I mode! You mode! We all mode for i-mode!

I want you to take a little trip with me down repressed memory lane. Cast your mind back. It's 2001. Everyone keeps telling you the Dreamcast is dead, but you're not having any of it. There are AAA titles still to come on the horizon, Dreamcast Magazine is still on the newsstand (barely), and you've got an eye on Lik Sang and Play-Asia for some exclusive import goodness. You're a true believer and you're not jumping the Sega ship yet (or ever). 

But you have a problem. You can't stay tethered to your 15" CRT TV and curled up against the warmth of your precious blue swirl baby. You have to leave the house. You have stupid lectures to attend, and that interminable bus ride awaits. If only there was some kind of portable Sega device you could take with you to while away the drudgery of public transport.

You look to your shiny new Neo Geo Pocket Color, but it's just not Sega enough for you today. You look to your forlorn and dust-covered Game Gear lying under a pile of socks in the back corner. Those capacitors have blown and leaked and it's never coming back to life. In desperation, you fish out the VMU from your Dreamcast controller, but the batteries are dead and there's only so much of Voldo's Volleyball minigame you can take. Out of options, you trudge out into the gloom, resigned to your terrible fate. 

Meanwhile, in Japan...

In June 2001, Sharp released a new generation "J-Phone" - the J-SH07. It was the first J-Phone to be compatible with Java applets, and it also came bundled with Ulala from Space Channel 5 as a kind of virtual pet / avatar on the device.

The more you used your phone, the better your "rating" gets, and as a reward, Ulala dances for you and sometimes changes costumes. You could download more Space Channel 5 related goodies from the "Ulala no Channel J" service.

The Top 200 Dreamcast Games: Voted by you!

Happy 15th anniversary of the Dreamcast! The votes have been counted so now here is the final Top 200 Dreamcast games! Thanks to everyone who joined in on the voting!

Before we get started, some random facts about the final list:

- There is a total of 235 releases within this top 200: that's because in many case and game and it's sequel is one entry, and in the cases of a few, 3 or 4 games in the same series (NFL 2K, Pop n. Music) are one entry. The bottom 18 entries would have missed the list if I had not done this.

- Of those 48 were Japan only, 10 America only, 2 PAL only and were 11 indie releases.

- Release years are based on where they debuted.

- Of these 4 were released in 1998, 49 in 1999, 107 in 2000, 39 in 2001, 9 in 2002 and 20 in any year beyond that.

- Sega Smash Pack is not included, but Sega Swirl and Virtua Cop 2 from that collection are listed.

- I own 165 of the games featured, yikes!

Just a note: the article is a bit incomplete at the moment. All the poll positions are there but a few of the games do not have descriptions yet. I'm out all of today (in fact I'm celebrating the Dreamcast anniversary in style!) so I will be coming back to finish it off tomorrow.

So without further ado, beyond the jump is the complete list from last to first. Enjoy!

Hands on with C-Smash VRS

You may recall a recent post here at the Junkyard in which I was somewhat apathetic towards Cosmic Smash, the painfully stylish retro-futuristic squash-cum-Breakout NAOMI port that graced the Dreamcast during its final days as a living, breathing platform. The point of that post wasn't to bash Cosmic Smash though; it was to point out that a reimagining of Sega Rosso's quirky, super-niche bat-and-ball 'em up was being worked on for the impending Sony PlayStation VR2. Since then I have been lucky enough to be invited to sample this title - C-Smash VRS - for myself. 

While my lukewarm opinion of the inspiration for C-Smash VRS hasn't really changed (indeed even contemporary reviews - of which there are precious few - weren't overly gushing), I would now like to explain why this pseudo sequel to Cosmic Smash is probably about as close to a next-gen Dreamcast game as we're likely to see for some time.

The fridge had backup.

In order to sample C-Smash VRS, I travelled to the fair city of London and to a rather nice venue called Icetank in the trendy Covent Garden district. In retrospect, the venue couldn't have been more appropriate, with its minimalist whitewashed rooms and open spaces plastered with the familiar lurid orange concentric 'C' motif. 

If a venue was ever going to be perfect for showing off a game like C-Smash VRS, Icetank is surely it. Well, unless there's a retro-futuristic space station available for hire somewhere. The open plan nature of the venue lent itself well the multiple PS VR2 systems set up; I can only imagine the carnage which could have ensued if there had been tables full of drinks and food dotted about the place as idiots like me jumped and waved their arms and hands around while wearing a VR headset. 

Her Converse are better than mine.

Fittingly, an original Cosmic Smash arcade cabinet was positioned out of harm's way in a corner - a cabinet I naturally had to play on and which belongs to C-Smash VRS game director Jörg Tittel. I understand this particular cabinet was originally housed at Sega World in London's long lost Trocadero entertainment centre, and the story goes that if you listen closely to the speaker grill at night you can still hear the frantic pulse rifle fire and screams of the colonial marines from Alien War, trapped forever like tormented, ethereal echos of the past. Actually, I just made that up. Hudson, run a bypass. What? Where am I?

A Cosmic Smash arcade cabinet sat quietly in the corner, minding its own business...

So I played on it. Note my inferior Converse.

Props must go the PR agency 4media group for their running of the C-Smash VRS preview event, and also to Lost in Cult for their production of the rather nice Cosmic Smash themed press kits that were handed to attendees. Full disclosure here though - I was invited to the event by my Dreamcast Junkyard colleague Andrew Dickinson, who also heads up the gaming periodical [Lock-On]...which is produced by Lost in Cult. So yeah, now that little disclaimer is out of the way, let's get down to business: C-Smash VRS is a fucking disaster of a game. What were they thinking?! Of course, I jest.

I can't believe Edge is £6.50 now. It was 75p last time I bought it. Inflation in action, folks.

No, from the small snippet I played of RapidEyeMovers and Wolf & Wood's reimagining of Toshiaki Miida et al's original vision, I can honestly say I was left thoroughly impressed by the experience. This is in no small part due to the fact that the Sony PlayStation VR2 is undoubtedly one of the most impressive pieces of consumer hardware I've ever had the pleasure of sampling; but then that's probably to be expected considering the price of the thing. I've already moaned about that though, so I'll spare you the sob story again here.

Why won't they...play with me?

As this was a preview event, only two modes (three if you count the two player versus mode) were available from the C-Smash VRS main menu - a tutorial and a practice mode. Both in theory make sense in the modern era, especially since VR controls do take a bit of getting used to if you're unfamiliar with how they generally work. After a fairly intuitive calibration (where you're invited to reach out and grasp a small cuboid doodad), you get into the game. 

The World's SMALLEST Dreamcast Games!

The Dreamcast's GD-ROM format was a strange beast, being ever so slightly bigger than a CD-ROM but nowhere close to the capacity of the impending, mighty DVD-ROM. Packing in 1GB per disc, a majority of the Dreamcast's retail game library barely even tapped into this extra available space. As we will explore here, storage space isn't everything though: you can squeeze some pretty darn good games into not even a tenth of a GD-ROM's space!

In this day and age of being able to store Dreamcast games on many different kinds of hardware, like SD cards or hard drives, it is possible to strip these games of any blank data that is used to fill up the rest of a GD, leaving just the necessary files to save space. This can be a risky move, as doing so can break games if they're not optimized correctly, but there are "means" to find games that have already been shrunk down to be used on a optical drive emulator such as GDEMU or MODE.

My entire shelf of Dreamcast games and more fit on this! What a time we live in!

It's via this technique that I have been able to put together this list of games that are all less than 100MB! Take note, I am not including indie releases, prototypes, unreleased games, Atomiswave ports or software like web browsers and Fish Life. Also I haven't downloaded every game ever released so there are probably some visual novels out there that are tiny in size for all I know.

15. Silent Scope - 96.91MB

Konami's Dreamcast output was kind of disappointing. When they weren't busy cancelling Castlevania games for the system, they did throw out the odd bone with some arcade ports such as this here sniping-romp. It's a real shame the Dreamcast wasn't blessed with a sniper light gun like the Xbox, as the game played with a standard controller feels like it's missing something. Much like Samba De Amigo, though, it is playable enough this way but you can't help feeling like it's a lesser experience. Oh well.

14. Ooga Booga - 91.49MB

This very unique collection of mini-games, with an emphasis on online multiplayer, released exclusively in North America and was touted as one of the big hitters during the push to sell people on SegaNet. Luckily, this is one of those games where online play has been revived, though even if that wasn't the case, this would still be worth checking out as there is nothing else quite like it on the Dreamcast.

13. Evangelion Typing Project E - 71.59MB

I won't go into too much detail about this one as it has been discussed here at length in the past after Derek Pascarella treated us all to an English translation! Evangelion Typing Project E gives us another game to practice our touch-typing skills on, but instead of gunning down zombies with words you er...do Evangelion stuff! Like the anime! I dunno, I haven't really had a chance to play much of it yet, but definitely give it a shot if you're a fan of the show! There are in fact two translated Evangelion typing games, but I couldn't properly shrink the other one without it breaking, so I assume if optimized well it'd probably be a similar size to this one.

12. SEGA Tetris - 62.56MB

This was the first Japanese import Dreamcast game I ever purchased from eBay, if I recall correctly! Why this one stayed in Japan is beyond me, but the console rights for Tetris have always been a bit of a confusing ride as Sega themselves found out when their Mega Drive/Genesis release had to be recalled... But this is Sega Tetris, not to be confused with Tetris...by Sega. Got it?

I really dig the presentation in this game. It's also kind of notable for being one of the last arcade Tetris games before the new rules came into play like swapping, hard drops and now legendary T-spins. The gameplay of this one gets ridiculously fast-paced, making it one of the harder Tetris games out there, though there are plenty of modes to mess around in, including a UFO catcher claw game with cute Sonic 1 remixes!

This is another one on the "someone get it translated and back online if at all possible" wish list!

11. Plus Plumb - 62.53MB

No, I wasn't going to pop down the shops just to buy a plum to photo this with. That'd be silly.

Only 3kB less than Sega Tetris, we have another Japan-only puzzle game! Plus Plumb is a pretty obscure one as far as I know. I discovered it back in around 2000 when a car boot sale I went to every week had a store of bootleg games (oh no! ☠️). These bootlegs were incredibly low effort, literally just plain CD-Rs with the game's titles penned on them, most of which were random Japanese games I'd never heard of until I took them home and fed them to the rotating Utopia reindeer.

Plus Plumb is a pretty standard match 3 versus game with some Pokémon-looking mofos chatting in between stages (with full voice acting!). I played quite a bit of this back in the day (did eventually buy a legit copy, don't worry) so the music from this is one of those earworms that has stuck with me for 20+ years!

10. Planet Ring - 62.44MB

Also within the 63MB range is this PAL exclusive, online-only mini-game collection that was given away on the front of magazines and the like. I never got around to trying this one out when the original servers were up, but luckily it's one of those games that is back online today! It even has voice chat so you can talk to someone other than your mutant human-faced fish for a change!

Monster Mash!

House Of The Dead 2 vs.Typing Of The Dead

Well it's been a while since or founding father, mentor and patron, Sir Teeleecee, walked out of the 'Yard with a knotted hankie on a stick, slung across his shoulder, to embark on his Confidential Mission... to save the world from the Axis Of Evil. And I don't know about you, but the 'Yard seems kind of empty without him.... (Sniff!)
Still, it is the sworn duty of myself and the Gagaman(n) to maintain the place in his absence. And so, without any further ado, I will embark on my next epic post (for the second fucking time, seeing as Blogger just wiped out about an hour and a half of fucking typing, by kindly 'updating' itself...)

BASTARD! (and now it seems to be underlining my text and changing font sizes without me wanting it to...

Take a look at this!
It's my new super-duper-fan-fucking-tastic 'Microsoft Wireless Desktop Elite' keyboard! (Wahey!) Everytime I run my fingers over it's bouncey, responsive keys it makes my 'third leg' stand to attention!
Each time I check out it's 'space age' contours, with different tactile materials...("Grunt! Gasp!"... Hard plastic keys, spongey, foamy exterior...) my swollen testacles start to tingle. Check out the fucking buttons and gizmos! AWLRIGHT!

Excuse me while I crack one off...Ah! thats better...



Keyboards... originally found on the humble typewriter, then later ascribed to fledgling computers, they've made life easier for us all.
In Dreamcast terms the keyboard was originally intended to enhance it's users experience of accessing the internet. (I did that a few weeks back and it was frankly wanktastic...56K modem? Dial up? Fuck me sideways...) For some gamers it allowed them to remain in a PC comfort zone...playing games like 'Quake 3 Arena' and 'Outtrigger' using Keyboard and Mouse to point and shoot.
But which fucking genius decided to use the keyboard as a peripheral to experience the established 'light gun classic' House of TheDead?
Someone at developer 'Smilebit' apparently... and if I ever meet that guy, I'll gladly suck him off...
Sorry! I meant to say "Shake him warmly by the hand"....
'House Of The Dead' Father? That tired old title has oft been discussed within the 'Yard... why drag it's sorry ass back up for another probing?

Well it needs to be re-inspected and compared to it's lesser known cousin 'Typing Of The Dead'...
'Cos like many a great DC title release, we Europeans were passed over! I've never understood why corporations like Sony (bawk!), Sega and Nintendo (feeling of warm acceptance...) feel the need to selectively deny Europeans, Japanese or Americans access to the same gaming experience, at the same time....
This inevitably ends up with commited gamers like myself, having to trawl eBay years later to find hidden gems... Our American cousins were denied Shenmue 2, and that's just wrong.

We on this side of the pond were denied the 'Sega Smash Pack' and 'Caution Seaman'.

Why? answers on a postcard please...
Anyway, back to the games... lets compare them...

House Of the Dead 2
A classic franchise, first experienced outside arcades by Sega Saturn owners as 'House of The Dead'. (Still retailing in Gamestation for a pricey £24.99 due to it's cult clasic status and rarity) A light gun classic, but in retrospect grainy, pixellated and rushed. It was poorly presented, had an unimaginative storyline and was badly voice-acted. Certain features that Sega were apparently keen to keep apparently...

So lo and behold, along comes House Of The Dead 2, one of the flagship titles for the Dreamcast. Back in the day, the game+ lightgun would have cost you a harsh £75.... Current 2006 price for game and peripheral? £8.50... OK so we've already got a reason to check it out... but the Dreamcast release had addressed the failings of the original Saturn game... Here we had sumptuous graphics, great frame rates, little pixellation, and a near perfect arcade port.

The voice acting was still terrible and the storyline equally weak, but to your average gamer, light gun at the ready, it was just an excuse to waste animated corpses, spilling green, YES GREEN blood..
O.K. Weak story line? What is it?
You play as James Taylor (no not the easy listening hippy ex-husband of Carly Simon- ignore that if you're under 40) but the AMS agent assisted by colleagues Gary Stewart, Amy Stewart and Harry Harris... (I kid you not....) Harry fucking Harris? Pur-lease...
You're fighting aginst the evil machinations of the mysterious Goldman... which have resulted in.... axe wielding, chainsaw toting, barrel tossing zombies!
Overthrowing the un-named city and presumably the world. And if you're not quick enough on the draw they're gonna bite you. Oh yes.

As if that wasn't enough there's zombie monkies, fish, frogs, owls and bats want to bite your sorry ass as well.

Depending on your zombie ass kicking skills you will be shown a variety of routes through the city. Play poorly and you'll arrive at something of a dead end. Save civillians and you'll be rewarded with extra lives... Kill 'em and you'll have lives taken away- fair enough!
There are four modes in the game...
Arcade, Original , Boss and Training. Play on Original and you get to save items like coins, gems, gold frogs, (no I have not been ingesting psychedelic mushrooms...recently...) air guns and unlimited continues that help you complete the game.

Complete the game? I wish! Never have and probably never will...

'Cos apart from items that you store in your car boot/trunk, you can't save shit on this mother fucker! (Why am I posting like an extra from 'Shaft'?)

'One bullet away from killing the last boss, and completing the game... and YOU DIE!
Then start all over again.
And incidentally, that's why I named it my most frustrating DC game on Tom's most magnificent recent post... I love it/hate it!
Ok I'm rambling...And you might have guessed already that I'm more in favour of the
later release....

Typing Of The Dead...

OK no need to go through any of the features of the original 'cos it's exactly the same as this one.
Except that the graphics and even the voice acting seem a bit more polished.
And ( now heres the rub) Instead of a gun you use a keyboard!!!
As do your charcters...


Instead of 'poppin' caps' you have to type like a bitch ass secretary on speed to repel the zombie hoarde. The basic scenario is this... The game is exactly the same but instead of shooting zombies you have to read set phrases and then type them.



Easy? NO! If your a good typist, no problem... If you've got poor keyboard skills (like me) then watch out. You just have to copy familiar (or increasingly non-familiar) words and phrases thrown at you by the game. "Hospitalised brick"? "Rasta"? "Uncle Slam"?
They're the easy ones... try "I lay my hand on yours my sweet, and then let out the nastiest fart you'll know".

Try that whilst zombies are threatening to chomp a chunk out of your face...
Having said that, compared to the light gun version, they actually wait around a little bit... patiently(!)... Whilst you complete your typing.
Unlike the original, they kind of lay off, lurking not too menacingly whilst you fumble over your typing errors.

To make things less horrific, they carry sink plungers, rubber mallets and sausages to throw at you instead of knives and axes. Plug two keyboards in and play against a friend. I did and it was some of the most gaming fun I've had in ages... You can pick up keyboards for peanuts these days...

Now back in 2001 two keyboards would have cost you £40.
In 2006? Two quid each for two keyboards if you look around...
(I was given one keyboard free by the wonderful Summit Games, Bangor, N.Wales because I bought a couple of rare import games from them-Heads Up! Respect!)

The two biggest gingers played them solid at the Lighthouse last weekend... in favour
of Tekken 5 Dark resuurection on the PSP.. Even the younger ginger generation are into
the gameplay...and BONUS! they're improving their typing skills!
IGN 2006 gave 'Typing' a 9/10 in the face of reviews of games on the 360, PS3 and Wii...
Planet Dreamcast in 2001 gave 'Typing...' an 8/10.
The original light gun HOTD version got a paltry 7/10.
And I endorse their conclusions... ergo Typing Of The Dead.... A clear winner!!!

So check this.... score a DC (£20 max) Score HOTD2 (£2.50 max) Score TOTD (maybe a bit more but probably under a tenner) (Score a couple of keyboards for the DC (Guess...£20 max) add it up... maybe (max) £55 and you get yourself a shit hot console, two games and the necessary peripherals for less than a next gen game.
I rest my luddite case m'lud!
Good night children... wherever you are...here's a little gift to make you sleep easier after looking at all those zombies....

Excuse me while I crack another one off...

A Beginner's Guide to Visual Novels on the Dreamcast

Avid fans of the Dreamcast are most likely already aware that the console enjoyed a much longer life in its home country of Japan (the last officially licensed Dreamcast game, Karous, was released in 2007). For this reason, as well as the fact 90s console developers had a track record of thinking Western gamers were frightened of anything even slightly unconventional, there is an extensive list of Japan-only Dreamcast games just waiting for fans to import. The best part is that so many are playable without knowledge of the Japanese language. All you need is a boot disc or a modded Dreamcast and voilà! you've unlocked another section of the Dreamcast library. Check out our A to Z of Dreamcast Games if you want to know the best Japan-exclusives to get your mitts on.

However, for every playable game, there are just as many that are unplayable for anyone who isn't fluent in Japanese. Anyone who is insane enough to try and collect a full Japanese set will soon realise that there is plenty of "filler" - the kind of stuff you only buy for the sake of checking another game off the list and not because you are actually going to be able to play it. You know, those games with the anime girls on the front. Games like this:

 

Some might mistakenly call these things "dating simulators", but that's a different kettle of fish entirely. No, these are "visual novels", and they do exactly what they say on the tin, they are novels with visual elements. The term was coined by developer Leaf, with their "Visual Novel Series" of text-based adventure games (source). Boot up any game like this and you'll be greeted with nothing more than walls of Japanese text and images of anime characters making various expressions. They are a very niché style of game that have never had a big following outside of Japan, especially back in the early 2000s (hence their Japanese exclusivity). Some may debate whether or not they are actually games at all, but they're still something I'd recommend to keen readers and anime fans alike. 

Their "gameplay" more or less consists of reading text and (in the case of the most common type of visual novel) occasionally answering a multiple choice question on how the main character should react or respond in a certain situation. That might not sound all that interesting to some, but I like to look at visual novels as a more visual version of a choose your own adventure book, and being a fan of anime, the artwork contained within is something I'm familiar with. A lot of the stories are enjoyable, and believe it or not, the plots aren't always romantic; there are visual novels that focus on genres like sci-fi and mystery, for example.

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. 

The Hidden Dreamcast Light Gun Game

How many light gun games are there on the Dreamcast? As I sit here staring at that rhetorical question, I recall about five if memory serves: House of the Dead 2, Confidential Mission, Death Crimson 2, Death Crimson 2 OX, and Virtua Cop 2. But wait. There's actually another I didn't even know about until today: Infogrammes and Pitbull Syndicate's Demolition Racer: No Exit.

Now, you'd be forgiven for thinking I'd had one too many bottles of strong ale before writing this (and you'd be right, in most all cases), but hear me out. Demolition Racer: No Exit is a stock car racing game very much in the vein of PlayStation classic Destruction Derby (we don't mention the Saturn atrocity), and while it looks very pretty I don't particularly like it because of the downright stupid rules in the championship mode. Try as I might, I can't even get past the first couple of races due to the ridiculously random nature of the scoring system - coming first in a race tallies up with damage given to other cars...or something. And there are weapons. Basically, it's a clusterfuck of confusion so I'm just going to leave it there for now.

Anyway, I'm in the process of moving house (for about the 8th time in 3 years) and as I was stacking up my beloved Dreamcast games ready to be boxed, I noticed something funny on the back of the Demolition Racer case:

A 'Light Gun' compatibility icon. Which is very odd, especially considering Sega didn't even release the gun in the USA. That, and Demolition Racer is an NTSC-U exclusive racing game..

Attack Of The Clones

Clone systems are nothing new and they're not going away any time soon either. If you don't know what a clone system is, let me enlighten you. A clone is a console usually manufactured and sold in countries where laws are lax and cheap electronic manufacturing processes are a way of life. Using the (nefariously reproduced) innards of older 8-bit systems such as an Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System or Sega Master System, a clone invariably comes with roms pre-installed, a controller that is a piece of shit and a shell that looks like the bastard lovechild of Sloth from The Goonies and the morbidly obese red car from that old Milky Way advert.

The Chameleon refuses to die.

In truth, most clone consoles are utter crap, but in some places they're the only way to play games simply because owning a PS4 or any other genuine gaming machine just isn't financially possible. Please be assured that I'm not mocking the societal hardships of fellow gamers in less developed nations, but that's just how it is. Saying that, calling the UK a 'developed nation' is pushing it - I saw a human turd in the street the other day.

Now, the reason I bring up clones is that it's become apparent that there are a couple that borrow heavily from the shell designs of legit systems...and some of them even mimic the hallowed Dreamcast. There aren't that many (not as many as ape the PlayStation, for example) but I thought it'd be interesting to have a look at the ones I could find. And by 'find,' I mean copy from a Google image search. Cough.

Dorikyasu Game Corner

This contraption is basically a NES in the shape of a Dreamcast. According to the almost impenetrable description from the website it is listed on (after being translated by Google, natch), the Game Corner features a cartridge slot under the lid and a handy eject button. The bundled controllers are N64 rip-offs and it also comes with a knock-off Namco GunCon for some reason. Could be handy for Duck Hunt I guess. Sadly, the Game Corner is no longer available, but I think it's safe to say no-one will be losing any sleep over it. Interestingly, the same site also lists handheld Dreamcasts that are built to order, but those are no longer for sale either.