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Quickly growing impatient, we fired up the only game we could get our hands on at the time of the system's launch, Virta Fighter 3: Team Battle. We popped the CD in the system, closed the cover door, pressed the On button and held our breaths as the screen quickly flickered, announcing that the TV had received the Dreamcast's video signal. We were greeted by a bouncing orange ball which ended up spiralling inwards to form the classic Dreamcast logo. Expecting to be flooded with a myriad of Kanji and Katakana symbols, we were relieved to find that the majority of the game had English text. After choosing our characters and arena we were treated to quite a lovely surprise. The visuals are simply amazing for a console. Polygon count was high, alpha blending was beautifully accomplished, textures were crisp and to top it all off, the game moved along at a very healthy rate. An educated guess would place the frame rate between 35 and 45 fps. Sega claims that the Dreamcast port of VF3 runs at 60fps, however with no benchmarking techniques available to us, we suggest that you take that with a grain of salt. With the exception of the limited and fuzzy resolutions produced by televisions, however, VF3:TB was almost an exact arcade translation. Nothing seemed to be sacrificed.
Shots are not screen captures. They were taken with a digital camera in front of the screen.
Five minutes in front of the Dreamcast quickly turned into one hour. Sharky Extreme editors ended up taking turns pounding away at Virtua Fighter 3 well into the early morning hours. The Dreamcast is an exciting new product, and holds a great deal of promise. We've all seen visuals like the kind spewed forth by the Dreamcast before, but never at such a low price. In addition, Sega has made it clear that they're aiming to close the gap between consoles and PC's. As we mentioned before, the Dreamcast will have a modem for online play through Sega's forums. The Dreamcast also has the capability to be hooked up to VGA monitors. We applaud this achievement, as regular TV's don't do the system's high resolutions any justice.
We'll be following up this quick preview with more in-depth articles on the Dreamcast and comparisons with its PC counterparts in the very near future. In the meantime, visit Dreamcaster.net for all your Dreamcast needs.
Amer "Mossad" Ajami
Senior Editor
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