Dreamcast: Sega's Last Stand? So What?

 

"Dreamcast": Sega's Last Stand? So What?

By Chris Adamson
September 7, 1999

Thursday is going to be a red-letter day in the North American gaming world -- of course, that means it doesn't directly affect the Mac, but maybe the Mac world should take notice.

No, it's not the release of Final Fantasy VIII, though the latest chapter in the popular role-playing series that's lasted nearly a decade would alone be enough to prompt lines outside the electronics stores at midnight. It's just that the bigger news is the release of Sega's "Dreamcast", the 128-bit console gaming system that many believe must succeed for the company to survive.

Sega, a long-time arcade-game maker whose "Genesis" system arguably won the 16-bit console war, squandered its position with dubious add-ons (32X, SegaCD, etc.), then alienated players and developers alike when its 3D-challenged "Saturn" flopped, beaten badly by Sony's "PlayStation". With the Dreamcast, the company has tried to reinvent itself with an innovative, developer-friendly, aggressively-marketed product at a low price-point. But the launch is threatened by Sony -- even though its "PlayStation 2" is a year away, Sony has the advantage of industry dominance, name recognition, and a steady flow of FUD.

Now that part should sound familiar to Mac devotees. And if it doesn't now, file it away in your mind for next year when Mac OS X faces Windows 2000.

But back to the Dreamcast: while it had a dismal launch in Japan, US reviewers are reacting favorably to the titles that will be available when it launches here, particularly Soul Calibur, Ready 2 Rumble, and NFL 2K.

Remember those names. Heck, play them at the store if the demo machine is free... because you will never play them on a Mac.

And that's a pity. And a problem.

Because right now, while Apple has been making great strides in attracting game developers, it's defining success in PC terms.

Mac magazines, and even Apple's PR, are tracking how many of the top-10 PC games have Mac versions available or in the pipeline. More often than not, it's the latter. Sure, it's better to get the game later than never, but that's becoming less and less true, and the reason for that is the move to multiplayer gaming.

Take away the impulse-buy games -- the Deer Hunters and Monopolys -- and you find the excitement in the PC world is in games that are best experienced multiplayer. Real-time strategy games like Starcraft and first-person shooters like Quake live and breathe multiplayer. In fact, Quake III reportedly is going to be nothing but death-matches and capture-the-flag, with no single-person Doom-like dungeon crawling to be had (just computer AI pretending to be other fraggers).

What happens when you release a game like that for the Mac, six-to-twelve months after the PC version? The Mac users hit two brick walls, social and technical. By "socially", I mean that with the marketing hype for the game long faded, the cutting-edge PC players have moved on to the next flavor of the month.

Well, that's fine, the Mac player thinks, I'll find someone other than a PC zombie to play against. But how? These games really shine on ethernet LANs, with plenty of bandwidth. Where do we find those? Offices -- like mine, where the big Starcraft game gets started every night about 5:30. And what do we not find in many offices? Macintosh computers.

Then there's dial-up. Some games run OK at 56kbps (even though you're only sending 33 upstream, at best), and some don't. As for game-network services, some game publishers run their own, but many of the big services -- Heat.net, MPlayer, and Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone -- don't support Macs.

That's why I'm personally not that excited about most PC game ports to the Mac. The games' best feature, the multiplayer mode, is often impractical, sometimes impossible.

So maybe it's time to Think Different. Maybe the Mac gaming world needs to focus on a different kind of game... the kind you currently play on consoles.

What's your stereotype of consoles versus PCs? Chances are you think the consoles are for the kiddies, a colorful land of Mario and Pikachu, while computers are for the grown-ups, where Solitaire leads to Tetris and eventually to Civilization II.

Would it surprise you to know that many people think console games are generally more sophisticated and deeper than computer games?

The top PC genre, first-person shooters, pretty much speak for itself -- run around, pick stuff up, kill people, pick better stuff up, kill people more spectacularly.

And then there's real-time strategy games like Starcraft or Myth, which seem deeper than they really are. Things happen too fast to make the player do much more than rudimentary unit placement and resource-management. They're fun, sure, but the learning curve isn't as steep as you'd think.

A Myth player would probably scoff at the PlayStation's Final Fantasy Tactics, whose battle maps are measured in unrealistic 16x16 blocks, and where there are never more than six members in your party. Heck, it's turn-based, so you can set down the control and grab lunch while you think about your move. Yet it turns out that pause makes all the difference: with time to consider his or her moves, the Tactics player must figure out how to effectively use the 19 jobs or more than 400 abilities, from throwing rocks to summoning monsters or warping time. And with 30-to-60 minute battles on 70 battlefields, you can imagine how long it takes to finish the game.

Even that console-gaming warhorse, the fighting game, has gained new sophistication. The early Mortal Kombat clones seemed little more than button-mashers, and Next Generation magazine once noted that a 6-year-old slapping buttons randomly could often defeat a supposed "expert" at Primal Rage. Yet new games like Soul Calibur and Ehrgeiz offer a three-dimensional world and a deep repertoire of offensive and defensive moves, allowing gamers to parry the cheap shots and set up devastating responses. You don't play Ehrgeiz by just running up to the opponent and smashing all the buttons, you try to get position -- under an unblocked opponent so you can hit him or her with a "lifter" (a hit that sends the opponent airborne) and do some "juggles" (repeated aerial hits), or behind for a throw-down, or right in front when they try that cheap move that you know how to interrupt.

And by all accounts, Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast is a far better game than Ehrgeiz.

Sounds fun, huh? Well, buy a Dreamcast or a PlayStation, or a Mac fast enough to do Connectix Virtual Game Station at 60 frames/sec, because as far as Mac gaming goes, we're stuck with Redneck Rampage 2 or whatever other PC table-scraps are being thrown our way.

So while we wait for Bungie's Halo, the Mac gaming world is fixing its focus on PC ports, and that's a losing strategy. Console-style games are a better fit for the typical isolated Mac set-up, and the often greater depth of those games would offer the Mac platform a unique asset.

Perhaps it's time for Apple's game evangelists to take the apparently disinterested Electronic Arts, Interplay and THQ off the speed-dial and replace them with Capcom, Midway, and Konami.

Copyright © 1999 by Bill Fox
All rights reserved--no use permitted without attribution.

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