By: Mike Ponicki
July 29th, 1999

I recently joined the ranks of the fortunate souls who were able to rent a Sega Dreamcast from Hollywood Video. I was just as curious as you all are now I'm sure to see if Sega is back on track, so, for this article, I'll describe to you the physical unit, as well as the OS's interface and a short bio of the games I've seen.

To start, the Dreamcast is a small, white unit, about half the width of a PSX and close to the same depth, when you're looking at it from the front. It stands slightly taller than a PSX, it's about the height of a Saturn. It weighs slightly more than a PSX or N64. On the front of the unit are four controller ports, labeled A, B, C, and D, and on the right side of the front is a "Compatible with Microsoft Windows CE" label. Centered on the front of the machine is the familiar "Sega" logo. On the top of the unit, closest to the controller ports, is a power button on the left, a power light (orange when lit) centered, and an open tray button on the right. On the right side of the system, there's an air vent with a fan that's constantly blowing hot air out the vent when the unit’s on. You can actually smell the DC after it's been on for a few hours, I think they need an additional fan :) On the back of the unit, there's an AV Multi-out, similar to the PSX's, a power adapter port, the phone jack/port for the modem, and a serial port.

The controllers are slightly bigger than an N64 controller, are white to match the system, and have both an analog stick and a D-pad on the left side of the controller, both within easy reach of the thumb. The analog stick has the same texture as a PSX's, so you have good grip. But the movement of the stick feels more like an N64 analog stick, except with an even tighter feel. The D-pad protrudes from the controller's surface a great deal when compared to conventional D-pads, and has the best definition between directions I've ever felt in a D-pad. The DC's controller will be great for fighters. On the right side of the controller surface, are four buttons in a diamond formation, X, Y, A, and B, and in the middle is a triangular start button. On the bottom of the controller, towards the top, are two analog shift buttons, L and R.

The visual memory unit, or VMU, slides into the top of the controller, similar to how N64 memory cards go into the controller. On the top of the controller, right in the middle, is a square opening, where you can see the VMU's screen. Unfortunately, the Hollywood Video rental doesn't include a VMU, so I can't go into more detail about it.

When you turn on the Dreamcast, you can't help but notice how noisy it is. It sounds like a 3DO because of the fan, and the 12x CD-ROM is much more audible than the PSX's measly 2x. Without a CD in the tray, you're first presented with a Dreamcast animation that runs every time the OS boots (like the PSX's boot animation), followed by a menu. The menu items read "Play", which prompts you for a game CD, file, which doesn't do anything because I don't have a VMU :), music, which brings up the audio CD player, and settings, which lets you set the language, Date/Time, Sound (stereo or mono), and "Other", which has a couple VMU-related options under it.

The menu has a very clean look to it, with a wavy water background, text that's exceptionally crisp, and cute little animations for each menu item. For example, when you select the "File" menu option, there's a cute little polygonal VMU that sways back and forth. The audio CD player is pretty neat too, the buttons (play, go back one track, forward on track, seek etc) are translucent green and spectrally highlighted, very pretty. Then, there's a huge, spectrally highlighted CD rotating in the center of the screen. It looks VERY awesome.

Enough about the OS, on to the games! My rental included Sonic Adventure, which happens to be the only game I've played in great detail. But to sum up what the DC's games look like, picture the pre-rendered backgrounds in Final Fantasy VII. Get rid of the compression artifacts, increase the resolution, and imagine that image being rendered real-time by a 3d engine. That's what the DC's games look like. They're clean, glossy, true color glory. Comparing Sonic Adventure to Zelda 64 (the next best thing basically) is like comparing Zelda64 to Zelda 3. The Dreamcast, from the moment you see it in action, is clearly the next-generation of video gaming. Sonic Adventure has the best graphics in any game, PC or console, I've ever seen, (much better than even Unreal) and it zooms along at a perfect 60fps, with no slowdown ever. The days of distance fogging are over as well, in Sonic Adventure, you can see a VERY large distance away on the main map board (like, the distance from one end of the field to the other in Zelda 64), and there's never any pop-in. Loading times in the games I've seen are, at max, about 2 seconds long, so it would seem a larger CD buffer and a faster drive have taken care of the CD speed limitations. Keep in mind too, Sonic Adventure is the first first-generation DC game, so the loading times are close to worst case scenario.

On the audio side, the sound is on par with the graphics. The Dreamcast has a noticeably crisper sound output than the PSX does, and the DC's first party titles, including Sonic Adventure, have soundtracks that make full use of the DC's capabilities, resulting in sound that's just as indicative of a new generation as the visuals are.

All in all, the Sega Dreamcast is capable of playing any game on the planet with better graphics, sound, and performance than a fancy P3 500 system. All for $200. Sounds like a damn good deal to me. And with 10+ games AT LAUNCH (optimistically, there might be as many as 20 games), the Dreamcast will have more initially available titles than any other console's launch in history. Sega has the hardware, the quantity, the quality (Sonic Adventure is incredible, and what about Soul Caliber?), and the price point. Sega fans rejoice! Sega has awakened from its long slumber, and is looking to hail back to its successful Genesis days with the mightiest console to ever hit the streets.