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I could go on and on about the Dreamcast, its awesomeness and how it's failure was not so much due to itself, but the failures Sega experienced before it.
After the disappointing reception of the Saturn (except in Japan where it actually did quite well), the bombs of both the 32X and the Sega CD as well as horrible marketing techniques of all the above, Sega had shot themselves in the foot so many times that even if the most absolutely perfect console were to be released (which the Dreamcast practically was), it still wouldn't save the already-financially-burdened Sega from having to jump ship and drop the extra luggage (their console department).
First, the whole idea of releasing add-on's to the Genesis in order to combat the onslaught of new consoles (the 3DO and Jaguar, as well as the technologically superior SNES were all seen as threats) was stupid. Why ride the Genesis when a company could just unleash an entirely new product altogether? The whole add-on idea makes for an ugly piece of machine, not to mention truncates the technical possibilities of the add-on's themselves. The Genesis was a weakling of a console by the time 1994 came around; programming your add-on's to run off 5-6 year old technology seems ass backwards to me.
So of course, Sega wants to forget about the 32X and Sega CD. But what was the point of the 32X after all? The Saturn was already in development before the 32X hit store shelves. Hardcore gamers knew from the start that the 32X was a pointless endeavor, and I can't think of any reason why Sega would want to prolong the life of a console that was soon to be replaced anyway.
Then the Saturn...well, some say that it was dead out of the gate as well, mainly because of how the system architecture was implemented. Instead of being a unified CPU, there were two seperate CPU's that worked simultaneously. This being a very new setup in the eyes of console game designers, making games at first was a total bitch. In fact, most of the first batch of Saturn games utilized only one of the CPU's, effectively only using about half of the Saturn's potential. This is why some early games, such as Daytona USA, looked like complete shit (that, and Daytona was rushed to make a surprise launch deadline that Sega stupidly announced THE DAY OF THE LAUNCH...by surprising the public, even most retailers had no idea...not to mention Sony took the showfloor just minutes later and announced a price point for the PSone that was $100 cheaper).
So now you have 3 consoles, 2 of which were bombs and 1 of which just wasn't managed properly, that have severely hurt Sega's reputation. By the time the Dreamcast made it stateside, many retailers gave a proverbial 'fuck you' to Sega for essentially screwing them over with the Saturn. Many Wal-Marts and Targets threw Dreamcasts in the way back of their display shelves, giving the inferior PSone and N64 more exposure, and some advertisements weren't even displayed. Even worse, some game companies gave very little support, notably EA, which gave NONE (supposedly because EA wanted exclusive rights of any and all sports games on the Dreamcast, but this couldn't happen because just months before the launch of the DC, Sega had recently bought out Visual Concepts for the specific purpose of developing sports titles). Without the support of one of the biggest 3rd party developers around, and limited support from others (Namco released just one game, and many say the best game, Soul Calibur), the Dreamcast was dead in the water.
...Which is too bad, because the Dreamcast was home to the first built-in network support in the history of consoles, the first true 128-bit console (the graphics jump from PSone to Dreamcast, to this day, remains the biggest jump in the history of gaming visuals if you ask me), and the first console to make arcade translation absolutely perfect. Still, with all of this shit working against it...the DC still accumulated a kickass library, and is among the best of consoles in history.
....sorry for the long post....just spreading the word that buying this console is a definite good idea.
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