The way I played it, Sonic Adventure was a virtual pet raising game with a 3D platformer minigame in there for something else to do on the side.
Hey little guy
Whoops I just threw him across the map :/
Wasn’t there something you could do with those and the VMU?
Yeah! There was a mini-game called “Chao Adventure” that would let your chao go for a walk with little events that would happen along the way. It was also the only way to see your chao’s stats and name them.
You could also make your Chao fight each other, kinda like a Pokemon battle. Required two VMUs hooked together
The Dreamcast really was ahead of its time. VMU-linking was honestly a really excellent use of the tech available at the time, and opened the doors for a lot of really interesting ways to play games. Some games even had single-player minigames you could access from the VMU, so you could play while you were away from your console.
If Sega had marketed the Dreamcast better, it could’ve really dominated the gaming scene at the time. It had a lot of features that were way more advanced than its competition. Hell, Sega could’ve possibly still been in the hardware market today if their consoles sold better. Sometimes I wonder what the gaming space would be like today if Sega was still making consoles.
I used to have Chao fights with my friend at lunch in high school. The VMUs totally worked
I spent so many hours in the Sonic Adventure 2 Chao garden, training and breeding the ultimate racer.
blessed image, i loved raising chao, but i never had access to online guides as a kid so i never bred the rare ones. hell i never really saw a chao die to begin with to know they reincarnated
also, just to be a dick, my sister told me they were pronounced “k-o” and not “chow,” so I spent a lot of my childhood being confidently wrong
