Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

Happy 10th Anniversary Dreamcast

9/9/99
it's thinking...




Dreamcast

Wow, it's hard to believe that it has been that long. The Dreamcast was a great system with lots of innovations that are now standard console features. It really paved the way for online console gaming, downloadable content, and so much more. Here's to the Sega Dreamcast!

Easily one of my favorite consoles of last generation. I was there on 9-9-99 around 4 am. I couldn't even sleep I was so excited for this. Granted it's old now [what isn't after 3 months?] but I felt it was far superior in terms of games and design than the other consoles out there. Of course it was a pioneer for many things we now accept as normal, so obviously the 'Big 3' were able to improve upon what the DC did and made it better. Even so, the DC is up there with my SNES and Saturn as my top 3 favorites [Xbox 360 notwithstanding]. My hat still goes off to Sega and this wonderful gaming gem.

Well, I wish Sega's online methodology had truly carried over to the other consoles. This mess about having broadband as a requirement to take consoles online kills me. Dreamcast gave the option of dial-up or broadband, it didn't limit the owner. One might argue that the GC did in fact continue this tradition of owners choice, but considering the only online titles to get released outside of Japan were actual Sega made sequels to DC games (the PSO series) it's hard to say Nintendo did anything.

Original model PS2's had a modem/ethernet combo adapter, but in this case Sony did nothing to ensure that the online titles being released for their system would be compatible with low bandwidth, which resulted in virtually all online titles only working through broadband.

Needless to say the only two game systems I've ever played online with have been the Dreamcast and the Game Cube. I've been an Xbox owner since 2002 and an Xbox 360 owner since 2006 and have never had the ability to take either of them online. Have owned the PS2 snce 2007 and have only managed to find one dial-up capable game, and it doesn't seem to be playable online anymore.

It really saddens me that the big three have never put any effort into recognizing just how truly remarkable the Dreamcast's online innovations really were. Think about it, the DC games effectively detected, nominalized, and regualted the connection speeds of all players playing in the same game/team so as to provide all players with an equal experience (exception being Quake 3: Arena). This was amazing because, for example in PSO, I could be in a team on my US DC with 56k modem, playing with a couple of people from Europe with 33.6k modems, and someone from Japan with a broadband adapter and there were no playability issues! No one was lagging to the point that they were detremental to the stability of the team. In fact, it all played quite smoothly and was quite enjoyable for all members of the party. Unreal Tournament played just as well, which was a remarkable achivement when you consider you could be playing in a deathmatch with as many as 15 other people! I tried playing the PC version of UT recently on my PC and was stunned that the DC version had had such a vastly superior online setup, I found myself the only dial-up player online, not one time, but three nights in a row! It was simply unplaybale as there was no regulation and nominalization of the connection speeds of any of the players, even some of the broadband players were complaining about how they were lagging because of the elite few players with T1 connections, it was horrible.

Anywho, due to an injured gaming thumb I only managed to briefly play a couple of DC games on the tenth anniversary.

Everything you mentioned, Tweeg, makes me wonder how some people hold online tournaments for various games, like Halo and Smash Brothers. How can those tournaments be fair when some of those players don't have connections as good as others that makes control lag vary from player to player? And the more lag, the more difficult. I do play Smash online with some of my friends and I have broadband, but I still often get control lag. Sometimes it's manageable, sometimes it's not. And it's frustrating because sometimes it pushes me away from playing Ness, because he's so precise that too much lag makes it impossible to pull anything off with him. If I was a competitive player, I would not want to play a tournament online because lag makes it impossible to play as well as you really can. If they used the Dreamcast online system, online play would probably universally improve.

I can understand why newer systems rely entirely on broadband. From my personal experience with PSO, it wasn't playable online with dial up. I was constantly lagging and disconnecting. Most of the time, I couldn't stay in a game for five minutes. I eventually gave up on it entirely.

The problems I encountered may have been caused by my ISP's dial up policies (very stingy about usage) and not the Dreamcast, but using broadband instead of dial up eliminates a lot of the hassle for newer consoles.