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| Product: Sega Dreamcast |
Company:
Sega of America |
| Web: www.sega.com |
Phone: 888-271-5678 |
| Platform: Proprietary (also Windows CE compatible) |
SRP: US$200
Street Price: US$200 |
Cred Rating: | Special Award: |
It's hard to believe that it's been seven years since I first played Sonic the Hedgehog on my new Sega Genesis. The 16-bit video game console was such a quantum leap in quality from the Nintendo Entertainment System that it succeeded. I could hardly believe I was playing games on a home console -- bright, flashy colors, large, cartoon-like sprites, excellent stereo music and sound effects. For a game geek, it was a dream come true: arcade-quality entertainment in my home. Sega's tale has since been filled with woe: at the top of their game with the Genesis and commanding impressive marketshare, Sega watched as Nintendo regained steam with its Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Sega tried to battle back with the ill-conceived 32x add-on for the Genesis and later with another game console called the Saturn. But Sega's poor developer relations, limited games catalog and difficult programming environment led Saturn down the slippery slope to the dead media happy hunting ground. By 1997, it was clear that Sony's PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 would lock up the game console market until a new competitor could make its way onto store shelves. Enter the Sega Dreamcast.
First announced in 1998 at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in Atlanta, Georgia, Dreamcast is the first of a new generation of 128-bit video game consoles. 9.9.99 - that's the date Sega had been hyping for months as the North American launch of the product. So there I was, standing with dozens of other sleepy-eyed game geeks in front of my local electronics boutique, anxious to be the first on my block with the next gen game console. In fact, the launch of Dreamcast set records. Sega of America reports that US$97.9 million was taken in the first day of sales. 300,000 consoles were sold, tripling the previous record held by Sony with the 1995 launch of the PlayStation.
Dreamcast launches in the U.S. with a dozen and a half games available -- quite remarkable for a new gaming system. There are dozens more titles in the works, not to mention a slew of third party peripherals already available. The console has been available in Japan for several months and has gathered legions of rabid otaku. With Sony's release of its Playstation 2 and Nintendo's release of its next console, code-named Dolphin, both more than a year away, Sega is poised to own the next gen console market at least until the 2000 holiday season.
The Sega Dreamcast Console
The Dreamcast box is quite compact. It's just shy of seven and a half inches wide, about three inches tall, and almost eight inches deep. The casing is a square of white plastic with a clamshell-style opening for the 12x "GD-ROM," and two round buttons on the top: one for power, one to open the lid. And yes, that's "GD-ROM." The Dreamcast uses a special format for its game discs that holds up to 1GB on each disc, rather than the 650MB on normal CDs. On the front of the unit are four inputs for game controllers, and on the back is an RJ-11 socket for the upgradable 56K modem, a serial port, for future expansion options, an A/V cord interface and the A/C power cord receptacle. Cut on the back, sides and bottom of the unit are slots to allow for air exchange. Although there's no fan inside, the Hitachi SH4 CPU and the NEC PowerVR2DC graphics chip produce prodigious amounts of heat, enough so that Sega has developed, believe it or not, a liquid cooling system to keep the chips working in their optimal range.
The Sega Dreamcast Controller
In addition to the 200MHz RISC-based CPU and the NEC/Videologic PowerVR2DC chip, the Dreamcast motherboard sports a 64-channel Yamaha AICA sound chip and on-board video processing. It also features 16MB of main operating RAM, 8MB VRAM, and 2MB dedicated audio RAM. Dreamcast can pump out about 3 million polygons per second, that's roughly comparable to a Voodoo2 card from 3dfx. While that may not sound too impressive to PC gaming enthusiasts, it's light-years ahead of what home console users have seen before.
The system includes an A/V cable with RCA plugs for video and stereo audio, a 38 foot phone cable (Sega has wisely presumed that your phone jacks are probably not right next to your home entertainment center) and a single game controller. The controller itself is derivative of Sega's Saturn analog controller. It features an analog thumbstick and a directional pad on the left, two analog triggers underneath and a cluster of four action buttons on the right. The center of the controller incorporates a small window suitable for viewing the display of the VMU, or Visual Memory Unit, which is sold separately. The controller actually incorporates inputs for two VMU's. The bottom input can also be used for the optional Jump Pack, a Rumble Pack-style tactile response peripheral. Sega even has a VGA converter box available for users who would prefer to display the console's crisp graphics on a computer monitor instead of a TV set.
A variety of game peripheral are headed towards Dreamcast owners. Peripheral makers will offer everything from replacement controllers to light guns to steering wheel rigs and arcade-quality joystick pads. Folks who'll be surfing the Web on their Dreamcasts are probably going to want the official Dreamcast Keyboard. And fans of bass fishing (hey, we know you're out there) will definitely want the Sega Fishing Controller. It even provides tactile response as you try to reel in that big catch. Zip drives are coming as well, which will enable Dreamcast users to download whatever they want: game levels, characters, pictures or other data they'd like to hold on to.
The Dreamcast ships with two GD's: the Web browsing software, which provides connectivity either through AT&T Worldnet or through your own ISP (as long as it supports PPP) and a sampler disc with new Dreamcast games demos.
The optional Sega Dreamcast Visual Memory Unit
The VMU is one of the more intriguing Dreamcast options. Part memory card, part Game Boy, the VMU is a tiny device, about the size of a fat pack of gum, that fits comfortably into the palm of your hand. It incorporates a small black and white LCD screen, a four-way directional keypad, two action buttons, a sleep button and a mode button. Some games enable you to download characters directly into the VMU, which you can play with offline. Sonic Adventure, for example, enables you to download Tamagotchi-style creatures called Chao from various parts of the game, which you can then play with in a self-contained Chao adventure on the VMU. The possibilities for the VMU are limitless: you could create your own plays for your favorite football game, or you could exchange saved game files with friends. Like some other handheld gaming devices, the VMU can be plugged into another VMU to enable you to play VMU mini-games head to head.
So, how does the Dreamcast play? Fantastic! The colors are rich and full, the imagery detailed, and the animation is smooth as silk. No other console on the market can touch this quality, and some PC's and Mac's -- especially those lacking up-to-date 3D acceleration hardware -- will be hard-pressed to keep up. The only complaint I've found with the system is the typical one made of any game console equipped with CD-style media: level load times sometimes take too long. But it's a minor inconvenience at most. The quality of some of the games appearing on Dreamcast actually outshine the arcade versions from which they're derived. Namco's Soul Calibur, for example, features improved graphics and additional play modes compared with its coin-op predecessor. In fact, Sega manufactures an arcade game logic board called the Naomi that is operationally comparable to the Dreamcast, assuring Dreamcast users a conduit of arcade-derived games for some time to come.
Dreamcast comes with everything needed to get on the Web: software, in the form of an included GD-ROM, and an integrated 56K modem. Configuration only takes a few minutes. The software uses a simplified PPP and email configuration system that makes it fairly easy to input your ISP info. It's mainly limited to how fast you can hunt for numbers and letters on a pop-up on-screen keyboard manipulated via your game controller. This is an exercise in sheer frustration, and I'm certain that those who've bought the box in place of a WebTV will rush out for the optional keyboard. In fact, Dreamcast users who sign up for some of AT&T's Worldnet package deals get a Dreamcast keyboard for free.
Sega Sports NFL 2K game
Not surprisingly, Dreamcast provides only a basic connection to the Net. Using Earthlink -- the ISP I already have an account with -- I was able to connect and cruise the Web on the first try. The software has definitely been stripped down to offer simplified surfing. Most tasks are available via a pop-up on-screen control that provides quick access to email, previous pages and bookmarks. The browser itself scales default-sized Web text up to a sans-serif font that is comfortable to read on a TV screen. Obviously, any self-respecting net.geek would run screaming to a more sophisticated browser, but it may give some folks for whom the Internet is still a strange and mysterious world a taste of what's out there.
Perhaps one of the more intriguing aspects of Dreamcast's operation is its support of Microsoft's Windows CE operating system. While game developers have relied upon Sega's own proprietary API's to develop games, it's conceivable, especially given Dreamcast's integrated online support and future ability to support Zip disks, that Dreamcast owners may begin to use the console as a set-top computer with applications developed for Microsoft's portable OS. Could it be that Sega's Dreamcast will be the first legitimate "convergence" machine?
All told, the Dreamcast is a remarkably well-configured game machine that doubles as a simple portal to the Web and email. There's little doubt that the Dreamcast's main strengths are in its entertainment capabilities -- something that Sega has already amply demonstrated it and its development partners are wholly capable of delivering. Dreamcast has a tough row to hoe, though, with fierce competition just around the corner. By all advanced accounts, the new Playstation appears to be a significantly more powerful machine with better expansion capabilities. Sega has already shown developers and consumers that it's learned from past mistakes by launching the Dreamcast with better third-party vendor support than any other game console in its history. That and the Dreamcast's impressive technical specs are enough to make Dreamcast the king of the hill. At least for the next fifteen minutes.
- Peter Cohen [9/17/99]
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