
	Platform Xbox 360 Genre Classic Games Publisher Sega Developer Sega ESRB E - T (Everyone, Teen) Released February 22, 2011

- It’s Dreamcast games on your 360! - Crazy Taxi is still a lot of fun - Achievements added to the games

- Barebones presentation - No real extras - Music changed on Crazy Taxi

Review: Sega Soccer Slam (GC) Review: Crazy Taxi (Dreamcast) Review: Outrun 2 (XB)
Newsletter
Be notified of site updates. Sign-up for the Newsletter sent out twice weekly. Enter E-Mail Address Below: Subscribe \| Unsubscribe

Dreamcast Collection

Score: 6.0 / 10

First of all, I have to give a disclaimer here. I love the original Dreamcast. In fact, I own every single North American Dreamcast release and dozens of imports. So you have to understand that I’m a little pained to score this thing so low, and that’s with doling out a mercy point or two.

So now we’ll move onto the basics.

This package gives us four Dreamcast releases: Crazy Taxi, Sega Bass Fishing, Space Channel 5 Part 2 and Sonic Adventure. It does deliver those four games on a

Advertisement

- Xbox 360 Game Reviews
- Games Published by Sega

single retail disc (and I really do prefer retail discs over downloads) but that is as far as it goes.

The menu is about as basic as it gets. You select the game you want and it loads. When you exit a game, it takes you back to the dashboard, not the “choose a game” menu. Fortunately, because the menu is so basic it doesn’t take too long to

Advertisement

load.

The games are all what you will remember back from the day, with the one noticeable difference being achievement support. This is of course great, but leaves a lot to be desired.

The games themselves are mostly unchanged. Crazy Taxi however has lost its great music! Due to a licensing issue, the Offspring (to me) is the most notable change and loss and I was really surprised how much I missed it. The game is still fun, having you pick up fares and drop them off at your destination in the most crazy way that you can.

Sonic Adventure was a big disappointment to me, I don’t know if I just remembered this game being better or exactly what happened but it’s not quite was I was looking for. Both the Sonic Adventure and Crazy Taxi are identical to the versions currently offered on XBLA so if you are thinking that they would be different, they aren’t.

Sega Bass Fishing is here too, although perhaps a bit of an odd choice in the mix. Although not a bad fishing game per se, it did gain extra brownie points back in the day for its innovative fishing rod controller. Of course, that’s not available on the Xbox 360 (although an included Dreamcast to USB adapter would have just been over-the-top awesome) so in the end you’re left with a fairly average fishing game.

Space Channel 5 Part 2 is a music rhythm game that actually never made it over to North America on the Dreamcast (although you might have tried it out on the Playstation 2). It’s quirky and unique, and you are either going to love it or hate it. It translated over fairly well although you do really notice that polygon count on the Dreamcast is (not surprisingly) a lot less than what we are used to today.

At the end of the day, some are going to question the choice of games. It’s called a Dreamcast collection, but it’s probably more correct to say it’s a “First Party Dreamcast Collection” as many of the system’s greatest games (Soul Calibur I’m looking at you) were not owned or published by Sega.

The lack of extras and choice of games makes this harder for me to recommend than I would like to. The fact that you get four reasonably good games in one package is nice, but knowing the size of these games there is no reason why between 6 and 8 games could not be included in a compilation. Tack on some Dreamcast development extras, videos (the cool 9.9.1999 launch anyone?) and so on and I could have hung a 9 or 10 on this one. Here’s to hoping for a sequel sometime soon.

- Syd Bolton

(April 4, 2011)

Syd Bolton is Canada’s top videogame collector who surrounds himself in thousands of classic video games at the Personal Computer Museum (http://www.pcmuseum.ca/) in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.