Game Gear - the battery life was a son of a bitch, though. My friend in the neighborhood owned one but it was always about to die so I rarely got to fuck with it.


>
>Dreamcast - But this is where they took that fucking playbook
>and amped it to 10. Just a great piece of console technology
>along with the first online. Think about how insane it was
>that EA left them out to die...and they created the 2k series
>which was BETTER then EA's own Madden/Live? A system with
>similar impact/innovation would have won any previous
>generation before or since...the problem was that it's
>opponent was the PS2.


I remember when I went to Seattle in 1999 (my mom's sister lives there and we visited every summer until I hit high school) and one of the museums there happened to be hosting a public video game expo. Only thing like that I've ever been to; it was entirely put on by SEGA to showcase the Dreamcast, which was about three months away. It was kiosks everywhere, and as a 12 year old I was totally amazed by everything I saw there. NFL 2K and Ready 2 Rumble in particular.

Ultimately what fucked that system up for ME was the controller, same as I've never been able to get into the XBox. As a lefty I have a more fond memory of the N64 controller than most (felt so natural for shooters) but I hated the Dreamcast controller and the original Box Duke (still dislike the asymmetric sticks and d-pad) and my dislike for that controller ultimately made me disinterested in the system overall.

Then it got hacked, stores like Toys R Us actually fucking sold the machine that cracked it IN STORES, IN THE VIDEO GAME AISLE and it was a wrap for the Dreamcast. Throw in what you said about certain companies writing it off from the very beginning and that system was pretty much dead in the water from day one, man.

I remember Sega consoles also being pretty confusing to me at the time; they went from Genesis to 32X to CD to Saturn to Dreamcast real, real quick, and back then it wasn't just hardware changes but format changes, way riskier than what Sony and Microsoft are attempting now. As a kid working on allowance savings, I remember thinking that SEGA just wasn't a good investment; if you read up on the Dreamcast, apparently even several of their executives felt the same way and wanted their board members to approve dropping console production as far back as the Saturn.
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