcast, as virtually unusable on such a setup. I swear people like this should be cast out of being Dreamcast Fans. If you aren't going to find ways to still play a console like the Dreamcast, then what the hell are you doing talking about how great it is. Nostalgia is an affliction or a virus that needs to be obliterated.
And now for the bombshell quote of the entire thing. I had to type this out verbatim just so you guys could see how braindead they are:
Quote:
GUY #1: Another way that Sega kind of lined up its ducks, that we havn't even mentioned, is the NAOMI arcade hardware architecture. The arcade board that was basically a Dreamcast with extra RAM. That supposedly should have made arcade ports super easy, but all it really did was uhh create this sad little trickle of Cave and uh Goo Rev shooters, long after the system was dead. You'd have these limited Prints of Border Down and uh Over Rev or whatever it was called. There'd be like 10,000 copies of the game that would sell out immediatly, and become suddenly super valuable collectors items, but that was the Sega Dreamcast Legacy after its Death, was like this stream of super niche, super hardcore shooters that had been developed on NAOMI and therefore were like no brainer ports over to Dreamcast.
GUY #2: Didn't one just come out recently?
GUY #1: Yea, umm, I can't remember which one it was, but yea there was one that came out this year. And you know, every time one these comes out they are like "this is the last Dreamcast game".
They said: "Cave and Goo Rev shooters". WHAT?! Cave games are not released on the NAOMI. Plus they probobly couldn't even run on it due to the RAM compression schemes on the NAOMI or Dreamcast. What is a Goo Rev shooter? (cue sarcasm meter) They mean "G" Rev shooter, but making this type of pronounciation error isn't cute or excusable. It is embarrasing and makes the speaker sound like a Class A doofus.
It gets worse when in the next sentance they say "Border Down and Over Rev or whatever it was called". Over Rev? I am sorry when was that game released? I sure don't remember any game named... oh wait yea thats right, there is no shooter on the Dreamcast named Over Rev, or one that even comes close to that name. The only guess I would have is that they meant "Under" Defeat, which was developed G."Rev". They flipped Under into the word Over and added Rev to it. Do you see the cryptic dislexia I am having to use to rationalize their thought process?!
The thing that really ticked me off was when they said the NAOMI, "
supposedly should have made arcade ports super easy, but all it really did was uhh create this sad little trickle of Cave and uh Goo Rev shooters".
Each of the shooters released in recent years on the Dreamcast were a unique case of circumstances. A symbiotic relationship between fans and the companies. These developers were able to directly reach their target audience across the entire world. Shooter fans all own Dreamcast's and still play them. Shooter fans still play shooters, because they are active fans of the genre! While not supporting the ability of cross region play right out of the box, imports can be played on the Dreamcast with the help of boot discs. Players all over the world were able to buy and play them with very little difficulty. ALL of the shooter development companies realised this, and knew it all along. This was one of the purest commercial videogame moments in video game history. No press releases, or commercials, or magazine spreads, or jargon chocked marketing ploys. It was the fans, and the developers working together to make NAOMI arcade ports happen on the Dreamcast for as long as they possibly could. The developers were able to keep making the games they loved to make, and we were able to play the games we love to play. This is anything but sad.
Also, I am not sure what this guy is talking about by trying to downplay the NAOMI's importance with regards to Dreamcast ports. The NAOMI was one of the most impactful arcade platforms ever. While people love to beat up on the DC as a "failiure", the NAOMI was the PS2 of the Arcade industry. It dominated. Contrary to what the person in the broadcast would lead you to believe, porting from the NAOMI to the Dreamcast was incredibly easy. This allowed over 60 NAOMI arcade games to find their way to the Dreamcast console, with many more games being ported to other game systems following Sega's decision to publish titles across multiple game consoles.
Reading stuff like this litterly makes me want to start Hulk Smashing chairs left and right. Why you say? Because these people are covering the video game industry as their PROFESSION! How is it that people with full time jobs in entirely unrelated fields, are able to know more about games than these court jesters?
They even are confused about when the last Dreamcast game was released, and think one came out this year. No. The last game to even see a commercial release was Karous in March of 2007. This was well over a year ago!
Either their ego's are so big they felt they could just wing it and get by on their random knowledge of the platform, or video game journalism is in such a state of dissrepair that proper research and fact checking is not longer a job requirement in these days of "brogging" and "flogcasting".
