When The Dreamcast Died In The UK

I’m recently been reading Service Games: The Rise and Fall of Sega by the ever-enthusiastic Sam Pettus and it got me thinking about my experiences working in video games retail in the early 2000s, and the fate of the Dreamcast. I worked in two different video games stores between 2000-2002 and saw first-hand the dramatic change in the fortunes of Sega’s final console.

Back in 2000 at the Nottingham independent video games store I worked at for 18 months the Dreamcast was flying high, despite being a little dead in the water internationally by then. It was really eating into the original PlayStation’s market and had the prominent display position in our store. However being an indie store we also sold import games, and the ominous arrival of the Japanese PlayStation 2 was a sign that Sega’s time in the sun was about to end, all due to the PS2 hype. And that’s what it was at the time, mainly hype - a lot of people tend to forget how lacklustre the PlayStation 2’s original games line up was. I remember people paying £600 for a Japanese PS2 and £80 on something like the underwhelming Ridge Racer V or FantaVision and ending up sheepishly trying to return them a few days later. The Dreamcast was so going strong at this point, with so many great games and the internet enabled play of games like Chu Chu Rocket and Phantasy Star Online offered something completely new for console gamers.

When the PS2 was released in the UK people went mad for it, they went crazy for it… as it was a cheap DVD player. And that was what the Dreamcast was lacking, I saw so many people agonise over which system to buy and in the end the DVD factor always won out. Reading Pettus’ Service Games it is interesting to see the reason why Sega did not incorporate one in the Dreamcast and opted for GD-ROMS -  in short: money. They just could not afford to include one and thought it would not matter for a dedicated games machine, but I saw first-hand how many sales they ultimately lost to this gamble.

A year later I had switched towns, moving south and eventually getting a job at a nationwide games retailer. Inside just those 12 months the fortunes of the Dreamcast had changed greatly, in this new store the display section for the Sega Dreamcast was relegated to the back of the store. The new releases were drying up, limited releases like Cannon Spike and Evil Twin that failed to energise sales. The second-hand market was pretty buoyant for the console then, but that was because so many people were trading in their Dreamcast for either the PS2 or Xbox. The GameCube was also just around the corner too.

In this store we still had an official Dreamcast pod for people to play on, which was seldom used. To generate more interest I started to bring in some of my import Dreamcast games from home to play on the pod, stuff like Treasure’s incredible shmup Ikaruga. It proved really popular and shows the mistakes that publishers seem to make regarding which games to localise. It was the end of Sega as a real market force, and its shelf-space continued to evaporate. Most customers I saw opted for the Xbox when trading in their Dreamcasts, seemingly unable to side with either of the bitter enemies of new and old that Sony and Nintendo represented. It was the end of the Dreamcast for the UK retail market, I will never miss their terribly flimsy boxes though.

Give Gozer a Break

I've been back playing Tetris a few times recently, but nowhere near the intensity of how much I played it last year. Suddenly this weekend I broke my all-time high score in marathon mode with ease. It amazes me how sometimes absence can make you better at playing a computer game. It reminds me of when I had Ghostbusters as a kid on the Sega Master System. That game had me stumped for an awful long time, I was constantly getting killed on the staircases before reaching Gozer.

In the end the frustration got the better of me and I stopped playing the game. Then about half a year later - for no real discernible reason - I decided to give Ghostbusters another crack. After a few tries I finally got to final level with Gozer and completed the game.

How did this suddenly happen?

Maybe I had lost some bad habits by having the rest?

Or maybe the break refreshed my enthusiasm?

That reminds me, I really need to go back to the 2009 Ghostbusters game. I drifted away from it - not because it was too difficult - but because the game mechanics were so clunky. But still it has the original voice cast so it would be worth going back to if only for that.

Twosday

I recently visited my Mum's grave on her birthday and I was struck by an old memory from my childhood about November 24th 1992. It was a Tuesday. But it wasn't just any Tuesday it was the day Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was released for the Mega Drive. Sega marketed the release day with a pun worthy of a genius: Sonic 2sday.

My Mum had quite a busy and stressful job at a law firm, she was always pushed for time. But on Sonic 2sday she used her lunch break to go across town to Virgin games store on Merchant Street in Bristol. Even though it was crazy busy she managed fight her way through and grab a copy of Sonic 2 for me. She spoiled me a lot.

Sonic 2 is by no means my favourite Sonic game (that honour has to go to either the original or Conic CD), but because it always reminds me of my Mum is has a special meaning to me.

Game, Set, Pad

Virtua Tennis 4 has destroyed two of my control pads. Once was unlucky, but twice is foolish of me. This is not from anger. I did not throw them against the wall in frustration (although trying to unlock the hidden character King pushed me close to doing so). My PS3 pads broke in the same way - the rim that surrounds the left analogue stick collapsed and broke off. Virtua Tennis caused just too much harsh back and forth, the pad could not stand up to the repetitive punishment. My first pad was black, my second was white, for my third pad I bought a gold one. I also decided to move onto Topspin 4, and although it is also a tennis game it shows the difference between the two games that the golden pad is still working fine years down the line.

I'm not saying Virtua Tennis 4 is a bad game, after all it is intended to be more of an arcade version of tennis than a full simulation. Playing it with an arcade stick would work best. I must get one as I do miss some Virtua Tennis.

Speaking of broken pads, I remember a friend of mine who used to get so frustrated and angry with his games he used to bite down hard on his control pad. You'd notice the teeth marks on them when you went round his house. But then the only games he had for his Mega Drive were Dark Castle, Fantasia and World Cup Italia 90 so maybe the bite marks are understandable.

The Psygnosis Mega CD Demo Moment

Getting demo discs for the Sega Mega CD was very exciting. For years I was secretly jealous of home computer owners who regularly got magazine-mounted cassettes and floppy discs full of game demos. It was too costly for magazines to do them for cartridge based systems like the Mega Drive and Master System. And to my knowledge no Commodore 16 Plus/4 demo tapes ever existed on magazines - but that is way back in the days before my Master System so I wouldn't count on my memory there!

The demo CDs were on either Sega Pro or Mega Power - both were wretched magazines and  the CDs were the only reason to buy them. The first one was Thunderhawk on Mega Power, me and my friends were wowed by it. It was the first time we'd seen a game that harnessed the power of the Mega CD for something other than FMV.

The demo CD that stands most out in my mind is the Psygnosis Demo CD. Unlike most other discs it had more than one game on it - a real treasure trove! It included demos of Puggsy and Wiz 'n' Liz. Wiz 'n' Liz... I can only imagine the game was conceptualised by Psygnosis developers in a Alan Partridge Monkey Tennis moment.

The games were so-so but there was also footage of Microcosm, a game that really intrigued me as the concept of being a airship shrunk down and injected into someone felt very Inner Space (and Inner Space has zero defects!) The footage - like most FMV games of that era - looks shocking now, so it is hard to describe how excited it made me and my friends for the game. The music accompanying the footage was stupidly bombastic, in a poor-man's Terminator soundtrack way. One time when we watched the music didn't play and the footage took on an eerie minimalist quality.

Finally on the Psygnosis Demo CD was a music video! A really hideously compressed video of Broken English by Sunscreem. It looked so bad the only thing you could really make out was that a guy was wearing neon pink sunglasses. And the song was awful. But there was something quite special still about having a music video on a CD no matter what the quality was.

How easily pleased I was before the internet!

Little Arcade of the Golden Axe

I was lucky enough as a boy to have a small arcade open up in the basement area of a shopping centre close to my house back in the early 1990s. It was by no means massive and housed about 6-7 arcade cabinets, but to me and my friends it was incredible to have this just on our doorstep. I'm struggling to remember all the machines, there was definitely a Gauntlet II machine. Gauntlet was the cheapest machine at 10p a go, but because you're always losing health it was a deceptive coin guzzler.

The most popular machine was that of Golden Axe, that was the one everyone crowded around to watch. Back in 1990 the big detailed sprites looked incredible, the music and sound effects... but most of all the magic. When you collected potions you could unleash magic, and the more potions you collected before using them the more powerful and visually impressive was the magic. Makoto Uchida designed a great new spin on the scrolling beat-em-up with Golden Axe's hack and slash play.

I remember one of my friends was the best at it and could defeat Death Adder on just a few credits. He loved that game. He was pretty crushed when his parents bought him a Super Nintendo for Christmas and realised he'd never get to play a home conversion of Golden Axe. He even converted my basic Master System version of it.

One weekend things changed, Golden Axe was there no more. And in its place was a new machine with odd octagonal joysticks. It was Midnight Resistance. Kei Akibayashi's novel take on the run and gunner wrong footed a lot of us used to the hack and slash of Golden Axe. But it did not take long before it was the most popular game that everybody crowded round in the little arcade. The rotatable joystick meant you could fire in a different direction than you were running and the power-ups for the weapons were fun.

Eventually there was less and less machines in the arcade and no new ones came in, so everybody became bored and lost interest with the little arcade. And I stopped going.

A couple of years later I rented the home conversion of Midnight Resistance for the Mega Drive, the controls just did not translate well to a 3 button control pad. But I enjoyed it despite its flaws as it reminded me of the little arcade and the good times me and my friends used to have down there. I decided to go down there and see what had become of it. The old place was now a pet food stall, but just a few paces down there was the 4 player The Simpsons Arcade Game. It was a pretty unforgiving beat-em-up but had great graphics. And a coin gobbler.

I guess some things just do not change.

Does the third level of Operation Wolf exist?

Remember when rapid-fire used to be a thing? I recall it being a big selling point for a lot of third party controllers when I was younger. I guess it is not such a useful function for modern games. I really liked the official Sega rapid-fire unit. You plugged it in-between your controller and the console - thus making any controller rapidfireable (uh... let's pretend that's a real word).

I paired it with the phaser on the fun port of Operation Wolf on the Master System. I say fun but I never got past the second level, as I ended up running out of bullets because of the rapid fire. And yet I never turned the rapid-fire off. I knew that Operation Wolf in the arcade used an uzi-style gun so in my young mind it made perfect sense to keep the rapid fire on. Never once did it occur to me that they adapted the game for home systems.

I really need to go back one day and try and play it through properly, that is if I can find a television that will work with a light gun nowadays.