Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I'm on a serious Dreamcast binge right now (Skies of Arcadia, Headhunter) while I wait for Shenmue 4 news.
While my brother would borrow a SNES, N64 and Saturn from his mates (lots of Super Star Wars, Mario 64, Die Hard Arcade and Panzer Dragoon Zwei memories), the Dreamcast was the first console our family properly owned. I still remember my excitement when our family went to purchase one at
Electronics Boutique and unboxing the system back home with my brother.
My favourite games for the system:
Sonic Adventure 1 & 2: The first Sonic games I played (no Mega Drive). I loved the colourful furry characters with their own unique abilities and the Crush 40 soundtracks were cool as hell. I adored these games as a kid.
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation & Tomb Raider: Chronicles: I love these games for simulating the thrill of being lost in a creepy, underground tomb and using all your wits to escape through brutal puzzle-solving. I rarely hear people beat these games for their puzzle-solving challenge, and if they do it's always thanks to a strategy guide. The Egypt setting resulted in many trips to the British Museum, and the witty action heroine who knees dudes in the balls made these some of my favourite childhood games that my sisters and I would wrack our brains trying to beat.
Resident Evil 2 & 3: I got into Resident Evil really late with RE4 (2014?). I finally got the chance to play RE2 and RE3 on the Dreamcast about three years ago and absolutely love them. I prefer the more cheesy, B-movie Resident Evil entries overall than the more ultra-serious ones purely for their 90's cheesefest awesomeness.
Crazy Taxi 1 & 2: Absolutely bonkers, and pure fun. With all the "We don't believe in using the word 'fun', we are creating art"
insufferable French horn fart-huffing from some developers lately, I really do miss these more zany games where you're leaping a taxi off buildings to get the priest to KFC. Also, the soundtracks for these games are 100% perfection.
Rayman 2: The Great Escape: Michel Ancel's swansong. One of the best 90's 3D platformers and the fact that Ubisoft has ported it to almost every system is a testament to how brilliant it is. Though I remember being really freaked out by the black, furry caterpillars for some reason...which is odd considering I was blowing up the undead in Tomb Raider around the same time.
Shenmue: My all-time favourite game series. I got this game as a gift from my brother-in-law around 2002 and spent the rest of the year being absolutely hooked. The game offered a snippet into where video games could go in the future: cinematic presentation, stunning graphics, an unprecedented amount of freedom and painstaking attention-to-detail right down to NPC routines and weather patterns. The multichapter, detective mystery story has left me just as hooked 20 years later and pining to know what will happen next in Shenmue 4.
