Jet Set Radio has to be one of my all time favourite games. There was very little if anything wrong with it. Hot graphics, addictive gameplay, and one bad ass soundtrack. To say the music in Jet Set Radio was eclectic would be an understatement. J-Rock, J-Pop, House, Dance, Techno, Hip-Hop. Everything cool and credible for you to rock to whilst you skate around and deface public property in Shibuya.

One of my fave tracks was the song “Electric tooth brush” from Toronto. I’ve not always been a fan of dance music. I certainly wasn’t around the time I used to murder Jet Set Radio every weekend. But “Electric tooth brush” just did it for me. It’s all about that bass. It always got me working a shoulder and adopting a bit of a bounce.

Listen: Electric tooth brush

Performed by Toronto
Jet Set Radio OST
© 2000 Sega

For the mp3 players: Electric tooth brush

Sonic adventure 2 was an upgrade from Sonic adventure 1, but it was still an iffy game that was far from perfect. Sega never took the hint from the first game that they should not expand the Sonic crew past Tails, Knuckles and Amy, and decided to introduce Shadow. Sonic in black with a bad attitude, a bit of hair on his chest and a gun is bound to be cool right? No. Sonic is annoying enough, a clone of him is overkill. Sega’s butchering of their once beloved franchise aside, Sega always manage to get two things right with their Sonic games: The graphics and the audio. You can trust Sega to deliver a Sonic game for consoles that looks and sounds nice, just as much as you can rely on them to f**k every other aspect of the game up.

Sonic adventure 2 didn’t have the most memorable soundtrack, but one song more than did it’s part: ‘Escape from the city’. The piece that players were graced with on the very first stage. Sure it was cheesy, but it was hot cheesy and captured the essence of Sonic brilliantly. I’m not ashamed in the slightest to say I really like this song and used to play the hell out of it.

Listen: Escape from the city

Performed by Ted Poley & Tony Harnell
Sonic adventure 2 OST
© 2001 Sega

Reading our latest “A look Back @. . .” post, I have thought of one thing: “Damn, the Dreamcast was an awesome console” and Bam! Soul Calibur comes to mind. A 3D fighting game like no other; it was the first game able to conquer successfully the bulkiness of past 3D games like Virtua Fighter or Tekken (and its predecessor, Soul Edge) and gave us the fluidity of fast sprite games like Street Fighter Alpha 3. Adding to that a very balanced parrying movement and different attack techniques and and the infamous Ring Out scenarios and you have a nearly invincible game (graphics play a role, but even when comparing past generation games, graphics won’t beat gameplay. . .ever).

Add to this game some nice characters like Nightmare, Xianghua, Voldo, and Sophitia and you have all fan bases covered. Along the way we’ve seen Soul Calibur, then the near perfected Soul Calibur II (with Link on the Gamecube, version! How cool is that?!); advancing with some let-downs in SCIII, and preparing for the next two games of the franchise: Soul Calibur IV on “power” consoles, and SC Legends on the Wii. And even as we of the DDN community have discussed the comparative issues of these two games, it would’ve been nice to have seen SC IV on our Wii’s.

To your viewing pleasure, Alexfung23 shows us a great compilation of the game for the DC, with brief clips of its characters and fighting styles.

Great, now I want to play a Soul Calibur I don’t have because my brother lost it. ;_;

Last weekend, on Sunday the 9th of September, marked the eighth birthday of one of the most underrated and underappreciated console to grace the American market. In a nutshell, it ran on 128-bit hardware, had a load of A-list titles, and was just awesome to play. But because of poor marketing decisions, it went into a downward spiral of low sales figure. To say it wasn’t commercially successful was an understatement. Ironically, Peter Moore, former Xbox 360 PR mogul, used to helm the marketing side of this console. Perhaps his venture in Sega was a lifelong lesson on how he should improve his marketing and PR skills before working for Microsoft.

Moving on, I would like to point out the many landmarks the Dreamcast created, both the good, the bad, and the obligatory “WTFs”.
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