Anyone remember the Sega Dreamcast?
These are the release dates:
JAPAN November 27, 1998
North America September 9, 1999
Europe October 14, 1999
Australia October 14, 1999
UK December 3, 1999
It was Sega's(creator of Sonic the hedgehog and other brilliant games) last video game system. It was short-lived, in 2001 Sega announced that they would stop production of the dreamcast.
NBA 2K2 was the last game released for the Dreamcast.
With the company announcing no plans to develop a next-generation successor to Dreamcast, this was Sega's last foray into the home console business.
According to Bernie Stolar, former President and CEO of Sega of America, the Dreamcast was canceled because the new chairman of Sega wanted the company to focus on software.[4]
Despite its short lifespan, the Dreamcast was widely hailed as ahead of its time, and is still held in high regard for pioneering online console gaming—it was the first console to include a built-in modem and Internet support for online play.[5][6] As of 2009, the console is still supported through various homebrew video game releases.
Here are couple of pictures
It came shipped with a DreamKey, you could use it with seganet to go online with a web browser.
The Dreamcast also had a black 56k modem.
In PAL/EU/Australia Regions the Dreamcast logo was blue and booting up logo was also blue.
In all other regions(NA etc) the Dreamcast logo was orange and booting up logo was also orange.
The Dreamcast can also read data from a Visual Memory Unit ("VMU") removable storage device and 4x memory cards that hold four times as much data. Input devices such as game controllers are connected to four USB-like "Maple Bus" ports. The VMU's would go in the controller, it also had a dpad and you could have a VMU for each controller.
The online servers were run by SegaNet, Dreamarena, and GameSpy networks.
There were 688 games for the Sega Dreamcast in total.
Some favourites of mine: Sonic Adventure(the best sonic ever), Quake III arena(awesome, my bro beat me though at it, i was like 2 when i first had it, 5 when last played). Shenmue I and Shenmue II,(excellent game) and Chu Chu Rocket.
I have yet to play sonic adventure 2 even though it is one of the dreamcast's best games.