Five for Five PS2 Gameplay Sampler -Part 5- (Sega Dreamcast Ports)

Remember how surreal it was to play Sega games on a Sony or Nintendo console for the first time. I guess you had to be there to understand the magnitude of Sega going from a company that produced game consoles to being a third-party developer. I know the Dreamcast to PS2 ports weren't the best ports, but these ports, and other ports fanned the fanboy flamewars of the Dreamcast verses PS2. The hardcore DC fans swore up and down that the DC was the more powerful console. It wasn't but it definitely did some things better than the PS2 which had a very strange architecture for it's time.

The DC's texture quality, and bright color pallet still pop to this day. Honestly, I find DC visuals to still be beautiful to this day in their own way. Developers definitely struggled to port it's games to the PS2, because the PS2's tough to learn architecture. I will always remember the epic fanboy arguments from this period. The Gamefaqs Dreamcast boards have forever cemented in my mind, the DC had 8mb of V ram, while the PS2 had only 4mb. That was the argument they made. In the end, not being a tech nerd, I'm not sure if that really matters, but it sounded convincing at the time.

The PS2 was a headache for developers to get a handle on at first. By the end, the system was old-hat, but at first it had a tremendous learning curve for developers. Some, like Oddworld Inhabitants, got frustrated with the system, and published games on the Xbox instead. From what I gather, since the PS2 did nothing in-hardware, like bump-mapping with the Xbox, or the 8-texture layers in one pass like the Gamecube did, developers had to manually program such things into their games. Not many PS2 games have bump/normal-mapping, but there are a few. This meant that developers had to spend more time and resources to program those effects into their games on the PS2 whereas other systems did them in-hardware.

Note: Not now, nor ever have I been good at Space Channel 5.

0:00 Space Channel 5: Special Edition
5:00 Sega Sports Tennis (Tennis 2K2)
10:00 Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future (16:9 aspect ratio)
15:00 Headhunter
20:00 Crazy Taxi (I had to mute the music, so no Offspring to be found)

#Dreamcast #PS2 #Sega