No console has arguably aged as beautifully as the Sega Dreamcast. From the still stunning visuals and wonderful arcade gameplay, to the way it set the groundwork for so many technical innovations in the generations to come, the Dreamcast captured the spirit of the new millennium in a still utterly enduring way. But which of its games have aged the best?
Quick bonus pick: Shenmue. It is the Dreamcast game and it does deserve to be here, but I don’t really have anything new to say about it.
Skies of Arcadia
The Skies of Arcadia hive may not be the biggest hive ever, but I might have just activated them. Run.
The Dreamcast is absolutely loaded with games that never quite got their due, just like the console itself. Obviously being tied to a console that burned very brightly and then faded as the PlayStation 2 began to make its mark is a key reason for that, but Skies of Arcadia is a game that, no matter how many 8 hour long retrospectives are released, you just feel like it’s never going to properly get its flowers.
And that’s a crying shame, because even into the 2020s, Overworks’ overlooked RPG can still make you smile from basically the main menu.
Following Vyse, a young sky pirate backed up by Fina and Aika, Skies of Arcadia is a bright, jaunty turn-based RPG in which you try to stop an evil empire from doing evil empire stuff. What that means for you is building up your crew and exploring the pretty beef overworld, with players able to traverse dungeons and all those classic RPG staples.
Where Skies of Arcadia really excels is in just its absolutely infectious sense of wonder and adventure, which is helped by its banger soundtrack that, honestly? Chills. Straight up chills. The game’s charming character is put over further by one of the most likeable supporting casts ever seen in the genre, and that includes just the random sailor jabronis who join you.
No expense was spared on making this one of the Dreamcast’s most detailed, vibrant games, with so much to see and do that it honestly puts a lot of its modern peers to shame. It got a GameCube port that also didn’t sell great like, at all, so we really are overdue for a port from someone, somewhere, somehow. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, I know I’m crazy.
Crazy Taxi
Listen, Crazy Taxi is a game I could feasibly play for the rest of my life. In fact, I even have this game on my phone and play it whenever I’m in a waiting room or there’s no internet. I have no problem being on my phone for hours and hours once that Offspring kicks in.
The thing about Crazy Taxi that’s aged so beautifully is just how pretty much anyone can pick up and play it, maybe even plagiarise it a little, and immediately find themselves dropping everything else for minutes or hours at a time.
Well, what do you do in Crazy Taxi? It’s simple: you drive, you stop, people get in your car, you drive, you stop, they get out, and repeat. Complete a fare quickly and you get extra time and money, which in turn helps you to improve your record.
The Crazy Box is also a collection of fun, goofy minigames that can give you a couple extra hours of fun, but really the best thing about Crazy Taxi is that it has very little fat. It’s no-nonsense arcade brilliance that activates your monkey brain, and I love that about it.
Really, the only thing that hasn’t aged that well about Crazy Taxi are all of the pretty damn on the nose product placements, but it’s still kinda fun to marvel at the brands of yesteryear and see how things have changed since. It’s a new age, after all.
Marvel vs Capcom 2
Recently ported after years in the wilderness to remind everyone that Justin Wong may actually have been brewed by Skynet, Marvel vs Capcom 2 is that rare, incredible fighting game that’s as shallow as a puddle if you want to mess around with friends, or deeper than the best bit in that Aquaman movie if you want to get competitive.
Just about the best arcade conversion of all time, MVC2’s incredible hand-drawn sprites honestly would look brilliant in any year for probably the next 25 years or more, with some crazy fluid 60fps animations and anime ass transitions meaning your eyes barely ever get a rest. It’s a visual tour de force, and while it’s obvious that hand-drawn stuff takes a lot of work these days, it’s strange how so few other fighting games have tried a similar style since the success of Cuphead. It just makes games timeless.
Then there’s the roster, which due to horrible licensing nonsense and the consolidation of art under one probably definitely evil umbrella, we’ll never get the likes of which again. Or, we will, but in 4 different DLC packs with, I dunno, my guy Amingo as a pre-order bonus. Don’t hold my boy back like that.
As for how the game plays, well, I’m not your boy if you’re looking for someone to go deep into switch glitches, punish assists, pushblocks, and endstarters. Only one of those is not real by the way, let me know down below which one and you could win a Steam key. However, Marvel vs Capcom 2 is a vivid, engaging fighting game that’s easy to pick up but difficult to master, with a banger soundtrack that will take you for a ride. Just try not to awaken the beast.
Daytona USA 2001
As well as having an absolute whipper of a soundtrack, Daytona USA 2001 stands the test of time damn well for a lot of the same reasons that something like Crazy Taxi does: it’s pretty simple fun. The fact that it is now playable online in PAL regions, as long as you import the NTSC disc, after all these years is just a bonus.
While it’s a very easy game to pick up and get something out of, Daytona on Dreamcast does have a bit of hidden depth beneath its arcade-y goodness, as you’re gonna need to practice, practice, practice to nail those corners to the point where you’ll begin to see palm trees in your dreams. So yes, admittedly, the controls on the Dreamcast will take a bit of getting used to or fiddling with, as they’re pretty slippy, so if you happen to have a Dreamcast steering wheel lying around, you’re gonna want to dust it off.
However, it looks beautiful and runs great at 60 frames per second, boasts a nice selection of cars and tracks, and, again, just has immaculate vibes that no amount of control bugbears can take away from. You might want to put Sega Rally or Metropolis Street Racer in here instead, but for me, something about Daytona just hits different, and I would kill for more fat-free racing fun like this today.
Grandia 2
While Grandia 2 might live a little in the charming shadow of the original Grandia game, well, at least it’s not as overshadowed as Grandia 3.
First released on the Dreamcast before later getting a PlayStation 2 port that itself has not aged well at all, many of the original staff returned to work on Grandia 2’s tale of a world that’s seemingly on the up after an ancient battle between the gods nearly destroyed it, and a church that isn’t quite what it appears.
A turn-based RPG in which you play as Ryudo, a mercenary who is entrusted to safeguard a songstress, Grandia 2 is far darker than the jauntier original, with you able to avoid enemies rather than constantly encountering them randomly — kinda a blessing for a 3D RPG when even Final Fantasy X still had random encounters a year later.
The general pace of the turn-based battles is helped a lot by the ATB system, which actually lets you interrupt enemy attacks with good timing, so you aren’t just sitting back and letting the AI take it in turns to whale on you.
Add in some charming dinner conversations with your party that will probably appeal to Tales fans, a pretty underrated soundtrack from the maestro Noriyuki Iwadare, and fantastic voice acting, and you have a cult classic RPG that might take you by surprise.
Soulcalibur
The best reviewed fighting game of all time, a record that’s unlikely to ever be broken because Netherrealm are probably going to make the pause menu a microtransaction one of these days, Soulcalibur should be your go-to game to show off the fun of the Dreamcast to a friend.
A sequel to the absolute slapper that was Soul Edge, Soulcalibur is one of those games where it didn’t feel like it was just a generational leap, but a lap. Absolutely everything about the first game was taken up by several notches here, with incredible animations that can still surprise you today, so much so that it’s often suggested that it’s even better looking than its original arcade version.
Soulcalibur also has some of the best range of movement of any fighting game up to 1999, and there’s still something to be said for cautiously defending against the Nightmare main who is supposed to be your friend, before then kicking them out of the stage. That will never get old.
So yeah, not much more to say here really. It’s 60fps fighting game perfection with tonnes of content and loads of ways to make a nemesis out of your best mate. They keep making these games for a good reason, but there was no good reason why we didn’t get anything from this next game for years.
Jet Set Radio
Developed by less than 25 people, Jet Set Radio is a game that’s going to last for many more years than that. What’s that? It will actually be 25 years old next year and everything I know will soon become Wotsit dust on the wind, ah cool cool cool interesting interesting.
Ask anyone to give you a game that definitively sums up the Dreamcast as a console, and Jet Set Radio will probably be one of the first picks. Bombastic colours, incredible music, and a Y2K attitude help Jet Set Radio to feel like a monument to a moment in time.
It’s easy to get caught up in just those lovely cel-shaded visuals when talking about Jet Set Radio, but the hook of grinding and graffiti-ing your way around Tokyo-to while pulling off tricks is still as good now as it was in 2000, and you just gotta play it if you haven’t yet.
This is another Dreamcast game where prattling on about it really does its refreshingly simple beauty a bit of an injustice. I’m holding out hope that the upcoming remake is at least decent, but even if it isn’t, we’ll still have Bomb Rush Cyberfunk for our fix.
Dead or Alive 2
While Dead or Alive as an IP has not aged very well due to just absolutely terrible decisions, those early games are timeless, specifically Dead or Alive 2, which took the pretty good basis of the OG and made itself a showcase for the power of the 6th generation.
Visually speaking, you just need to glance at Dead or Alive 2 to realise that it still looks absolutely great today. It arguably has even more vibrant colours than the later PS2 and Xbox ports, with the PS2 version interestingly only running at 480i compared to the 480p on the Dreamcast.
The movement of combat always looks great, with super fluid, silky animations barely seen up to that point, arguably surpassing even the benchmark setter, Soulcalibur 2. And yes, some characters being jigglier than a mountain of jelly getting shot with a gatling gun when they’re just like breathing is a bit funny to see, but just generally speaking the character models for characters like Ayane, Kasumi, and hottest of all, Bass, are still iconic.
The gameplay too is still great, as Dead or Alive has always been intended as a series that’s incredibly easy to pick up and start whaling on your mates with. It’s not overly concerned with metas and slide cancelling or whatever, just being really, really cool and doing really cool martial arts, and there’s still a place for it in the current fighting game scene. Here’s hoping it gets rez…urrected.
Rez
The first time I played Rez, it was actually on PS2. I remember it well, because I got it from a random video game shop on a pier, of all places. Where’s the weirdest place you ever bought a game? Anyway, as an impressionable young Digimon stan, let me tell you that playing Rez in all its weird glory was like some kind of video game puberty, and then I played Metal Gear Solid 2 and was suddenly like this.
The simplest way to describe Rez is Panzer Dragoon meets Tron, with you controlling a hacker’s avatar as they dive deep into an AI system. A rail shooter, Rez has you shooting at targets part of a security system to the beat of the banger electro soundtrack, with the level being shaped around you, and your avatar changing form based on your power level.
Designed by Tetsuya Mizuguchi to be as emotive as possible, the wire frame graphics give Rez an entirely unique identity that you can’t really replicate, or get tired of looking at. The gameplay can certainly be challenging, and maybe a tad overwhelming, but anyone can pick up the basic gist pretty quickly and get something out of it.
Rez is a real treat for the senses, though maybe a bit overwhelming if you’re super young and have not yet become a man, i.e. traded your first Crazy Bone. Especially when you’re getting into the existentialist singularity stuff. The only thing that hasn’t aged too well about it is its short length, but Rez is one of those games that everyone needs to experience at least once. It’s a great escape from reality.
Rayman 2: The Great Escape
I got another confession to make, I did actually originally have another fighting game in this spot, though I decided to instead be more varied. Games like Power Stone and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, which I did already shout out in the PS1 games that aged beautifully vid, would be locks here, but let’s give the shine to a guy who’s really not had a lot of it lately: Rayman.
Originally released on Nintendo 64, Rayman 2: The Great Escape’s Dreamcast version gave players a pretty good idea of the kind of generational leap the console was capable of. Everything was just so much better: animations, textures, sound — and the N64 version was pretty awesome already.
Rayman 2 also just plays great as one of the best 3D platformers of the time, or all time really. You play as the titular cartilageless wonder as he collects six million lums, fights pirates, and regains his powers across varied, vivid and massive levels with surprisingly tight controls that just make it all feel so smooth to pick up and play today.
Speaking of smooth, the game’s Dreamcast version is the only console version of the game that runs at a pretty much buttery 60 frames per second, which is kinda crazy for a 3D game with a lot going on from this time. Even the PlayStation 2 version doesn’t hit 60, and it just doesn’t feel anywhere near as fluid as a result.
Games like Rayman 2 prove that while the Dreamcast may not have been as powerful on paper as its rivals in the 6th generation, it was a bit of a developer’s dream, with so many cross-platform games shining when given the chance. And while the dream may not have been a long one, it was a pretty good one.
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