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Editor's note: Brian clearly loved his Dreamcast — so much so that on launch day, when one of his games didn't work, he not only drove half an hour to get a new copy but also went back again to get a working system. He learned a valuable lesson about the dangers of buying hardware on the day it's released. Brian, I salute your Dreamcast dedication. -Jason
At 7:30 a.m. on September 9, 1999, I was standing in front of the closed gate of the Electronics Boutique in the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, NH. (For those curious, Nashua and Salem, NH are the Mecca and Medina for northern Massachusetts residents looking to get out of paying sales tax.)
I was second in line that morning and bursting with excitement — I'd been waiting a long time for that day, with many of the events of the past six months of my life revolving around the upcoming U.S. debut of the Sega Dreamcast.
In the spring, I wrote my final paper for my technical writing course on the Dreamcast's specs and capabilities, and I didn't get laughed out of the classroom. I even got an A on the paper!
When I returned home that summer for a six-month engineering internship at a local company, I discovered that one of my friends had actually imported a Japanese Dreamcast — and the early look that I got at games like House of the Dead 2, Power Stone, and Pen Pen Trilcelon really got me excited about the system's potential. (Well, maybe not so much Pen Pen Trilcelon….)
So when I walked out of the EB later that morning with a substantial haul — the system, a spare controller, a Virtual Memory Unit, an arcade stick, five games, and my commemorative preorder T-shirt — I was beside myself with glee. I'd taken the day off from work, and my parents had promised to let me use the big TV in the living room. I was looking forward to an entire day of finally playing my very own Dreamcast.
Little did I know that I was driving home with a ticking time bomb that would soon explode into a giant pain in the ass.
I started my day, as I'm sure most folks who came home with a launch system did, by putting in the game that ended up being the primary reason to own a Dreamcast — SoulCalibur. I'd already pumped ridiculous amounts of time into its PS1 predecessor, Soul Blade, and I spent a very happy half hour getting reacquainted with Taki, my favorite character.
Wanting to get the full breadth of the Dreamcast experience on my first day, I put SoulCalibur aside, knowing that I would spend much, much more time with it later, and moved on to the next game on my list, TrickStyle. (Designers in those days were big on not putting spaces in their game names, eh?)
TrickStyle was a futuristic hoverboard racer that was essentially a combination of WipEout XL and Back to the Future 2 — two of my favorite things! While it certainly looked fantastic, the trick mechanics were simplistic, the racing controls were nowhere near WipEout's standards, and the track selection was pretty limited. After another 30 minutes, I was ready to move on.Next up, I threw in NFL 2K. This was my first real foray into "behind the QB"-style video game football, as I was born and raised on Tecmo Bowl, never owned a Genesis, and was incredibly underwhelmed by the football options available during the PlayStation/Saturn years. (I distinctly remember watching a friend play one of the NFL GameDay games on his PS1 once and thinking that it looked like "absolute butt.")
NFL 2K was the only football game in town on launch day, due to EA's decision not to publish the Madden series on the Dreamcast. I certainly didn't think I was missing anything. The game came out to fantastic reviews, including a 9.9 from Gamespot and a 9.7 from IGN (but only an 8 from EGM — what were those idiots thinking?), and it definitely deserved these high scores.
Graphics, animation, control, and commentary were all top-notch, and the Patriots hadn't fully completed their fall from grace following the 1997 Super Bowl loss to the Packers, so I was having a grand old time with it.
But again, after a half hour or so, the lure of games yet opened became too strong, and I made the fateful decision to tear the shrink-wrap off of Airforce Delta.
I was really looking forward to playing Airforce Delta — I hadn't played a good flight game with real planes since Chuck Yeager's Air Combat (a 1991 game for PC/Mac) — but when I put the game disc in the drive and closed the lid, nothing happened.
Confused, I popped the lid and checked the disc for scratches, but it was absolutely pristine. I replaced the game and tried again, but I still got nothing. Annoyed, I quickly unwrapped my final game, threw that in, and it appeared to work fine — so I reluctantly found my receipt and drove the half hour back to the mall to exchange it.
After explaining my issue to the EB clerk and getting my replacement copy, I drove back home, unwrapped it, and slapped Airforce Delta into the drive — only to discover that this one didn't work, either!
Fuming, I called the store back and explained that the replacement had also failed, wondering out loud about the odds that I would end up with two consecutive defective copies of the same game. That's when the clerk suggested that the problem might be with my system — and with a sinking feeling, I realized he was probably right.
"Well," I said, "that makes a lot of sense. But I'll tell you one thing — if I have to drive up there again today, I'm not leaving without a working system!"
After putting my Dreamcast back into its original packaging (always an enormous pain in the ass), I grabbed my games and drove to the mall for the third freaking time that day.
After arriving at the EB, I literally had them unpack a new system right there in the store and hook it up to a TV. We tested combinations until I finally had a system that played all five of the games that I had bought that morning.
Thoroughly frazzled, I dragged myself back to my car, wearily drove home one last time, unpacked my replacement Dreamcast, and hooked it back up. I fooled around with Airforce Delta for a little while and enjoyed it, and then I decided to finally get a good, long look at the game that I'd saved for last.
Unfortunately, it was Blue Stinger, a game so monumentally bad that I could never bring myself to finish it.
This game is one of the most ridiculous titles that I've ever played — you buy guns out of vending machines, an entire level takes place in a Christmas-themed shopping center with happy-style Christmas music blaring, and defeated enemies explode in a shower of bouncing gold coins that you have to run around and collect. (Keep in mind that this was supposed to be a survival-horror game.)
And yet, a game this bad still managed to sell 500,000 copies, simply because it was available at launch — the perils of being an early adopter, indeed!