Showing posts with label DC-IE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DC-IE. Show all posts

Turning Japanese (And Possibly American)

My very first experience with a Dreamcast came in early 1999 when a friend who was earning suspiciously large amounts of money for doing a menial warehouse job decided he wanted a new games console. Tired of playing Buck Bumble and Rush 2 on N64 in his cramped bedroom, we took a trip to an import store in nearby Manchester's Chinatown district where my friend handed over several hundred pounds for a Japanese Dreamcast and a few games. The games were Virtua Fighter 3tb, Dynamite Deka 2 and Shutokou Battle - a game we had no idea was a racing title because there were no screens on the back of the case and no English text at all (time must have muddied my memory - all three apparently have screens). Since then, I have played (and obviously own) all three of those games in their PAL guises: Virtua Fighter 3tb, Dynamite Cop and Tokyo Highway Challenge...but you no doubt already guessed the English title of the first game mentioned there.

It was really cool getting to play on my friend's DC back before the PAL release, and even cooler because everything was covered in Japanese text and we really had no idea what we were doing in most of the menu screens. It was literally a case of 'push A until the game starts.' One other cool thing was the Project Berkeley video that came on one of the GDs, but I forget which one it was - possibly Virtua Fighter 3...but I digress. As a side note, it turned out that my friend had been fiddling the till at the warehouse/timber yard he worked at and that's how he'd been able to afford the Dreamcast in the first place. He was eventually rumbled and the police were involved...but that's a different story.