Whatever happened to Sega? Back in the early 90's they were the biggest thing in the console games industry, and now they've sunk so low as to make games for Nintendo! I haven't owned a games console since my old Sega Megadrive, so I still have a bit of a soft spot for Sega. They flopped with the awful Mega CD, the Mega 32 and the Saturn (which really should have been much better than it was), but I can't understand why the Dreamcast never took off, some of the games looked amazing. Pity they gave up on consoles after that, with their experience of producing good games and at one time, good consoles, they could provide an alternative to the Playstation and the like.
SEGA Dreamcast was badass. But no one bought it because PS2 was backward compatible, and Sony lied saying it would be released earlier than it was, and they also lied about how powerful it would be. SEGA Dreamcast had a partnership with microsoft, and as such had internet connectivity and a lot of online games (that didn't lag on dialup!). It also ran windows CE so it could use a web browser and stuff like that. For 1999 these features were really advanced. Really these features didn't get implemented again in any meaningful way until Microsoft came around with the Xbox. NFL 2K on Dreamcast was amazing. I still remember playing Alien Front Online, that game was awesome. Phatasy Star Online wasn't bad either (on dreamcast it didn't have a subscription fee). I still love Power Stone. Shenmue was a really sweet game too. Really the games on dreamcast were really solid. I really enjoyed my Dreamcast but games kinda died out for it early since not enough people bought the console to begin with. I still remember people saying "PS2 will be out in a couple months I will just wait". In fact, Dreamcast came out on 9-9-99 and PS2 came out on Oct 26, 2000 in North America. Really Dreamcasts textures were amazing at the time. The polygon counts weren't really all that amazing, but they were solid and with the great textures you could tell a huge difference between the N64 and the PS1. Even PS2 games didn't initially look as good (although after some time they got better as it was a more powerful platform with DVD storage media vs CD). I think SEGA has too poor a record to continue successful consoles though. While they had some great successes, the issues with SEGA Saturn (in US) and SEGA dreamcast leave a sore taste in buyers mouths. Nothing like buying a console and running out of games in a year or so to make you leery of buying it again. Furthermore, now SEGA has yet another competitor. Last time it released in a seperate window from PS2 and way before Gamecube but still had issues. This time around they have to compete with the new Xbox360 version that comes out every 2 months and with whatever Nintendo and Sony do.
SEGA doesn't even make good games anymore You KNOW they're running out of ideas where they make a Sonic game (About shadow) that's slow and involves guns. I long for the good days
Yeah the sonic games these days aren't great... but then again at work I used to see little kids buying them fairly often. Although, I think the Sonic game that was released with the Dreamcast was really bitchin' too. I beat it during a 3-day rental though so I never bought it.
The Dreamcast is my favourite console of all time, nothing like it. The time of Sega as a hardware maker is long over though, the Dreamcast could have done well (and indeed was selling pretty well although not as much as PS2) but Sega simply didn't have the cash reserves to make it work. It's why Nintendo has been very smart to abandon the "sell consoles at a loss and make back the money through games" business model.
