Top 12 Disney Games on the Sega Dreamcast

The Sega Dreamcast's short lifespan (relatively speaking) didn't lend itself to a large number of "big" licenses coming to the console. Alongside Sega's own franchises, we received a third-party lineup that was - again, relative to other consoles - not huge, with a couple of noticeable exceptions (think Capcom). This proved to be both a blessing and a curse for the Dreamcast. It allowed the console to hold a rather unique place amongst its peers: it wasn't plagued by sub-standard licensed games, but was also missing some rather popular titles, which led to the console being considered a little more "niche". Of course we did receive our share of big name releases, and alongside the sports leagues, professional skateboarder and vehicle licenses, we did see a small but not inconsequential number of games that fell under the umbrella of the worldwide media behemoth Disney.

Many of Disney's licenses, above and beyond their big-eared animated rodent, are popular the world over. And, as long as there have been licensed video games, Disney have been publishing tie-in games in order to ring as much money out of their animated movie releases as possible. Unlike some of their competitors though, Disney has a rather unique place in gaming with a series of titles released, especially in the early '90s, that were really rather good. Far from being quick movie adaptations, the likes of Castle of Illusion, Aladdin and The Jungle Book helped define the 2D platformer age and have aged particularly well both technically and in the nostalgic memory of players. 

Disney's legacy on the Dreamcast is perhaps not quite so fondly remembered, but there were still some decent animated adventures. Plus, thanks to the company's subsequent attempts at monopolising the entertainment industry, these days the Dreamcast now finds itself the home to several Disney-owned licenses that are worthy of at least a look. Some of the games on this list are probably not what you were expecting to see when you clicked onto this article (sorry!), but thanks to Disney's rather aggressive business pursuits, all of the games on this list technically now fall under the umbrella of The Mouse, even if they didn't originally on release...

(All pictures in this article were either taken by myself using my rather mediocre screen capturing setup, or from the fine folks over at MobyGames.)

12. Disney's Dinosaur

Just breaking into the top dozen of Disney titles on the Dreamcast is this tie-in with the somewhat forgotten 2000s movie "Dinosaur" - which always seems to be referred to as "Disney's Dinosaur" for some reason. Whilst it isn't one of the company's biggest or most fondly remembered films, it was still a decent family-friendly romp, and anything with dinosaurs in is always going to have a ready-made fanbase of kids who can't get enough of the prehistoric reptiles. 

As a game it has some interesting points – it's a puzzle adventure title aimed at the kid's market where you switch between a trio of characters, each of whom have different abilities and skills, and make progress by utilising the right character for the right task. The isometric/top-down graphics are nice and there are loads of snippets from the film included, but the game suffers from being just a bit average – which is a criticism that can be levelled against the movie as well. The puzzles aren't all that interesting, relying on the sort of generic setup that the all-encompassing "action-adventure" genre revels in. The combat is disappointing and the controls leave something to be desired. It's not a terrible game, especially if you're part of the target market or a fan of the film, but it's all a bit too generic and unremarkable to make it any higher on this list.

11. Buzz Lightyear of Star Command

Next up and just missing out on a spot in the top ten is an adaption of an animated TV series which itself is a spin-off from Disney Pixar's ever-popular Toy Story franchise. Centred around the exploits of the Buzz Lightyear character (although not the toy version we've come to love, but rather the character which the toy is based on in the film's own lore) this is a fun if sometimes generic action-adventure title, developed by Traveller's Tales (who are more well known today for developing the incredibly popular and multi-license spanning Lego games).

The action involves platforming, running, shooting and beating similar looking baddies, quite typical for a licensed game of this type. Whilst it is never particularly innovative, it does at least deliver an approachable and enjoyable gameplay experience. Graphically, the PlayStation roots of the game are rather glaring with blocky characters and a lack of texture that stands in stark contract to the best the Dreamcast has to offer, although they are still bright and colourful (it's worth noting the Dreamcast version was the first to release, although it's glaringly obvious that it was developed in tandem with the inferior hardware of Sony's machine). The links to the Sony release are also evident in the game's general performance, which holds up for the most part, although sometimes descends into bouts of slowdown. The game does deliver in other areas though, with a decent soundtrack and plenty of snippets of dialogue taken from the show, as well as some sort video clips. The issue throughout the game is that there isn't anything to really criticise - it does a good job at bringing the TV series to life for its young audience, but can never escape being a quite average, middle-of-the-road licensed title that feels very similar to a bunch of other similar games in the early 3D age. For those who love the character and have nostalgia for the series, it's worth a look today and it's far from being a bad game - but don't expect a poll-topping title here. 

10 Very British Games for the Sega Dreamcast

The British are an odd bunch. We're not really a country (look we're not, you have to admit it. It's like someone got a bunch of nations together who don't really like each other all that much, told them the same rich pricks are in charge of them all and everyone was like "oh okay" and went on about their business. Other than the Irish, obviously), but we have contributed far more than our share towards modern culture (partly by being real arseholes to just about everyone else and insisting they consume our culture whilst invading them), have terrible cuisine, terrible weather and a really, really shit flag. Yet the internet (and by "the internet", I mean Americans on the internet) views all of us Brits as a bunch of posh people who live in country estates who apologise to each other every other second; generally a bunch of genial, mostly nice and horribly polite people with bad teeth. Of course, the Europeans don't see us like that, and instead see us for our true selves - a bunch of gammon-faced troublemaking binge-drinking tourists who invented the sport they're now better than us at. And of course by "us" I mean "the English" because somehow the Welsh and Scottish get a free pass from everyone else despite them both sitting right alongside us when we were arseholes to the rest of the world. So yeah, we're not really a very nice country all in all, if you can even call us a country. What has this to do with the Dreamcast? Absolutely nothing - other than the fact that there are several games on this little Japanese 128-bit wonder that try and come close to truly capturing the real essence behind "being British" - and those games are my target for the latest in my ongoing series of lists about Dreamcast things.

So, without further ado, let's take a look at the ten most "cor blimey, fish n' chips, bottla wateh, tea and crumpets, god save the king" games on the Dreamcast.

Disney's 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue

Set mostly in London (aren't all UK-based video games?), this Disney adaptation contains Big Ben, posh English people and dogs. All quintessentially British. The little canine stars travel to various locations either directly modelled after real-life locations (or at least as far as "modelled" can be attributed to a Dreamcast-era movie tie-in) as well as some more generic locations with a British feel. As the game is based on a live action movie and not an actual Disney animated film (which was always a bit of a weird mix), there is some definite artistic license taken, especially as developer Toys for Bob are based in the distinctly un-British state of California, along with Prolific Publishing, who dealt with the Dreamcast port. This all results in a "Disneyfied" Britain that will be familiar to most of us but doesn't quite reflect the hard streets of London or the rubbish-strewn, annoying middle class walker-infested countryside we all love. At times, you half expect Mary Poppins to emerge from a chimney with a hopping Dick Van Dyke singing some ridiculous song behind her. Disney's bastardisation of British culture is something we should all bemoan, especially if you've ever visited the city of Bath and had to contend with the culture-shocked American tourists despondently trudging the streets who thought that everything would be posh, cultured and historic but instead have to contend with crackheads trying to sell shit-stained PS2 games from a carrier bag to people on the street. And that's just Bath - can you imagine their reaction if they visited Swindon?

This is Piccadilly Circus. Sort of. Points for the phone box, but it's slightly less busy than I remember it.

The first appearance of a red double decker in the article. Surely more will come?

The British countryside in all its glory. Sort of.

Britishness Rating: As British as Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Dancing chimney sweeps should, however, make a return.

British Town it Best Represents: London, I suppose. If you're American, anyway. 

SEGAbits Top 100 SEGA Games VS. The Top 200 Dreamcast Games

Over at SEGAbits.com, I've been hard at work for the past six months compiling a Top 100 SEGA Games list. The list was a reaction to IGN's Top 100 Games of All Time, which was complete BS. Not because I disagreed with the order, but because it did not include a single SEGA game. What began as a hate-fueled reaction transformed into a very interesting experiment in finding what SEGA fans deemed their favorite games. 

Unlike the Dreamcast Junkyard Top 200, I couldn't list every SEGA game ever made in a tick box survey, so instead the SEGAbits list was assembled from over fifty top twenty-five lists that were then weighted with a points system favoring games that were closer to number one. Sure most people will include, for example, a game like Sonic the Hedgehog. But of those people, most rank it lower in their top twenty-five compared to a game like Shenmue II. The end result was a top 100 that brought both the number of votes and how much those voters enjoyed the games into account. 

Seeing as how the DCJY has their own list, I thought it would be fun to compare the top 10 games from each list to see how they compare. Since the Top 100 SEGA Games list does not include non-SEGA titles, I'll remove those from consideration in the DCJY list. The top ten, seen below, will show the placement on SEGAbits and DCJY lists, and in parenthesis where that game is found on the other's list.

The Trouble With Lists

When Tom very kindly invited me to write for the Junkyard, he asked me for a quick list of my top three Dreamcast titles. Its funny, but despite writing about video games and the industry for many years now, I’d never really sat down and made a real list. You know, taken time out to carefully and methodically try to ascertain what were the titles that spoke to me, the few games out of literally hundreds that I would choose. In the end I did manage to narrow it down, however it was no easy task.

And that got me thinking about the entire mechanism of listing, how in video game culture creating that ideal, definitive list is seemingly so important. How placing down games in a rigid numerical order is not only revered so much by gamers, but is a kind of active, self re-affirming process for both individuals and the wider gaming collective. After some thought, I feel the process has both a positive and negative bearing on the culture.

So what about that listing process? Well, firstly what strikes me is that essentially the entire concept is deeply flawed. To create any list, say, such as the top five games ever made on Dreamcast, firstly you need criteria. The important pillars of quality that your potential list is to be based on. And it is here that you hit your first issue. What are the criteria to be? Should a game be ranked according to its graphical fidelity or its plot? Should a title be scored on the tightness of its control mechanics or on the professionalism of its voice acting and soundtrack? You can of course select a variety of criteria, score the games, and aggregate a final list from that, however that handily assumes that the criteria chosen are definitive. It also raises issues such intra-criteria quality definition - for example, should Street Fighter 3: Third Strike score lower than Dead or Alive 2 in the graphics criteria because it is 2D rather than 3D, or does its superb animation make up for that?

Should all 2D fighters score less in a 'graphics' criteria as they are only 2D?

If the rigidity and strict definition of that form of listing process is its downfall, then how about a process built around vaguer and more loose concepts? If we drop hard criteria such as ‘graphics’ or ‘sound’ and use things like ‘fun’ and ‘longevity’, do we get a clearer system of ranking? Unfortunately, this system is also flawed for the primary reason of falling too far into subjectivity. The criteria of ‘fun’ sounds like a great idea to base a top ten list on, but then how do you even go about defining it? Just because I think exploring Yokosuka for hours on end in Shenmue is the last word in fun, that doesn’t mean the next gamer does. To them the lack of narrative pace and game progression may see it classified as boring. From too rigid to too loose, both these listing systems seem to fall down pretty quickly as soon as their surfaces are scratched.

Would all gamers agree that Shenmue is 'fun' to play?

Progression however I think can be made by re-evaluating the importance of lists, and it is here where what I see as the empowering part of list making can be salvaged. If lists are seen less as a tool for making definitive, rigid rankings of titles - rankings that will always be negatively fought over due to the aforementioned issues - but more as a type of mechanism for individuals and the gaming culture in general to hold some, albeit ill-defined, image of what the best of the industry can be, then not only can an elevated level of consensus be reached, but gamers themselves can help reaffirm the legacy of the best games of all time.

In many respects I think what I'm trying to say is that by not thinking about games in the strictest, most black and white terms, but more in a loose and intangible manner, I end up arriving more naturally at a list that I agree with subjectively, and has the possibility of being true objectively.

N.b. That all said, anyone who says that Shenmue is not the best game on Dreamcast should be automatically fired out of cannon into a pool of enraged wasp-piranha hybrid mutants.