Dream Machine

By Chris Taylor

A female friend recently suffered a classic contemporary dilemma: What to furnish the apartment with first, a couch or a video-games console? A couch is nice to sit on, but a console is "a man magnet," she decided. "No male can resist the challenge." I knew what she meant. For mindless fun, you can't beat a console evening. Invite your friends over, gather round the TV, crack open a six-pack and get down to the serious business of knocking the stuffing out of them. It does wonders for your social life.

Lately, however, 64-bit consoles like Nintendo and PlayStation have lost a little of their punch. Maybe it's because PC games have improved so fast--along with PCs themselves--while the quality of the consoles has stood still. Or maybe it's the advent of the more powerful 128-bit Sega Dreamcast that my pals and I have been testing.

Dreamcast is Sega's bid to work its way back into the console market. Its previous offering, the ill-fated Saturn, was too pricey and offered too few games. Learning from its mistakes, Sega is launching Dreamcast in September for $199, with a built-in 56K modem for online game play and at least 20 titles to start wrestling with.

PlayStation purists have already turned up their noses at Dreamcast. They claim that PlayStation II--Sony's next-generation console, expected in the fall of 2000--will blow it out of the water. So why bet a couple of hundred bucks on a minor-league player like Sega? Dreamcast, however, has a 12-month head start on PlayStation II. Past experience in the console market suggests that quality ultimately matters less than the ability to build up a loyal base of customers. So I resolved to give Dreamcast a chance.

Good thing I did. Dreamcast can be, well, a dream: in graphics, sound and especially speed, it's a quantum leap ahead of the 64-bit consoles. If anything, it may be a little too brisk. Take Sonic Adventure, a revamped version of that Sega classic Sonic the Hedgehog, which the company is marketing as the quintessential Dreamcast game. The visuals are 3-Delicious--Sonic's footprints appear in the sand as he zooms by, while the sun glints in the lens just as it should. But dismal attempts at midair loop-the-loops left me cursing at controls that always seemed a step behind the speedy blue hedgehog. Perhaps my synapses simply don't fire fast enough.

Then again, I'm hardly the target audience for Sonic Adventure. Much more my sort of thing is a fishing game called Get Bass. Your aim is to reel in a catch within a time limit, using a rodlike controller that vibrates every time you get a bite. The best bits: underwater shots of your bait, and a kind of fishy artificial intelligence that determines whether the bass will fall for it. I found myself returning to Get Bass again and again--and I'm no angler.

Bottom line: Dreamcast is a serious contender in the new console wars. It does have design flaws. The controller isn't as comfortable as Sony's or Nintendo's, for one. The connecting wire comes out player-side rather than console-side, which can be irksome if you do happen to have a couch and want to sit on it while playing. But Sega's machine passes the all-important test: it's a blast to play with your buddies. Just ask my girlfriend, who spent hours testing the Dreamcast version of Mortal Kombat with me--and dished out a thorough whupping. Man magnet? More like man trap.

Get the latest on Dreamcast's launch at sega.com Questions for Chris? E-mail him at cdt@well.com