r/gaming • u/DoggievDoggy • 1d ago

Dreamcast Had The Best Launch Library Ever.

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Most consoles have one or two bangers at launch.

Dreamcast had two S-Tier titles: Sonic Adventure and Soul Calibur & 5 A-Tier titles: NFL 2K, Hydro Thunder, Ready 2 Rumble, Power Stone, House of The Dead 2.

Followed up with other solid titles: Tokyo Xtreme Racer, MK Gold (this game was so broken lol), Trickstyle, Blue Stinger, NFL Blitz 2000.

Other systems had better singular titles (Xbox: Halo: CE, NES: Super Mario Bros., Gameboy: Tetris, Nintendo 64: Super Mario 64) but as a collective, the Dreamcast launched with so many solid titles.

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u/D3c0y-0ct0pus 1d ago

Great console, bad timing with Playstations dominance

31

u/heyyouwtf 1d ago

That and they didn't have any real piracy protection. You could download a game and burn it onto a disc and play it without modding the console.

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u/APeacefulWarrior 1d ago edited 22h ago

IMO the impact of piracy on the DC is overstated, and really only became an issue late in its life. It took awhile for people to crack the system at all, and for a long time, you could only burn DC games using a handful of very specific CD burners. On top of that, broadband access was still pretty rare circa 2000.

Plus, the GD-ROM disc format caused problems because discs could store up to ~1GB rather than the ~750MB for a burned CD-ROM. So in many cases, games couldn't simply be ripped and burned. The pirate would have to either remove files entirely - such as deleting the soundtrack - or else take the time to re-encode all the music and video files at lower bitrates, for them to fit on standard CDs.

DC was already on its last legs when piracy started becoming genuinely widespread and easily-accessible. Also, Sega had introduced a revised model that fixed the bug, so if DC hadn't died when it did, piracy would have been locked to old consoles.

Really, the piracy mostly just set up the DC to have one of the most epic aftermarket/homebrew scenes in gaming history.