You're reading this because you're probably not one of the half-million people who bought the Dreamcast within its first couple of weeks on the U.S. Market. Don't be ashamed of holding out; you're an educated consumer. You want to see if this is overblown hype or if this is a real, quality system with staying power.

So you might be interested to know that we here at GameSpy like the Dreamcast. Oh, we don't love the Dreamcast -- we're going to wait til the second generation of titles before we're sure -- but to tell you the truth, this pile of hardware scores a good 8 out of 10 on our ass-kickometer. I walked around with my trusted tape-recorder and polled the GameSpy.com staff to find out why.

That's an actual in-game model from Soul Calibur. Her hair blows in the wind!

Reason One - Graphics: The Boob Tube Never Looked So Good

We're hardcore PC gamers, so just about all of us noticed that the Dreamcast was limited by the lower resolutions of the television screen. But hey, it's a console; we're cool with that. What really blew us away were the quality and fluidity of the animations, even in hyper-fast games like Sonic.

Shaithis: I'm amazed at how much stuff they can have moving on the screen at the same time. I'm also really impressed with the modeling ability of some of the people they have working on the software. Now graphically, it doesn't look that much better to me than Nintendo 64 does, in terms of just looking at it. The texture resolution seems a bit better ... I think the graphics differences between the Dreamcast and the Nintendo 64 would be significantly greater if you were playing on a high definition television. You would notice the Dreamcast a hell of a lot more there.

Mix: The graphics rock. The Dreamcast .... it's a console. It's not meant to compete with PCs, it's not fair to compare it to PCs. It borrows technology from the PC world -- it has a Power VR graphics chip, it can run Windows CE, so programmers can use it as their low-level API if they want to -- But I think that's where the comparisons end.

Sluggo: Some of the games are really good, graphically. I'm looking at NFL Blitz or NFL 2K and comparing it to Madden 2000 on the PC. Some of the animations -- especially in the fighting games -- are fantastic, they look reminiscent of the Quake 3 texture or model quality. The graphics are certainly comparable to a PC, the animations and environments in a game like Soul Calibur are even better than you'd see on a computer.

For myself, all it took was ten minutes of playing Soul Calibur to see the graphic potential of the system. The Dreamcast achieves a speed and fluidity that, to me, surpasses the current state of the PC. Graphically, this system is hot.

Next up: How's the sound?