The Best Dreamcast Games

Here’s a terrifying fact: Sega has been out of the console business longer than they were in it. And while it was the Dreamcast that finally did the struggling giant in, for a platform that was only around for a couple of years it certainly left one hell of a legacy behind.

In honour of Sega’s fallen hero, we’ve put together this list of the best games for the Dreamcast, for those who might be interested in circling around and picking one up, or those who once did and would like a tragic trip down memory lane.

JET SET RADIO

Jet Set Radio was the best Dreamcast game. I know it had its flaws regarding difficulty and the time limits (some of which were addressed in the later Xbox port), but the colours, the music, the style…this is the millennium distilled, the perfect standard bearer for everything beautiful and good about the Sega Dreamcast. If you could only ever own one game for this system, it should/would be this.

SHENMUE

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An expensive and beloved project, way ahead of its time, that bombed commercially leaving a flaming wreck (and a beautiful legacy) in its wake? We could be talking about the Dreamcast itself, or we could be talking just about Shenmue.

Its heavy emphasis on story, and revolutionary (if also frustratingly basic) way of implementing it in a video game earned it a ton of praise at release, but also a ton of indifference from a market that just wasn’t ready (or, let’s be honest, just didn’t care) for its quirks.

SPACE CHANNEL 5

If Jet Set Radio was most millennial video game, Space Channel 5 might run a very close second. Its mere existence is testament to how weird and daring the Dreamcast’s library could be, where a company could actually take a Janet/Michael Jackson music video and turn it into a rhythm game, then expect more than three people to buy it.

Here’s a terrifying fact: Sega has been out of the console business longer than they were in it. And while it was the Dreamcast that finally did the struggling giant in, for a platform that was only around for a couple of years it certainly left one hell of a legacy behind. In honour of…