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Comment by micromacrofoot | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I don't think a console has come close since, and this always makes launches feel very lackluster to me.

Man, that is hooey, if we're talking launch (day one) titles. The US Dreamcast launch lineup was spectacular.

Leading the way was Soul Calibur, one of a handful of games to earn a perfect score from Famitsu[1] and it actually blew away the arcade version (!)

NFL2K was also a launch title and while I'm sure a lot of the HN crowd is allergic to sports titles, it was far superior to contemporary versions of Madden... got correspondingly high reviews as well

Sonic Adventure was pretty spectacular too I thought, I would call that an 8.5 or 9/10 (like a lot of 3D platformers it maybe hasn't "aged well" but at the time, I thought it was spectacular and it was well reviewed)

Power Stone was a blast too.... Hydro Thunder.... bunch of other solid ones. Day one.

https://www.mobygames.com/group/13786/launch-title-dreamcast...

Here was the PS1 launch lineup. Ridge Racer is the only really good title here, excluding previous-gen ports like NBA Jam and Rayman. Toshinden was obviously mindblowing as the first polygon fighter many played but it's sort of a notoriously bad game.

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/06/playstation-launch-titles/

But in some ways that just shows Dreamcast had already lost the war before it launched. Sega did everything right and hit the ground running with what many consider the greatest launch title lineup in history, but their rep was too tarnished.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famitsu_scores

Almost every single game during the PS1 launch was a killer app because every single one was a novel new experience in a 3D rendered space. Dreamcast showed up way too late to compare.

The PS1 also launched several novel IPs.

Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a dime a dozen and no one cared by that point. That's why Sonic Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable where Tekken and Rayman are not.

The Dreamcast wasn't competing against the Playstation 1, the Sega Saturn was. And price and game library aside it had the hardware to back it up. You can see this in gameplay videos of, say, Nights into Dreams or Tomb Raider.

If anything the Dreamcast was competing against the PS2 and Gamecube (despite coming out at an awkward time significantly earlier than the competition)

    Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a 
    dime a dozen and no one cared by that point. That's 
    why Sonic Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable 
    where Tekken and Rayman are not.

I mean, you could make this same argument to claim that the Atari VCS was better than the NES because the idea of "playing games on your TV" was no longer a novel new experience by the time the NES rolled around.

For everything about to say, please note that I'm not arguing one system was better than the other. Just talking about how they fit in historically. I owned and enjoyed all of these consoles.

For me, the Dreamcast was the first "modern" 3D console where everything came together.

PS1 3D games were largely pretty ugly. Jaggy warping textures and the hardware was not really powerful enough for big worlds. Perhaps even more importantly, the lack of analog controls was a very very serious impediment.

Obviously despite this there were a lot of classic PS1 titles. A few games like Gran Turismo even seemed to pull off miracles graphically while other titles like Metal Gear Solid just leaned into the grimy pixelated look.

The N64 was largely a joke to me. You had a standard analog control, but the hardware was clearly a mess. Specifically there was far too little texture memory so every game had these giant low-res smoothed out blurry textures. Again obviously a few games transcended that but in general, man, yikes.

The Dreamcast was the first modern 3D console. The one where things came together. Enough horsepower and texture memory to render actually good looking worlds and the flexibility to do things like cel-shading. You play DOA2 or Soul Calibur and those models still look pretty good today. Lots of games were locked in at 60fps. Etc. Even had the first console MMO.

The Dreamcast really was a wonder and it has a huge place in gaming history.

I remember the launch being as attractive as you described (I was always lukewarm on Sonic, though). A few years later when the parents finally agreed to buy me that gen's console, I still went for the PS2 because of the catalog and DVD player, after a long streak of only buying Nintendo consoles. I borrowed a few other the years, but never the DC.

Competition was fierce. I like the arcade-Sega style of games and enjoyed the DC titles when I got my hands on them, but that was as far as I went.

    DVD player

Yeah. This was really a "killer app" for the PS2. That, plus Sega's self-destroyed reputation thanks to the SegaCD/32X/Saturn fiascos.

Dreamcast had terrible timing, in my opinion. That, and the controller was obnoxious. But wrt timing, the Dreamcast launched in between generations. Console generations tend to last at least 5 years. It was harder for people to afford multiple consoles back then, and if you had purchased an N64 or a PS1 in '96-'98, it was probably too soon to buy a second or third console in 1999, when Dreamcast launched. It had far too little time as the best hardware before PS2 and Xbox both launched in the following year and a half with better graphics and DVD support, leapfrogging it in the process.

    It had far too little time as the best hardware before PS2

It didn't matter because Sony had already won the hype war, EA forsook the DC, and the built in DVD player was something of a killer app itself.

BUT If you go back and look at the first year or two of PS2 titles, they were not technically superior to the Dreamcast.

IMO the Dreamcast had 1-2 years as the best hardware on the market, and another 1-2 years on par with the PS2.

PS2 was far superior "on paper" but in reality, the difference was not as large as the numbers suggested at a glance. The Dreamcast did two things the PS2 didn't:

- Hidden face removal, making it vastly more efficient than the PS2 (most polygons in a scene are actually hidden by other polygons, so if you avoid rendering them that's an enormous win [1]

- Free hardware texture decompression, so it needed much less video memory [2]

Those points were subtle, though. The gaming press and internet chatter at the time was largely (and understandably) oblivious to tech subtleties like that.

In the end, obviously, the PS2 actually was superior once developers (and particularly middleware developers) mastered its tricky CPU. But I didn't consider it to really surpass the DC for a while.

   That, and the controller was obnoxious.

I liked the controller unlike many, but the failure to include a second analog stick was a real miss. The sad thing is, the DC's controller protocol had support for dual analog inputs. They just didn't forsee the need.

___

[1] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/

[2] https://dcemulation.org/index.php?title=Texture_Formats

The PS2 was backwards compatible with the PS1, so virtually all PS1 games from their huge library continued to be playable on PS2. And PS1 games were still shipping in 2000, 2001, and 2002.

Meanwhile, PS2 may have had a poor launch lineup but by 2001 it was rapidly improved with Gran Turismo 3, Grand Theft Auto 3 (by itself a killer app), Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Jak and Daxter, every sports franchise you could want, other smaller hits like Devil May Cry, Max Payne, etc. Meanwhile the Dreamcast was discontinued by March of 2001, just 5 months after PS2's North American debut.

Was soul calibur a launch title? I bought power stone with mine on launch day and remember getting soul calibur much later, though this was in the UK

The PS5 is a good example, it was announced over a year before it came out and I'm confident first-party developers could already work on games for the platform, but... exclusives were lackluster at best, and for the first year or two it was pretty much all cross-platform titles.

Probably for the best since production couldn't keep up with demand, so the PS5 was a slow burner that didn't yet need exclusives to sell the console.

But a better launch lineup would've been nice.

PS4 wasn't too different. Many people held off on getting one until Bloodborne came out 16 months later.

I think Microsoft is the one in a really weird position ever since they started releasing PC versions of basically all their platform exclusives. Not that I'm complaining, but they've pretty much made it so there's zero reason for PC gamers to buy an Xbox, whereas there's still reasons to buy a Switch or PlayStation for the exclusives.

I wonder if Microsoft does this because gaming has been one of the biggest differentiators for their OS. That's an advantage that is rapidly fading and they want to hold onto it as long as possible.

Fading? Vs. Linux, maybe. Mac OS is still a bad platform for games.

Not sure if that stance is going to be relevant much longer. I recall Apple releasing a new framework that actually had some substance during their last keynote. I think Linus did a segment, they were running cyberpunk on Mac at 30FPS, not ideal sure, but it's a big step up.

https://developer.apple.com/games/

I don't know. I can hope for the best, but when they killed 32-bit apps and with them a ton of classic games, I gave up on Apple.

Yeah I meant vs. linux. True that it should continue to be a motivator for potential Mac switchers.

Heh, possibly. My brother won’t touch a PC game unless it runs on Steam Proton in Linux.

Are there a bunch of PS5 exclusives now? Last I checked it was all PC ports and PS3/4 remakes. What are the must have PS5-only games right now?

I kind of totally missed the PS1 launch, but it would have had the advantage that most of the titles being worked on didn't have anywhere else to go, really.

It you're working on a maybe PS5 launch title, you can relatively easily decide to release it for PS4 instead.

Most PS1 titles are tied to a cd-rom, and maybe some of the other hardware, and would have been tough to release elsewhere. Sega CD and 3DO didn't have much traction, TG16-CD and Jag-CD even less, Saturn vs PS1 vs PC was the relevant choice, and I think Sony was better at attracting developers at the time.

Although, it should be pointed out Road Rash was widely ported, launching on 3DO, later releasing on Sega CD, PlayStation, Saturn and PC.

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