As someone who actually owned Shenmue, i can vouch for it being rubbish. It was rubbish back then, it will be rubbish now, and it was definitely rubbish on that day.
Shenmue was a chicken terrine starter compared to the turkey-with-all-the-trimmings feast that was Shenmue II. I was a huge fan of both, but the building section near the end of the sequel was immense. The Raid/Judge Dredd - pah. All that fuss about you can go anywhere and open any drawer etc from the OTT previews for the original though - iirc you could only really do that in a handful of houses other than the Hazuki residence.
Whatever you think of the game, it looks pretty special for something that's nearly fifteen years old (and this intro is still great):
The DC games I hold dearest are Shenmue II, Super Magnetic Neo, Ecco: Defender of the Future, Quake III (online), Skies of Arcadia and Chu Chu Rocket.
I have Shemue 1& 2 for DC. However I got as far as the 1st arcade in no.1 and then lost interest after spending all my money in there. However that is no reflection on the game itself as the narrative-led, adventure-style game leaves me cold.
Headhunter was good actually, I tend to forget about that (although adkm's point about most DC games being ported elsewhere is true for that too). It's probably aged terribly, but I do remember it having a very satisfying shotgun.
I probably missed a handful of decent PAL DC games, but as I worked in Game at the time, chances are I owned or played most of the good ones. Red Dog always looked OK, probably should have given that a go. Toy Commander too, I only played the demo.
True, but it wasn't long at all between the Dreamcast releases and those PS2 ports, so it's different from say, SNES to GBA (or SNES games on Wii U). I loved my Dreamcast, but half of your list would have been available to me elsewhere, within a year or so, if I'd been more patient/less obsessed with Sega.
Not that I'd go back and do things differently if I could, it's just that nowadays I'd be more inclined to wait, which wouldn't bad a bad choice financially.
NB: Most of the PS2 ports were inferior to the originals though, or at least the PAL versions were.
The speed of the ports were largely due to SEGA giving up on Dreamcast.
Just imagine if it'd been around a year or so longer, Jet Set Radio Future, Super Monkey Ball and Panzer Dragoon Orta would probably all been DC games too.
Yep. I would have played the first two more if they were on Sega hardware too, I have to admit. It took me ages, but I got right near the end of Future (I enjoyed it, I just rarely played it), and after I'd beaten the insane final boss on Orta I never touched that again either. In contrast, I played through the Japanese and PAL versions of JSR, got 100% on everything in Panzer Zwei and completed Saga twice (and the first disk at least double that).
I don't think it would have been possible for me to play Monkey Ball any more than I did though; I was obsessed.
I came up with soundcloud in 1999, I called it 21cbeats - it was supposed to be, well soundcloud and myspace for artists before it.
Besides that, I'd go back only 3 years and would've moved to Japan after the Tsunami and would've set up that localisation firm for western enterprise software.
Too late now.
"Better than a tech demo. But mostly a tech demo for now. Exactly what we expected, crashes less and less. No multiplayer." - BnB NMS review, PS4, PC