kartooner

A week or so ago, ebgames.com ran a spe­cial for a used Dream­cast con­sole at the bar­gain price of $15.00 plus ship­ping. I felt this was a steal con­sid­er­ing the fact my brother sold our orig­i­nal Dream­cast on Ebay with­out noti­fy­ing me of his busi­ness ven­tures. Just as well, how­ever, since we only owned two games for the sys­tem (Ray­man 2 and Crazy Taxi) and chose to rent the rest at Blockbuster.

One of my favorite rentals was Shen­mue, a Japan­ese RPG by cre­ator Yu Suzuki, mas­ter­mind behind the pop­u­lar Vir­tua Fighter arcades. Shenmue’s premise is sim­ple and yet bril­liant in its execution.

In the game you play the char­ac­ter Ryo Myazaki, on his quest to avenge his father’s bru­tal mur­der. Each day, your Grand­mother leaves 500 yen for you to spend, which today equals to about $4.50 in USD. The game itself is non-linear in the sense that you can either fol­low the sto­ry­line to the tee or veer off the path a bit.

Along the way you encounter var­i­ous sup­port­ing char­ac­ters that inter­act in a real-time envi­ron­ment; for exam­ple, dur­ing the morn­ing hours and depend­ing on when a par­tic­u­lar busi­ness opens you’ll see the shop­keeper make their way towards their busi­ness to open for that day.

Inbe­tween cru­cial game­play sequences, you can even make a trip to the local Arcade and waste time play­ing such Sega clas­sics as Space Har­rier and Hang On. Depend­ing on the amount of yen, you could eas­ily burn hours on these per­fectly emu­lated clas­sics, but where would the fun be in just doing that? While it might not be for every­one, Shen­mue is cer­tainly epic in its orig­i­nal­ity and over­all game­play, but of course has its own flaws (repet­i­tive fight­ing sequences, etc.) which in my opin­ion are minor at best.

In the past week I’ve scoured web sites look­ing for cus­tom Dream­cast games and emu­la­tions. I found that some­one had ported Scum­mVM to the Dream­cast, flaw­lessly I might add, and it was only a man­ner of using Alco­hol 120% to burn the soft­ware to a reg­u­lar CD-R.

Last night I was play­ing Day of the Ten­ta­cle, Sam and Max and Mon­key Island 1 on my tele­vi­sion and it rocked. The only annoy­ance play­ing these kinds of games is the con­stant spin­ning of the CD, but it doesn’t mat­ter because finally I can play DOTT on my TV. It’s like a Sat­ur­day Morn­ing car­toon, but inter­ac­tive and with­out commercials.