u/Such_Bonus5085

As games, I don't like them very much, but I love their respective vibes. If that makes any sense.

I played through the titular quirky arcade-shooter version of Code Veronica on the PS2. It's apparently ported from the NAOMI. Did a Dreamcast version get made?

Back in the day, I definitely spent more time enjoying PC shareware from BBSes or magazines like The Software Labs, than I did playing retail games. Did the Amiga have a shareware scene too?

To me it's feeling more and more like the creator of this Bitmap Brothers aesthetic inspired FPS is purposely milking it. Maybe it's just the cynic in me, but when these projects drag on for years and years, they almost always inevitably turn into a "And then they took the money and ran!" punchline on a DJ Slopes Kickscammers video.

Going from least enjoyable to most.

• Call of Duty Finest Hour. A really solid effort to replicate the look and feel of a then high-end PC game onto consoles. The set pieces really go big. That Stalingrad opening stage makes the Normandy Beach stage from Medal of Honor: Frontline look last gen. That said, it feels very unbalanced. The difficulty is all over the place. With some levels so brutal a single misstep sends you back to the loading screen.
• Call of Duty 2: Big Red One. This one feels almost more like a Medal of Honor game, with the way your playing the same protagonist, with the same group throughout. The difficulty balance and voice acting was a lot better than Finest Hour. It just doesn't have that Call of Duty feel. Still a great game though.
• Call of Duty World war War: Final Fronts. Despite a couple of bugs, I really enjoyed this one. It's a companion to the mainline World at War game, featuring wholly different campaigns. It's obviously a budget title with some recycled assets, and there are zero extras(as in no Multiplayer or Zombies), but I had so much fun with this one.
• Call of Duty 3: Strongest of the bunch. It's obviously a down-port of the HD version, but out of all of the CoDs released for the PS2, it feels the meatiest. I felt like the story was a particularly strong point for this one too. There's a lot of heart and personality in the characters. I actually got attached to some of them. It's basically the same as the Wii version, but without the frustrating motion controls.

Dreamcast plays backups, which put getting to play games from other regions into your hands, without having to sell one of your kidneys! Sadly, the grass is not always greener on the other side, and we find out the forbidden fruit isn't as sweet as we thought it was gonna be. So, what's an import you had unmet high hopes for?

For me it was the Godzilla duology.

Godzilla Generations let's you be different incarnations of Godzilla, including Zilla, and weirdly enough a giant Doctor Serizawa, as you destroy the city. Sounds like a great concept...but the game plays about as horribly as it looks. It's...pretty terrible.

Godzilla Generations: Maximum Impact sees Godzilla moving along a set path, as you use his atomic breath to destroy human vehicles and weapons. The boss battles give you a bit more control over Godzilla, but it's just so.... boring. The visuals are a noticable upgrade though!

My favorite game in The Bards Tale style is Dragon Wars. I played this a LOT growing up, and it was one of the games that took advantage of the Tandy 1000's 16-color mode. It being on the Tandy 1000 also meant I had a volume knob for when games only had PC speaker audio, lol!

I would spend a good hour just making my party. And that book with all the game world lore in it was fantastic.

Well, the Amiga version feels like a whole different experience due to the higher color artwork, and in-game music. It's about how I'd imagine a SNES port of the game being.

I would argue out of the combat flight sims for the Dreamcast it is the best one. The gameplay loop is "If you've ever played Ace Combat, you know what to do!" It's uncomplicated. Easy to just pick up and get into. Really nice selection of planes too. Konami copied Namco's homework perfectly.

I love watching stuff like this, decades after the fact. It's astonishing that features we take for granted now, once required very specialized hardware.

I've also seen a couple of the writers of Rifftrax take a crack at this one. Pretty funny stuff.

Even if you didn't have an Amiga back in the day, like me, stumbling onto Tracker Modules was inevitable. I got a Shareware CD for Christmas of 1995 that had all the PC shareware games I could ever want, as well as a large directory full of MOD, XM, S3M, etc and software to play them via a Soundblaster. Fantastic stuff! I could, and did, listen to it for hours on end.

This kind of music would also find its way into late-era PC shareware titles like Jazz Jackrabbit, Halloween Harry, Terminal Velocity and One Must Fall 2097.

As I understand it IBM PCs and their clones weren't that common in Europe, meanwhile the Amiga wasn't a very popular platform in North America. This was years before the Internet as we know it existed, so I just don't see there being the kind of Us vs Them that was going on like there was with Nintendo vs Sega.

Certain titles seem to be required playing for Dreamcast ownership, but like anything else in life, people are gonna have different tastes. What are some of the "iconic" stuff that doesn't gel with you?

Three of my picks are

• Crazy Taxi. I know this is an arcade port, but it's painfully shallow. I spent two hours with it, before taking it back to the store and exchanging it for a copy of Grandia II, which I absolutely loved! There's only so much enjoyment I can get out a game where playing for points is the only real end game.
• Phantasy Star Online. Sega took one of their best RPG franchises and turned it into an MMO, one that bears really no semblance to the franchise it's named after. There's no compelling story to make me want to endure the grind. In that regard it has the opposite problem FFX on the PS2 does.
• Shenmue. Does it have incredible atmosphere? Oh yeah! Is there a lot to do? You bet! Does it have a story to tell? Yes! Is it fun to play? Sort of. Look, as a "One man's tale of revenge!" Shenmue leaves a lot to be desired. You spend more time visiting the arcade, driving forklifts and collecting gashapon than you do beating up on Lan Di's men. What does the game give you for troubles once you make it to the end? "To be continued." Kiss my ass, Yu Suzuki!

Not just in terms of quantity, but quality too. Even their last gen ports on the Dreamcast were a cut above. For instance: Resident Evil 3 is actually better on the Dreamcast than even the PC version, due to Capcom adding some subtle QoL tweaks. The fact Capcom showed that much love to a budget release really shows how committed to the platform they were.