Category: Time

My Collection: Dreamcast

February 16, 2017

Sega released the Dreamcast console on September 9, 1999. I bought mine that day, with the launch game Soul Calibur and a Visual Memory Unit (ie. save game cartridge). Total cost: $275, or about $400 today.

The Dreamcast (DC) had a rough life, burdened by piracy, strong competition from the PS2 and disinterest from the public. It failed quite spectacularly (especially outside of Japan) and when Sega discontinued it in 2001 it marked their departure from the hardware industry. Even so some publishers continued to release software for a while after, but by 2002 the system had become a memory.

While I remember the Dreamcast quite fondly I purchased fewer than 30 games during its lifetime. I own less today due to an ill-advised trade-in event I may one day dedicate a blog post to. Here (excluding an additional controller) is the entirety of my Dreamcast collection today:

Here are the games I still own:

I set it up this past week and gave most of these games a whirl. To be honest, few hold up now. While we thought the Dreamcast a beefy system back in it’s day, the 3D (polygon-based) games are a bit muddy and suffer from slowdown, and the load times on most other games leave a lot to be desired. Also – bizarrely! – many of the games don’t even use the analogue stick on the controller.

There’s also the issue of the terrible VMU, which is essentially a USB drive with a tiny LCD screen on it. It had a pathetically tiny amount of storage on it, and it’s telling that I bought a second one the day I bought my second DC game. I recall the horror of continually moving or deleting save files just because storage space was limited and I didn’t want to buy another overpriced VMU.

That said, there are some real gems on the system, including most of these:

Cannon Spike is a curiosity – a top down almost-twin-stick 3D shooter/Smash TV hybrid. It’s not great – arguably not even good – but it came out three months after Sega killed the system and is among the pricier games on the system these days.

It’s companions on the photo: Mars Matrix, Giga Wing and (the mighty!) Giga Wing 2 are the triumvirate of superb and these days very expensive DC shooters. Giga Wing 2 in particular is a monster bullet-hell tour-de-force that holds up oh-so-well even now 17 years later. If you want to play it though you’re looking at more than the cost of a Dreamcast today. In fact those four games in the above shot are probably worth collectively well over $500 today, which isn’t bad since I paid a total of $70 to buy all four of them!

Other notable games include Record Of Lodoss War (a still-unique RPG I could sit down and play for hours right now) and Sword Of The Berserk (the first game based on the manga Berserk featuring a story by Miura and the famous anime soundtrack by Hirasawa). While the latter is an important part of my collection, to be honest the gameplay is utter crap and wasn’t much better back then 🙂

And then we have this guy:

Typing Of The Dead, the utterly bonkers “is that real?” arcade machine was converted to the Dreamcast and I bought it used (complete with keyboard) for a laughable $4.95 four years after the DC was dead. The game design is classic House Of The Dead but instead of using a light gun to shoot the zombies you attack via quickly typing words that appear above the attacking hordes. It’s as insane as it sounds, but is a lot of fun and the DC port plays beautifully.

Seriously, this may be the most fun game I own for the system.

The rest of my collection includes racing games, a few fighters, some puzzle games and some RPGs that are almost unplayable these days due to clunky systems or excessive loads. Most of these games have become footnotes, or curiosities at best, and in fact rarely are any Dreamcast games included in lists of landmark games through history.

Which is why, going through my collection as I did I was surprised how much some of these games are ‘worth’. In fact the average cost per game may be higher for my DC collection than for any other system I own. I’ll never (say never…) sell them, but it’s good to know their not worth less than the space they take up.

Which reminds me, is there any interest in a blog post about the ‘stars of my collection’? I started one once but didn’t post it since it seemed indulgent. But I think there’s some good stories to be heard there about games I paid retail for that have now skyrocketed in value if you want to hear them…

Thanks Mr Dever

December 1, 2016

Most of you probably haven’t heard of Joe Dever, even though he was an author of over 50 books that sold more than 10 million copies combined in many languages. As the owner of more than 50 of his books (in several imprints), it was sad to hear that he passed away the other day at the age of 60.

Starting in 1984 Joe Dever was the creator and sole author of the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks that continued for 29 installments and spun off into other gamebook series, novels, computer games, audio books, role-playing games and even a phone-based adventure game. It’s still going strong (more or less) with iOS games, reprints of the books and even a new installment which was released a few months ago. Lone Wolf was every bit as important as the Fighting Fantasy series, and is as much-loved today by it’s legions of fans.

As a 12-year old already caught up in gamebook mania via the Fighting Fantasy series, I ate up the Lone Wolf books when they were first released. Unlike the FF books, they were all set in the same world and told a continuing narrative where you played the same character through each book. You could even use your old character sheet, which was remarkable in those days! The world of Lone Wolf, inhabited by the jedi-like Kai Lords (and more powerful Magnakai) and the evil Daaklords was exotic and dangerous and fascinating and illustrated by the wonderful art of Gary Chalk.

In those days I had no way of knowing when (or if!) a new book in the series would ever come out so it was a real treat when I went to the bookstore and found the latest one. I must have played through at least ten in the series before I grew out of them (as a youth at least). As an adult, when I fell back into gamebooks about a decade ago, it wasn’t long before I’d acquired most of the low-number Lone Wolf books. My collection grew to include a mishmash of USA, UK and Australian imprints and would soon expand to include Dever’s other gamebooks (Combat Command, Grey Star and the Mad-Max Freeway Warrior) as well as Long Wolf novels and the (long sought-after by myself) The Magnamund Companion Lone Wolf Atlas. All of these are now important parts of my collection.

And yet to this day even in my expansive and encyclopedic gamebook collection there are a few books that remain elusive. And many of them are from the Lone Wolf series. I have books 1 through 20 (in some cases, multiple versions of each) and then book 25. This leaves 9 books out there to be one day found, with evocative titles like The Hunger Of Sejanoz and Vampirium. These books had small print runs, are quite rare, and very expensive (hundreds of dollars for some). One day I may own them.

I’ve read every Dever book I own and enjoyed them all. The gamebooks in particular are among the best written, and the quality of the Lone Wolf novels was a great surprise (since my expectations were influenced by the for-kids FF novels). The Lone Wolf books though are the keystones of his legacy, and I’m just one of millions that have enjoyed them now for over thirty years. Apparently Mr Dever was still writing new installments up until he fell ill. Even though those books will never be read, I believe the many works he left behind will keep readers entertained for many years to come.

Frozen Novelties (Part 2)

October 14, 2016

The post on ice creams was unexpectedly popular! It led to some digging around on the interwebs during which I found these licensed Aussie ice blocks.

I’ll post them in more or less chronological order:

I can remember these! Apparently the license was so massive that more than one company made SW ice blocks over the years. This was of course in 1978.

Licensing was in full bloom by the late 1970s, although obviously the Bionic Man license was cheaper than the Star Trek one based on the cost of the ice block 🙂

The KISS ‘water ice confection’ came out in 1980 and I can remember the cola-flavoured back ice staining your tongue when you ate it. They sold these at school believe it or not!

Look at those flavours on this 1980 ice block! Lemonade, pineapple and bubblegum?!? I bet I loved them!

This delicious Flash Gordon ice cream was also 1980. I’d ruin one of these right now.

Collating these photos gave me distinct flashbacks of perusing the freezer cases in the days all this stuff was available. Happy times!

We’re into the early 1980s now. Orange and pineapple is my dream combination; here’s hoping they still market Donkey Kong when I visit 😛

The first one is a bit special since they came with glow-in-the-dark stickers. You can read about them here, and I strongly recall having a Spider Man sticker of my own! There other licensed shaped popsicles as well (such as Disney), but I don’t recall ever buying any.

Here things have just got a bit out of control don’t you agree? While this is a box from a New Zealand company, I read (although don’t recall) that Fame iceblocks were marketed in Australia as well.

All these are over 30 years ago, and there were virtually no licensed iceblocks before 1978. This is just another example of how Star Wars changed marketing entirely. Growing up in that era – where even The Bionic Man was a good license for the freezer case – was a privilege indeed.

Robot Claw