If you try to tell people in this day and age about the Sega Dreamcast you might find that you’ll get a variety of responses ranging from ‘it was the best system ever’ to maniacal laughter followed by the idea that it’s best left in the past and buried. It’s true that the system kind of came and went without much fanfare but there were at least a few games that were worth mentioning either because they hung in there long enough to make a franchise or simply because they were awesome for their time. The Dreamcast wasn’t quite as limited as some would like to think since the graphics were, for the time, still pretty decent and the intros to many games were enough to get people interested. The list of games was actually pretty limited compared to a lot of other systems, but that’s also a reason why it’s easier to pick out a top five. Keep in mind if you played on the Dreamcast this list is kind of subjective, so your top five might have been a lot different.
Here are five of the best games from the Dreamcast era.
5. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2
For a while skating games were actually quite popular, as was skating. While they both have kind of gone up and down in their popularity throughout the years Tony Hawk was one of the kings of the video game world as his mere name was enough to gain interest in a lot of crowds. The gameplay was fun and engaging, the difficulty wasn’t too tough, and in all honesty it could be a lot of fun for hours and hours if you didn’t mind the fact that once you mastered the game it became something that was there just to engage in for a few minutes or a few hours at a time. It was fun, but like a lot of games once it was conquered it was time to move on.
4. Quake III: Arena
First-person shooter games have been gaining in popularity for years until this point when it’s simply something that seems instinctive to move towards since the first-person shooter games are among the most popular titles in anyone’s personal gaming library. There wasn’t as much of a plot to this game but that didn’t seem to matter since it was a kind of free for all that created a maddening effect that made it a matter of survival and not so much a goal-oriented game. Okay, there were goals to meet, but the constant mayhem was still a very prevalent part of the game that people enjoyed.
3. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
Any time you see Tom Clancy in the title you know it’s going to be something technical but also something that has a chance to be the kind of game that will be entertaining and even mind-blowing when it comes to the story. While Clancy’s books are sometimes a bit hard to read if you don’t enjoy the type of description that he goes into, the games that bear his name are still pretty entertaining, and back in these days the difficulty was something that many people either enjoyed or avoided. As the Clancy games have continued to come out throughout the years this one has been almost forgotten, but all in all it’s still one of the many that have made the franchise popular.
2. Unreal Tournament
This is all about killing more enemies than your opponent, plain and simple. The first-shooter experience is something that a lot of people have clung to for years and in some cases don’t know how to move past. But this game was among those that drew people in great numbers to the action. There were a great number of players that would talk nonstop about this game day and night, whether the people around them knew what they were talking about or not. This was easy to accept once you learned what the game was, but if you weren’t a gamer then it might have gone right over your head.
1. SoulCalibur
SoulCalibur is one of the several games that made the eventual jump from Dreamcast back to Playstation where it’s original game, Soul Blade, had first appeared. SoulCalibur is one of the many fighting games that offers a great deal of violence and several fighting styles without the shock and awe of the blood and gore that Mortal Kombat made so popular. Unlike MK though SoulCalibur is a game that did manage to keep its roster fairly small in comparison and only experimented with certain characters without making them a part of the actual roster. The game has endured a lot of criticism throughout the years, but if you’re a lover of fighting games this is actually one of the more entertaining.
The Dreamcast had its day, a lot of people just missed it.
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