Well, here we are, sitting in the wake of the DC announcement, drifiting along as we wait for information on games and future projects to actually surface. Good ol' Fernando, ever concerned about content, asked me to offer up my "expert" thoughts on the Dreamcast, now that we have the facts in front of us.

First off, regarding my comments about Windows CE being "bloatware," I have been happily informed by folks far more knowledgable (obviously) than I that CE 2.0 is actually a very efficient and streamlined product. "What?" you gasp. "From Microsoft??" Sure looks like it. After doing a little offline research, it's now pretty evident that Sega made a good choice in using CE, as this remarkable little OS is surprisingly stable, flexible, and consumes very little memory. Once again. my anti-Gates knee-jerk bias did me a disservice (I'm a UNIX git by day).

On the other hand, the news that DirectX can (developers, as I understand it, certainly have an option here) be used to facilitate PC-to-DC ports and minimize initial development overhead has me a bit worried. The best games tend to come from companies who rely less on externally-developed APIs and more on their own ability to spank the metal around, in my humble opinion. The good news is, though, that DirectX is not required, and can be ejected if the developer feels it's unnecessary. Unfortunately, I'm afraid the the facility for quick and convenient PC ports will be more detriment than boon, since, to be honest, most PC games suited to the console market (those games not requiring a keyboard, hard drive, or other PC-specific peripherals) are derivative, uninspired schlock. The last thing we need is GT Interactive porting their many mediocre Quake clones to the DC in order to make a quick buck, especially during that initial period when the console's library is under such close scrutiny by the media and industry pundits. Besides, I'd like more original titles, please, or at least more titles in certain oft-neglected genres. I can really do without the "Corridor Shooter of the Week" or any other title designed to generically fit into some marketing weasel's half-baked notion of what the DC demographic wants. Feh.

I'm also not particularly excited about the built-in modem, either. This is probably a personal thing, since there are plenty of hardcore guys and gals slagging it out on battle.net as I speak, but I gotta vent: I simply don't enjoy network gaming very much. I prefer having a group of peeps over for a couple games of X-Men vs Street Fighter and Rally Cross, rather than tying up my sole phone line and committing myself to a several hours I can barely afford just to watch some 15-year old punk try to Zealot rush me over and over, all the while screaming such articulate epithets as "WhOa D00D HoW d1d j00 BuiLD bUnK3rZ s0 fAsT??? Th1s sUx0r3z!!!" at me. No thanks, really. Of course, that doesn't mean that I think the modem is a bad idea, in any way; to the contrary, it's a great advertising point and will probably garner the DC some needed respect from the media, as well as satisfying the base desires of a few hardcore online gamers. In my opinion, though, having 4 built in ports was a much better idea, and I'm glad to see that one aspect (local multiplayer) was not neglected in favor of another multiplayer paradigm (online). Now, if there's a port for a link cable thrown in, too...

Negativity aside, the specs really do have me a bit moist. This machine is obscenely powerful, and one-ups the PC market by a not-unsubstantial margin. One thing the 3dfx crowd (of which I am a sometime member) often forgets in their 10K+ spiels exhorting inflated specifications is that consoles have a concealed advantage in that the hardware elements are proprietary and standardized, eliminating generic (and hence, suboptimal) drivers and configurations. A great example of this is the 2x drive in the Saturn - that thing loads games substantially faster than my Sony 8x drive does in my PC, for a variety of reasons, almost all of which center around the fact that the Saturn's drive is standardized and proprietary, allowing for more effective communication between it and the rest of the hardware. On top of that, portions of the hardware were designed with accessing that drive specifically in mind, minimizing the sort of overhead that results from many of the guessing games current CD-ROM drivers play, and eliminating the sort of data bottlenecks that crop up in the markedly non-standardized PC CD-ROM configurations. The same is true for the PVRSG chipset and the 12x CD drive in the DC - they will be significantly faster than their PC counterparts, thanks to the elimination of bottlenecks that arise from the generic nature of PC configurations, and the fact that the bus (the center of all communications in a computing system) was designed with the PVRSG/SH-4/CD drive/what-have-you in mind. Not that I'm dissing PCs for gaming, mind you - I have a Voodoo 2 and love it - but, in some ways, consoles really are better suited to efficient game delivery. Of course, consoles don't always work out as cleanly as might be implied by the above discussion - look what happened when Sega plunked that extra SH-2 into the Saturn and the inefficiency that resulted when programmers actually tried to do parallel processing in a system that wasn't originally designed for it. Admittedly, that extra SH-2 allowed for some great theoretical specs, but most of the potential power was lost due to the system itself not really being able to maximize the use of it. The same thing happens with PCs and 3D cards, to a limited extent: it's hard to optimize code for hardware under a system that was not specifically designed to maximize its potential.

The name "Dreamcast" is gonna take some work for me to get used to, since I'm a bit of a GenX dork. Personally, I do think it's a hell of a lot better than the fruity "Super Nintendo" and "Nintendo 64" monikers belonging to their respective consoles - Super anything sounds downright doltish. However, contrary to popular sentiment, I like the spiral logo - it's simple, stylized, and you can easily carve it into the corpses of murdered prostitutes just like the Strangers did in Dark City...er, yeah. Some of the comments made about the name and logo have been pretty bombastic coming out of the peanut gallery, with some folks swearing that they'll never buy a system with a name, and I quote, "as gay as Dreamcast." Hey, kids, didn't you watch In And Out? "Gay" is IN, baby. The Decade of the Fruit is upon us; Sega's just more happenin' than you.

Hopefully, the future will reveal more about game development, especially original titles. I mean, we all know that VF3 and Super GT are gonna look and play great, but how about that Sonic title? Or the tentatively- titled "Crimson?" Games are the meat of the system, and dammit, now that my interest in the DC has been really piqued, I wanna know more.