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Instead of writing a lengthy post about the Sega Dreamcast to celebrate its 10th Birthday (Oh man, do I EVER feel old! — today’s my birthday as well! *gulp*), I decided to make a special Dreamcast dedication video instead. So instead of writing just a normal blog post, sit back, relax and learn a bit about the Dreamcast in this ScottCGaming.com exclusive video!
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: A group of college-aged people head off into a remote part of the country in search of a good time. What they soon discover though is that an evil presence is also where they are and by the end of the film most – if not everyone – is dead.
I know. Shocking concept for a horror movie, right?
With that out of the way, it’s hard to criticize House of the Dead for its lame, predictable plot. Every modern day horror film suffers from this all too common “story” and it’s become so overused it’s almost expected by viewers. This is another videogame movie from Uwe Boll, the same guy who has brought us Alone in the Dark, Postal, BloodRayne, and other terrible films…so it should come as no big surprise that this is a giant cinematic turd as well.
The problems with HotD lie in its development. For some reason Sega is used all over the place from a giant “Sega” banner being in one shot to actual clips of videogame footage from HotD being used as transitions between live-action scenes. When characters die the director even mimics the camera panning around the character like it does in the game. Basically, this is truly a videogame converted into a movie with absolutely no respect given to either medium. I’d like to know if Sega or Uwe is to blame because HotD just sucks.
The characters, like most of those found in schlocky horror films, are bland and forgettable. The plot focuses on a group of five yuppie twenty-somethings who are invited to go to a rave on an island. Not seeing anything even slightly bizarre about that location and being dumb enough to miss the ferry taking everyone there, they agree to pay the grizzled captain of a boat (randomly named Captain Kirk) $1,000 to get them there (one of the yuppies actually had $600 cash in his pocket).
On the way there the people already partying on the island are attacked in broad daylight in probably the least scary way ever shown on screen. Meanwhile, one of the guys gets seasick and vomits on his girlfriend’s face. Once on the island the young college kids discover an empty party area with only a few bits of blood covered cloth around. Three of the five students go off to find out what happened while vomit boy and his gal-pal take the opportunity to get it on.
The kids who go off searching for others eventually find an old house and a few survivors inside. One of the survivors is the ex-boyfriend of the hot brunette in the group. In a crappy voiceover narration at the beginning of the film he says they broke up because “…he wanted to study and she wanted to fence.” Okay, um..yeah, let’s move on. So now the group of people (that group’s number is up to six) return back to where vomit boy and girl were and find someone stuck in a tipped-over Porta-Potty…vomit boy. When he is let out by his friends, he is now covered head to toe in human waste. They laugh at him and ask where his girlfriend is. Out of nowhere she appears as a zombie, kills one of the students and then a cop appears out of thin air and blows the zombie’s brains out.
So now the group is up to…oh hell. Does it matter? The movie just sucks. There’s boobs, barf, beer, babes, blood, bullets and other bad thing things in this Boll b-movie and only mentally handicapped people will find this film entertaining.
As a videogame movie it has absolutely nothing to do with the game series it is based on and even the “house” is a pitiful interpretation (In the game you are a detective of sorts who shoots his was through a demon-filled mansion but in the movie you have college kids fighting standard ol’ zombies near a wooden shack).
The movie then spirals even further down into nonsensical gibberish and plot developments when that hot brunette fights a zombie with a sword. Apparently entire lines of dialogue and characters were created just to add something the director wanted to see. Uwe’s reasoning probably sounded something like this: “I want a zombie sword fight! Even though that isn’t in the games let’s just say the main girl character knows fencing and throw it in because swords are kewl and fun to film!“
The movie is a mess and has no redeeming qualities. The acting is sloppy, the characters are poorly cast, the special effects are laughably bad, the dialogue is typical toilet Boll quality and editing/pacing of the film is almost seizure-inducing (Uwe loves techno music and fast editing). There’s even a huge gap in the plot because at the beginning you have a young girl talking on her cellphone but later in the film cellphones apparently can’t be used on the island. It’s as if no one even read the script before they made this film.
Even as a zombie, b-movie flick the film falls short and will make the viewer either stop before its done and/or wish they hadn’t wasted their time and money at all.
Overall: 1/10
Since the demise of the Dreamcast, it’s not hard to imagine why so many gamers cling onto every word from Peter Moore (who was the last guy in charge at Sega of America before they decided to get out of the hardware business). Peter Moore was always a very likeable guy and seemed to have a knack for connecting with his company’s audience on a “Hey, I won’t sell you a crappy product because we both know you’re too smart for that” sort of level.
After the Dreamcast’s unfortunate early death Moore nabbed the top position at Microsoft and almost overnight the X-Box fondly became regarded as the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast. While no one can be certain how much Moore’s influence affected the popularity of Microsoft’s new console in the early ’00s, you can’t help but feel as if the guy knew what he was doing when he essentially kicked Nintendo out of hardcore gaming market (when the Gamecube failed to gain much ground) and stole the #1 spot from Sony with the 360.
Last year the gaming community was shocked to learn Peter Moore was leaving Microsoft and heading to the top spot at EA Sports. EA has been thought of as the “Microsoft” of the gaming market for years because of their tendency to eat up small developers to acquire licenses and then doing cookie-cutter multi-platform versions of many of their most high profile games. So when Moore left Microsoft, a lot of gamers & journalists seemed to start thinking he had finally lost touch with his “gamer perspective” in pursuit of $$$ and, as a result, we haven’t heard so much about him since then.
That is, until recently.
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Last week The Guardian did a pretty in-depth interview with Moore for their website (an interview, that I might add, was five parts long and published on five separate days. Talk about milking an article for all its worth…) and I want to just cover some of Moore’s comments from that conversation:
The Dreamcast was an interesting beast. Sega was so financially strapped, and it had already launched in Japan to a sort of tepid, luke-warm reaction. These are big stakes games. I mean, when you’re launching a games console, you need hundreds of millions of dollars to get it off the ground… and so the North American launch was the last best chance – Europe was going to be launching but there wasn’t enough there to salvage what was going to be a tough situation with the PS2 looming 12 months out … The US was the last best chance of getting the Dreamcast up and running.
Just as I thought, Sega’s presence in North America wasn’t just important, it was absolutely necessary to Sega’s survival as a hardware company globally. That’s a pretty bad situation that the Dreamcast was put into because up to that point Sega of Japan always screwed over Sega of America whenever possible and treated them like an afterthought. It’s no wonder why the Saturn is often cited as a major reason why the Dreamcast ultimately failed in the market.
We amassed a very strong line up of titles, but unfortunately, EA – God bless ‘em – decided they weren’t going to publish on Dreamcast.
Back in the early ’00s, EA’s support of a system wasn’t as crucial as many people would like you to believe. In EA’s absence Sega formed 2K Sports, a developer who quickly became the shop that produced the most critically acclaimed sport games on any console. To this day 2K (which isn’t owned by Sega anymore) remains the sole competitor to the EA juggernaut and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Perhaps having Madden on the Dreamcast would have attracted more of the casual gamer audience which may have saved the system (and Sega)…but really, I’m glad the Dreamcast stayed EA-free.
We had a tremendous 18 months. Dreamcast was on fire – we really thought that we could do it. But then we had a target from Japan that said – and I can’t remember the exact figures – but we had to make N hundreds of millions of dollars by the holiday season and shift N millions of units of hardware, otherwise we just couldn’t sustain the business.
So on January 31 2001 we said Sega is leaving hardware – somehow I got to make that call, not the Japanese. I had to fire a lot of people, it was not a pleasant day.
We were selling 50,000 units a day, then 60,000, then 100,000, but it was just not going to be enough to get the critical mass to take on the launch of PS2. It was a big stakes game. Sega had the option of pouring in more money and going bankrupt and they decided they wanted to live to fight another day. So we licked our wounds, ate some humble pie and went to Sony and Nintendo to ask for dev kits.
Now that is a shame. Technically, the Dreamcast was right on track in the U.S. to being where it needed to be…but yet again Sega of Japan insisted on these set-in-stone goals and basically killed the system from afar. It all came down to money (as usual) and Sega of Japan decided that the world no longer needed Sega in the console race…even though SoJ was no longer the biggest money maker in Sega-Land. It was probably done out of pure-spite (and I’m not exaggerating – the SoJ/SoA bitterness has been well documented over the years since the Genesis days).
I was angry with Sony at the time, but in their shoes I probably would have done the same thing. They did a tremendous job – and it’s a story they repeated in 2005 with Killzone – where they promised the consumer something they probably believed they were going to deliver, but they never did. PlayStation 2 – it was the emotion engine it was games coming to life, Real Player was going to be on there, a full network browser… and they just never delivered.
But what they did was place doubt in the consumers’ mind. …And then Sony came up with that Killzone video – and they still haven’t shipped the game! Have you seen the video?! The game will never be the video! But what they did again was they placed doubt. I mean it’s a classic PR tactic.
I remember hearing all the hype for the PS2’s Emotion Engine as well. In the end, years later, we discover that the PS2 was only marginally more powerful than the Dreamcast. I personally believe Nintendo did the same thing with the Wii, telling potential owners about all the revolutionary gameplay styles that would come from the Wiimote, only for gamers everywhere to eventually realize that the Wii was just Gamecube 1.5 with a fancy new controller. Good for profits/stock holders, bad for gamers.
Was that a difficult time?
It was not optimistic. We had developers, Yuji Naka, Yu Suzuki, all these people who had never worked on anything other than first-party hardware. And now we’re saying you need to go multi-platform, and it was just not comfortable for them whatsoever. You don’t just one day say ‘well we’re just going to go from our Dreamcast dev kits to our PS2 or Xbox.’
That comes as no surprise either because once the Dreamcast was officially killed by Sega the big name developers all took off for the reasons probably mentioned above. I’m sure they weren’t even consulted in Sega’s future when the Board of Directors were deciding the Dreamcast’s fate in 2000 – yet they were the ones counted on to deliver the games that would make millions time and time again.
So during your reign at Xbox, how hands on were you, at a creative level?
I ran the entire business – everything reported to me. So I would go from meetings with McCann Erickson who did the Standoff spot, into an Xbox Live retention meeting to a financial commitments meeting looking at the quarterly numbers – it was a complicated yet exhilarating time, we were trying to pull all of these pieces together. And the [profit and loss forecasts] of what we were doing would absolutely make your hair curl.
Well, there you have it. This guy pretty much got Microsoft into the #1 spot in the U.S. in just one console generation. That’s pretty impressive from a business standpoint (no wonder why EA wanted to bring him on-board). While he obviously wasn’t coding the games or anything he must’ve had an extremely good grasp on the market and what gamers wanted. So Moore was essentially Microsoft’s Miyamoto.
And in the same way, not having a hard drive in every Xbox 360 was a hard decision, but we wanted to get price under control. The hard drive in every Xbox killed us; we we’re still selling it at $199 and the hard drive was like $70. That’s why we prematurely left the original Xbox, because the more we were selling – there was still great demand – it was killing us, and there was no way to bring the price down. So in the end we determined at around the 25 million unit mark that we just needed to slow this thing down and just not sell any more, and move to the 360 as quickly as we possibly could. And to this day people still believe we left the Xbox too early but it was purely for financial purposes.
Okay, so maybe that’s why the Wii and the Xbox Arcade/Core lack a HDD – they simply cost too much to include and it eats into profits (or just breaking even). I always wondered why Microsoft killed the X-Box so quickly as well – it appears to have more with saving money on their end than necessarily trying to drain more from people with a new device.
The GameCube had pretty much failed. I was in Tokyo when Iwata-san brought the controller out and said, ‘here it is!’ and we were all going, ‘what the hell is that?”. I was with Robbie and I remember going ‘I don’t know… it’s different’. But we knew that they were too good a company to lose twice in a row. But even then it was all about Sony, it was not about Nintendo, because they were so down and out – it’s very difficult to think now, it was four years ago. You just couldn’t picture that four or five years ago. GameCube was just… dying. The Revolution as it was called, we knew it couldn’t be anything powerful. It was in the days when Sony and ourselves were saying it’s all about hi-def, it’s all about 5.1 sound, it’s all about 1080i, and they said it’s about a GameCube 1.5 and you’re going to wave this stick around and have a lot of fun.
Wow. I thought I was alone in thinking that. The Revolution never excited me once and I was pretty sure whatever system Nintendo released next would be their last before the big N said ‘bye’ to console devices. I guess I was wrong…but who could have imagined that their survival (& popularity) would come from embracing the casual gamer market?
…I learned some hard lessons about price value.
Reebok [where Peter Moore once worked -ed] was even more fascinating and intriguing. A brand is a brand no matter what you do, if you’re not making radical changes … We spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the 90s trying to out Nike Nike, and just everything they were doing, we were doing, and what we didn’t do was change our brand radically, we trust tried to be cool and hip, and go get their players, their leagues, their clubs, and spend a fortune – go get the Olympics go after the World Cup… but the consumer till says, Reebok, female lifestyle, aerobics, maybe running, definitely tennis, fitness – that’s who you are. You’re not football, you’re not baseball – that’s for Nike and Adidas. I had a little bit of success in soccer … but a brand’s a brand.
So what he’s saying is that fanboyism is always going to be something very difficult to overcome in the gaming industry. No matter how good the games from Sega or Microsoft are (or “were” I should say in Sega’s case) the mere fact that Halo or Sonic isn’t Mario or Zelda or have “Nintendo” as their maker won’t convert customers to your system. This is very bizarre for me and it’s the only thing that can explain the Wii’s massive appeal nowadays. Non-gamers tend to associated gaming with “Nintendo” and “Mario” and proclaim anything Nintendo does to be amazing…even if they haven’t touch a Mario game in decades,
What’s funny is that Sonic has probably been milked the same as Mario in sheer number of times in titles (I know, that sounds bad ;P) since the Dreamcast’s death in 2001 yet fanboyism/Nintendo-love has made that a great thing for Nintendo but a bad thing for Sega. It’s very weird and I really hope everyone starts moving past the Mario/Zelda series like they obviously have with Sonic. They were both great series at one time…but now? Let’s move onto something else. When the gaming market gets to the next true revolution (whatever that may be – maybe when games are holograms :), then we can revisit the franchises. But enough’s enough.
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So that ends my thoughts on the interview with Peter Moore from last week. I wish him well and hope he provides EA with the perspective and ability to treat gamers more like, well, gamers…instead of mindless consumer drones who’ll buy anything with the words Madden slapped on it. We expect more nowadays and companies need to deliver more. If you want us to buy $400+ systems to play your games you better make us feel like our money was well spent.
Thanks again Mr. Moore for trying your best to make the Dreamcast #1 (which was soooo close to happening) and making the X-Box a great competitor to Sony at a time when the industry desperately needed another breath of fresh air. I think gaming would have been negatively affected without your input.
Yeah, so yesterday I found out that Yu Suzuki has officially said “Sayonara” to Sega, effectively killing all chances of a genuine Shenmue game ever appearing. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen but at this point in time it was already next to impossible and this latest development certainly means that the game’s biggest supporter no longer has any say at Sega.
A couple of years ago I would have been heartbroken by this news but now, after Shenmue III has been ignored for years and years now, I’m really not shocked. I only wish Yu Suzuki could’ve have taken the license with him and done something with it elsewhere. *sigh*…on a more positive note, I really, really think I’m getting a PSP this weekend. I just found out about an 8GB Memory Stick so that means this could serve as a gaming system AND a new portable music player (I was thinking of getting an 80GB Zune).
I’m totally psyched.
I first became addicted to Phantasy Star Online back in 2001 when it was on the Sega Dreamcast…and I must have played that game for at least a hundred hours, if not more. What was so interesting about PSO is that I played the vast majority of the game in the offline mode. The first time I really had a chance to play the online mode was with Phantasy Star Blue Burst when it was released for the PC.
Back in 2004 was our first chance to see what the sequel to Phantasy Star Online would be — and that came in the form of Phantasy Star Universe. I had such high hopes for this game because I was so addicted to PSO and I loved the fact that it was going to be on next-gen consoles, you were going to be able to play with characters all over the world and on different platforms…basically, it was going to be amazing.
I at first thought it’d be coming out in late 2004, maybe 2005…but NO…it comes out at the tail end of 2006 when the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 are out…and what we’re left with is this game that visually underwhelms so much you just can’t help but feel like you’ve been cheated by Sega. It’s like, “Why didn’t they release this back in 2004 when the graphics were still pretty good for the time?”
And it’s not just like the visuals are the only thing the game has going on for it and that’s all I was wanting — it’s not. But, it’s just one of many flaws. Another thing they messed with were the controls — so if you played Phantasy Star Online before this and said, “Oh, I’m gonna pick up Phantasy Star Universe” the controls would feel awkward and weird — they just don’t feel right.
Another thing I don’t understand is why they added were all the goofy voice-overs and Japanese/Anime-style cutscenes. I realize Sega wanted to add more of a story but I didn’t want to watch an Anime or play a generic JRPG!…and that’s exactly what they added elements of in this game.
Overall, unless you’re a die-hard Phantasy Star series fanatic, I can’t really recommend this to anyone else because it’s not a very good game on its own and visually it isn’t going to impress you. Plus, Phantasy Star Online is still a much better game and you should check that out instead.
Graphics: 5 | Sound: 5 | Play Control: 5 | Fun Factor: 4 | Final Score: 45%
