(Tails' voice costed me 1000s of dollars (or euros) of mental health counseling though ... OK seriously ... what did sega think giving tails a voice like that?)
As usual with sega, the hardware was ahead of it's time (sega-cd (cd!), 32x (3d! virtua fighter almost like in arcade), gamegear (color screen like 10y before mariotendo), nomad 16-bit quality handheld, ...). It had an internet connection and a central system (seganet) for online gaming, the DC was powerful gfx-whise and atleast the thing had decent anti-aliasing (which you can't say about ... well you know who I mean) but also as usual (with the exception of the genesis/megadrive) sega managed to fuck it up.
For a change it was mostly sega japan that sinked the DC, together with too many delays (Rainbow six, Quake3, ...) and cancellation (Half-life, Black & White, Commandos 2: Men of Courage, ... ) of some major PC ports.
Some top titles cancellation (Castlevania: Resurrection, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2, Shenmue 2 USA, Colin McRae Rally 2.0, ...), no DVD player (and talking about addons early or even before launch does no good ... (whoops, do I recognise something with the X360 here?)), the lack of money compared to Sony for marketing and the failure to finish a deal with Squaresoft for an RPG and Konami for a MGS episode (which was rumored for a long time) killed it completely.
As square-soft became a clear 'no' what I missed most on DC: a follow-up to Panzer Dragoon RPG (rlsed on saturn), a good enix game or a translated sakura wars (OK, I'll stop DREAMing
).
The Dreamcast (Katana/Dural - by sega japan) HW development will always have one of the most intriguant misteries in videogame history. Who doesn't wanna know what the next-gen-saturn sega USA project (codename 'Blackbelt'), based on a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee chip, looks like? (did it physically ever even exist? - any demos made for it?). After the sega vs 3dfx lawsuit (settled out of court) any paperwork or possible HW should have been destroyed, which makes it very unlikely we'll ever know more about this.
Oh and sega and their slogans ... just a few 'recent' ones I still remember:
Sega! "you thought it was just a game" (must have been for the saturn around 1995 or so)
Sega! "Up to 6 billion players" (that one got banned here in europe actually ... the Trading Standards people didn't like the lie).
Let's also take this time to thank sega and their megadrive/genesis for one the the biggest hypes on the internet "All your base are belong to us"!
What you say!! ;p
Atleast sega went out of the HW biz with a bang. The 'Divers 2000 CX-1' is without any doubt one of the coolest limited edition console ever released (japan only ofcuz ... what did ya think
... "you damn westie aint get an'thin'").
What about a sega branded Xbox 360? Now that would make the japs love the MS console
