Redkey
Zero Page Homebrew. That guy is absolutely on top of Atari homebrew. Every relase, demo, and announcement, as far as I can see.
I tried it somehow back in the day (it might’ve been in a store) and it was absolutely amazing. Noticeably more polygons and higher frame rate than SuperFX games. The price was crazy, though. IIRC in Australia it was close to twice the price of an average Mega Drive game (like 1.7 or 1.8 times). As a kid that was way too much for me, especially for what was (aside from the 3D graphics) a very ordinary racing game (not really my taste even in the best case).
Several years ago I picked up a copy in Japan for just 100 yen. I didn’t particularly want the game per se, but knowing some of the history that OP outlined, I couldn’t pass it up at that price! However, even with retro game prices shooting up in recent years, the price of Virtua Racing for MD doesn’t seem to have ballooned as much as many other games, at least in Japan.
People are writing a lot of things that I agree with, but I want to chime in with two points.
The first, which one or two other commenters have touched on, is that in 2024 we have approximately 50 years of content already in existence. There’s no need to limit ourselves to what’s been released in the last 12 months. Classic books, music, plays, and movies stay popular for decades or centuries. Why feel shamed out of playing old games by 12-year-olds and the megacorps?
The second thing is, yes, try indie games, and IMO the best place to find them is for PCs on itch.io. Forget 95% of what’s marketed as “indie” on consoles.
Looks very interesting, thanks for posting!
Watching the video and reading the blurb, I immediately got some Panzer Dragoon vibes (a lone hero riding a flying mount, an evil empire hoarding ancient technology, biomechanical weapons, lots of airships, Moebius-influenced visual design, Celtic touches in the music), and looking at reviews, some other people have picked up on that too. But it’s not a bad thing; the (solo!) developer seems to have borrowed a few parts of the franchise that they liked and run in a fairly different direction with it overall.
Did you read all the way to the end of the article? I did.
At the very bottom of the piece, I found that the author had already expressed what I wanted to say quite well:
In my humble opinion, here’s the key takeaway: just write your own fucking constructors! You see all that nonsense? Almost completely avoidable if you had just written your own fucking constructors. Don’t let the compiler figure it out for you. You’re the one in control here.
The joke here isn’t C++. The joke is people who expect C++ to be as warm, fuzzy, and forgiving as JavaScript.
Yeah, I’m sure that almost all of us have felt this way at one time or another. But the thing is, every team behind every moronic, bone-headed interface “update” that you’ve ever hated also sees themselves in the programmer’s position in this meme.
Unfortunately I think that Sega themselves weren’t the only group lacking confidence in the Dreamcast. In fact, I feel like they put up a valiant fight, with marketing and first-party titles.
Critics and consumers all had an extremely “wait and see” attitude that I think took the theoretical advantage of the incredibly early launch and turned it into a huge liability. People didn’t want to commit to buying their next console without seeing what the other offers were going to be. So Sega had to work hard for about two years to keep the real and actually available Dreamcast positioned high in the market while their competitors had the luxury of showing jaw-dropping demos of “potential” hardware (i.e. “Here is some video produced on $50,000 graphics workstation hardware that is made by the same company that’s currently in talks to produce our GPU.”)
Third-party publishers also didn’t want to put any serious budget toward producing games for the Dreamcast, because they didn’t want to gamble real money on the install base increasing. This resulted in several low-effort PS1 ports that made very little use of the Dreamcast hardware, which in turn lowered consumer opinion of the console. When some of these games were later ported to PS2 as “upgraded” or “enhanced” versions, that only further entrenched the poor image of the Dreamcast.
I have owned all four major consoles of that generation since they were still having new games published for them. And if I had to choose only one console to keep from that group, it’d be the PlayStation 2, because of the game library. It’s huge and varied. I have literally hundreds of games for it, while I only have a few dozen games for the others. But looking at the average quality of the graphics and sound in the games for those systems, I’d also rank the PS2 in last place, even behind the DC.
Sony was a massive juggernaut in the console gaming market at the time. The PlayStation 1 had taken the worldwide market by storm, and become the defacto standard console. It’s easy to forget that the console launches for this generation were unusually spaced out over a four year period, and Sony was the company best positioned to turn that to their favour. People weren’t going to buy a DC without seeing the PS2, but once they did, many were happy to buy a PS2 without waiting for Nintendo or Microsoft to release their consoles. The added ability to play DVDs at exactly the time when that market was hitting its stride (and more affordably than many dedicated DVD players) absolutely boosted their sales in a big way. Nintendo’s GameCube didn’t do that, and by the time the original X-Box came to market, it wasn’t nearly as much of a consideration.