#189. Demolition Racer: No Exit
October 24, 2000
Pitbull Syndicate
Infogrames North America
The tracks are made of dirt and grass yet the tires squeal like they’re on asphalt. You come in first place but actually lose because you didn’t earn enough points by smashing into other cars. You pick up a health box to repair your car and it actually does more damage to the vehicle. You’re killing it in points by staying in the pack and hitting everyone only for your car to explode and disqualify you.
Demolition Racer: No Exit is a poorly made game whose budget seems to have been spent on song rights. The textures are flat, there are only a handful of cars to choose and players must walk a fine line between racing and doing damage to come out ahead. Demolition Racer tries to be both a demolition derby and a racing game but fails at both.
Players that want a better bang for their buck are better off getting games dedicated to each genre or going the Crazy Taxi route. Otherwise, the truly malicious could simply write this to a flash drive with an emulator on it and hand it out for Halloween and be worse than the house that hands out popcorn balls. — C. Dawson
#188. Max Steel: Covert Missions
December 5, 2000
Treyarch
Mattel Interactive
Along with Cubix, Butt-Ugly Martians, and Action Man, Max Steel was one of the first CGI-animated kid shows. It lasted longer than the others but became forgotten until a failed attempt at a reboot back in 2016. Max started as a toy, so naturally along with his semi-popular show he got a video game, Max Steel: Covert Missions.
Max Steel’s origin is familiar but different. After visiting his father’s tech company, college student and extreme athlete Josh McGrath discovers the company is a front for a spy agency. While fighting a metal-faced dolt named Psycho, Josh gets doused in nanomachines that bond to his body. His body rejects them until his scientist friend supercharges the nanomachines, saving Josh’s life and giving him superpowers and a dumb name.
The premise and TV show are far more interesting than Covert Missions. Playing this game (moving Max through levels, punching and kicking guys) feels like controlling an action figure through a cardboard environment you built yourself. If you’re somehow reading this in the year 2000 don’t buy this; instead pick up Official Dreamcast Magazine Volume 11 and play the demo disc. — J. Ruggiero
#187. Sega Bass Fishing 2
August 23, 2001
Wow Entertainment
Sega
When I first sat down with this game I fully expected that the review I’d inevitably end up writing would read something like “it’s fine for what it is, it’s probably not gonna be for everybody, but it does what it sets out to do and there’s nothing wrong with that.” But in actuality this game is pointless as hell. It’s a realistic bass fishing simulator in a time when realistic “graphics” meant “just be grateful you’re not still a two-dimensional circle, nerd,” and the environments manage to make it feel like your avatar is fishing in an underfunded hatchery that they broke into. It’s sterile, dull, and it doesn’t even let you feel like the time you wasted playing it was relaxing, as I assume real fishing does – I don’t know personally, as actually going fishing would interfere with my policy of not going outside ever. But I’d doubt if even a serious angler could find any joy to be had in this timecard punch clock of a game. — J. Knapp
#186. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue!
June 30, 2000
Traveller’s Tales
Activision
Here we have yet another previous-generation game hastily ported to the Dreamcast with seemingly no effort whatsoever to enhance it and reach the console’s full potential. Remember the mediocre platformers that flooded the N64’s library? Well, they’re still mediocre, but now you’ve spent a lot more money to play them. In this case, you’re spending a lot more money to play through the plot of Toy Story 2—complete with low-resolution FMV clips of various scenes taken directly from the movie—but now for some reason Buzz has to collect various Pizza Planet tokens to advance from sequence to sequence. Why does RC insist on racing me to give me a token? Isn’t he supposed to be Woody’s friend too? Or does he not give a shit if Big Al McWhiggin sells Woody to a toy museum in Japan to rot for the rest of his days? Even if you can manage to suspend your disbelief when it comes to the story, I defy you to suspend your disbelief when it comes to thinking that it’s worth playing this game instead of doing anything else with your life. The one silver lining that every other reviewer seems to nod to is the voice acting, so yes—if you’ve always dreamed of playing a game where Mr. Potato Head says “HEY, BUZZ!” every 10 seconds regardless of whether you’ve already talked to him, it’s time to drop everything and pick up a copy. And finally, a note on the gameplay mechanics: I turned the control stick to make Buzz turn left just before writing this review, and as of publication the camera still hasn’t caught up with him. — Chandler Dean
#185. Surf Rocket Racers
February 28, 2001
CRI Middleware
Crave Entertainment
Surf Rocket Racers does exactly one out of the three things that its title promises you. But which one is it? Is it the “surf” part? Well, unless you consider a stagnant estuary or a flooded alleyway the most heightened location for extreme sports excitement then it isn’t that. Okay, is it the “rocket” part? Considering that for the most part in this game you travel consistently at one speed which I can only describe as “averagely medium” I don’t think that applies either. So after all, it must be the “racers” part? And in the many technical senses, yes, this game absolutely has racers – racers with stats blown up like Wordart all over the screen, likely to distract you from the complete nothing anywhere else in the actual gameplay. Surf Rocket Racers completes one third of the goal its name sets out to, so we are legally obligated to award it one third of the total possible points for a 33/100. Congratulations, Surf Rocket Racers. — James Knapp
#184. Disney’s Dinosaur
November 24, 2000
Ubisoft Paris
Ubisoft
This game isn’t any fun. It’s not broken; it’s just pointless. Every level is the same. You switch between the three playable characters and use their unique abilities to complete their missions in turn. The graphics are muddy and the controls are clumsy. The story is told between levels through FMV cutscenes that are, presumably, from the movie. There is nothing of value here. The game put me into a deep, existential ennui. Why does it exist? Why does anything exist? Is value inherent or subjective? Are we born with a purpose, or do we make our own? Either way, what does it say about me that I spent several hours of my precious life playing Disney’s Dinosaur? In any case, this game did not make me want to watch the movie. Or do anything, really, besides lie down in a dark room. — Kyle Duggan
#183. WWF Attitude
November 9, 1999
Acclaim Studios Salt Lake City
Acclaim
WWF War Zone is one of the least-fun wrestling games of all time so how in the blue hell did it get a sequel in WWF Attitude? Even more miraculous, how is it that the Sega Dreamcast port is the definitive version of this game? Everything from the original is improved, thankfully, but if you hated War Zone as much as I did, you’re not gonna like this game any better. It truly is a polished turd.
I’ll give it this, though – the game does at least have a time sink and a dedication to a wrestler who unfortunately passed right when the game was originally supposed to release. The career mode in this game is a long, tedious grind that young me would’ve at least tried to stick with but it can fuck right off as an adult with an adult amount of time now. The dedication is to the beloved Owen Hart, who tragically passed in May of 1999 and as little fun as I had playing this game, I’ll give it completely emotionally driven points for their tribute to him. If nothing else, thank goodness the Acclaim license to WWF games ran out after this one. — W. Quant
#182. Pen Pen TriIcelon
September 9, 1999
Team Land Ho!
Infogrames North America
First we have to break down this wild name. The Pen Pen is a dumb abbreviation of penguin, the creatures from a strange planet you can control in this odd racing game. TriIcelon is dumber; it’s a clumsy portmanteau of triathlon and ice, a.k.a. three kinds of races that can be performed on ice, since you’ll be waddling, swimming, and sliding through the wacky-designed courses of this game.
Unsurprisingly the name is as stupid as the game, where your animal of choice stumbles over other terrible beasts while miserable music and an even worse color commentator assault your ears. Also it took me until this revisit to realize the Pen Shark Jaw has his fin removed, which is bad. Between that, the disgustingly-sexual Mrs. Cream, and the racist Unga Pogo, this game might have the most awful line-up of characters in a racing game I’ve ever seen. This seems like a game created for a “ripped-from-the-headlines” episode of Law & Order about a teen killing another because of a video game, and the writer really hated video games. — J. Ruggiero
#181. Vanishing Point
January 3, 2001
Clockwork Games
Acclaim Entertainment
This is, by a wide margin, not the best driving game on the Dreamcast. To start you can only drive a boring Ford Mustang or Explorer. If I’m playing a racing game, give me something exciting or exotic to drive, not a vehicle my drunk uncle would own. Unlike most racing games, you have to beat lap times rather than other drivers to advance. Maybe it was good for the time but the driving feels like you’re controlling a car on black-ice-covered tracks. Finally this racing game has something that plagues other racing games: cars on the track that have nothing to do with the race. Other cards are driving around you at twice your speed. Learn to pull over, random delivery truck!
This is, by a much narrower margin, not the worst driving game on the Dreamcast. It gets points for having a pretty substantial number of unlockable vehicles in it, including “secret cars” and for some reason the loading screen shows an x-ray view of a car that has a person in it. It makes it look like Vanishing Point has a neon blue driving skeleton as a mascot, and that rules. — J. Ruggiero
#180. Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes
October 31, 2000
Saffire
Midway Games
I actually had a ton of those little green army guys growing up – the ones from Dollar Tree that were always molded wrong so they never stood up right and their guns were always bent so they were actually pointing back towards the guys who were holding them. Maybe it was for the sake of that parallel that the developers who made this game designed the controls to feel like a third person shooter from the perspective of that one army guy who is supposed to be crawling but looks like he’s trying to play an electric guitar behind his back. Trying to fight the tan army (which for some reason looks like a vaguely lighter shade of green in this game) is an effort that I would put on par with being in several actual wars as far as how fun it is. This game is barely worth all the surplus Dollar Tree army they melted down to make the disc cases, although if they had actually included one of those guitar guy soldiers it would’ve been cool to hear some Vietnam era CCR. Sure felt like I was “in the shit” with the grunts playing this. — J. Knapp
#179. AeroWings 2: Airstrike
August 8, 2000
CRI
Crave Entertainment
If you loved AeroWings but still have an unchecked bloodlust that you feel the desperate urge to satiate then I have good news for you – AeroWings 2: Airstrike is here! Okay, so full disclosure, the game actually focuses on flight combat training rather than any real combat, so if you were hoping to work through your anger issues you’re gonna be out of luck. But it does also kind of beg the question: what’s the point? Much like its predecessor, AeroWings 2 does what it sets out to do very well but… that thing is pretty boring and sucks. If you’re truly so interested in combat flight training then just join the airforce already – hell, at least that way you get college credit or something. — J. Knapp
#178. Death Crimson OX
August 5, 2001
Ecole
Sammy Entertainment
Famed composer Kunitaka Watanabe, who worked on the original Death Crimson, has no delusions about the fact that his work is featured in one of the worst games ever made. In one of his many daily uploads on YouTube, he admits that “the game is fucking… but the music is amazing!”. Somehow, that infamous game spawned two more, creating a Death Crimson trilogy. And, following in both of its predecessor’s footsteps, Death Crimson OX is also pretty damn “fucking”. “Fucking what?”, you may ask — well, I have no idea. But it sure is fucking something.
While the menus no longer look like a playable version of a Geocities page from 1996, the looks of this game leave much to be desired. Odd rainbow text blocks sit in the corner of a drab, muddy-gray city environment. But hey, at least the buildings are coherently shaped. And there are doors! Love the doors. I mean, I could go on about the mediocre shooting and the blasé environments, but none of that shit matters. What does matter is that Death Crimson OX wants to be not only a 30-minute light gun arcade shooter, but also a thought-provoking narrative experience.
So, spoiler alert: our protagonist, Kou Yamagi, uses a cool gun — the eponymous Crimson. As it turns out, Crimson is also a cursed artifact. As a Yu-Gi-Oh! fan, I totally get it; sometimes you just end up with cursed artifacts containing the essence of pure evil. Shit happens. Anyway, there are lots of people in Death Crimson OX who want a piece of that MacGuffin. Admiral Zaza of the SMO, an evil organization of some kind (no idea what it stands for), has kidnapped Lily, mother of your pink sidekick Yuri. Zaza is holding Lily hostage in exchange for Crimson. Thus, the quest begins. A quest that culminates in Admira Zaza’s defeat and subsequent most epic monologue in gaming history:
“Do you know the reason why Crimson exists? It’s because humans have a desire to hold a gun and shoot. The desire is evidenced by the fact that you have come this far, using the red guns. That dark desire is the true source of the radiant blue light here. And I shall just disappear, along with the blue light.” — L. Fisher
#177. Grand Theft Auto 2
May 1, 2000
DMA Design
Rockstar Games
It’s 2023. I don’t have to put up with this. Maybe I would have been amused by this game a quarter of a century ago, but I can’t just pretend that it hasn’t had five far superior sequels — and that’s not even counting spinoffs. The graphics are nice enough, but the controls are abysmal and the audio becomes grating very quickly. If you were a kid who went all-in on having your parents buy you a Dreamcast so you had no juice left to convince them to get you a PS2, then you probably squeezed some fun out of this title. It’s just really difficult to relate to that perspective when you’ve played several much better versions of this exact game. — K. Duggan
#176. ECW Anarchy Rulz
November 28, 2000
Acclaim Studios Salt Lake City
Acclaim
After the Acclaim license to WWF games ran out after WWF Attitude, they turned to one of the other major wrestling companies at the time, ECW. This gave us ECW Hardcore Revolution – a game which I’ll do murder about if I talk any more about it – and this gem, which was released only a few months afterwards. Pardon me if I had zero faith going into this.
Turns out, this game is not as terrible as I thought it’d be, but still no fun. If WWF Attitude was a polished turd version of WWF War Zone and this game is a polished version of Attitude, I guess that makes Anarchy Rulz shitty DLC that you still had to pay for. It clearly has improvements over all the Acclaim wrestling games prior, so it was sort of nice to see them learning from each installment. But it’s only an improvement in the sense of Amazon going “okay, you can piss in a bottle *twice* a day now”. I can only recommend it if you are on a mission to play every game in the late 90s/early 2000s that used “xtreme kool letterz” flavor. — W. Quant
#175. KISS: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child
November 1, 2001
Tremor Entertainment
Take-Two Interactive
This game is what would happen if you wished for a boomer shooter on a monkey’s paw. It’s always tough to revisit first-person games from the single analog stick era, but this title in particular misses the mouse-and-keyboard controls of its PC counterpart. Navigating the levels feels clumsy, almost like you’re wearing giant, spiked football pads. The enemies are more annoying than challenging, the weapons are dull and same-y, and the level structure negates any sense of progress. There’s just not too much to like here, unless you’re super into KISS. Even then, their actual songs exist in the game only as Easter eggs. I guess that’s a small point in its favor. — K. Duggan
#174. Fur Fighters
July 13, 2000
Bizarre Creations
Acclaim Entertainment
Fur Fighters is another entry in the acclaimed genre of ‘Oh I didn’t expect a cartoon to do THAT!’ with such other visionaries as Conker, or the Naughty Bear series. In this outing, you can choose one of six Fur Fighers, each with their own little quirks and violent weapons, each talking in grunts and grumbles like Spiral Mountain rejects. Unfortunately, this game came out in the time before third person shooters on consoles had anything resembling good controls. You aim with the analog stick, then move with the face buttons. Which leads to clunky controls, both when shooting and when trying to platform. Players will eventually get used to it, though most probably aren’t getting paid to play it and will stop soon after pressing start. Instead of focusing on either the shooting or the platforming, they tried to have their cake and eat it too. Too bad nobody realized that the cake was undercooked and mushy. You’re gonna get us sick! — Gabe Porter
#173. Dragonriders: Chronicles of Pern
August 9, 2001
Ubi Studios UK
Ubisoft
Nearly two years into the final Sega console’s life cycle, almost to the day, the already drowning Dreamcast would get thrown a rescue line with Dragonriders: Chronicles of Pern. Unfortunately, Dragonriders arrived far too late to help the poor console as it had to speak to every single person in the mead hall and get an untrackable side quest from them before it could arrive to help at all.
Dragonriders is a fantasy RPG based on the Dragonriders of Pern novels created by Anne McCaffrey, who was the first woman to ever win the coveted (by sci-fi/fantasy writers, anyway) Hugo Award. With such a rich world to pull from, it has the ingredients to be really fun, but my god is it slow. This game rolls up there with Shenmue as RPGs of the era that are difficult to go back to. It has that gunk that all 90s PC RPGs had, which is actually pretty charming, but that also means it takes forever getting anything done. It also does that fantasy setting thing where you’re just bombarded with names and concepts that mean nothing to you, then you just get burdened with everyone and their mother and their dragon’s requests.
Best thing I got out of the game is you ride dragons, who are bonded to their riders through the mind, which means everything each of you think, the other knows. Which can go just as weird as you think it does and it immediately does when you wake up hungover and meet another dude whose dragon is in heat and horny on main, which leads to him stabbing a guy at a party. I wish I had the patience to see what the hell this thing was really all about, but I can only take so many unsynchronised lip-flaps that constantly show me everyone’s uncomfortably modeled teeth and it taking me 10 years to equip a simple knife in my inventory. — W. Quant
#172. Bang! Gunship Elite
December 22, 2000
RayLand Interactive
Red Storm Entertainment
Bang! Gunship Elite is a rather simple spaceship shooter. Players take control of a starfighter in first person and blast away at a variety of targets. That’s it. That’s the game. While the gameplay may not be compelling, the visuals are top-notch. I’ve always been a sucker for anything with a sci-fi theme mostly due to how absolutely gorgeous the cosmos are, and Bang! definitely captures the feeling of fighting in the shadow of a planet while the resplendent beauty of background star systems fills the cockpit window.
The controls are spot on and are much tighter when compared to other Dreamcast titles. The biggest problem with Bang! is the absurd difficulty. I’ll admit that there is a possibility that I could be utter crap at the game, but after a solid hour of trying, I could not get past the first level and that was with it set at easy. I was blasting ships out of the sky with ease and staying alive myself, but for some reason, the ship I was protecting would always eat shit. I want to like BGE. It has the looks and the feel but sets a high barrier to entry. Sure, I could spend the time to “get gud” but why do that when I can use my Dreamcast to talk to a virtual fish? — C. Dawson
#171. Mortal Kombat Gold
September 9, 1999
Midway Games
Midway Home Entertainment
Mortal Kombat Gold is a pseudo port of Mortal Kombat 4 which was only released in the arcade. Back then, I was a huge Mortal Kombat fan and would pore over each article I could find regarding the title. I was blown away by the graphics at the time and seeing my favorite characters in 3D.
Wistful nostalgia aside, MK Gold is a painfully average fighter. It lacks the nuance of technical fighters like Marvel vs Capcom and pales in comparison to other 3D fighters like Soulcalibur. It came at a time when many fighters were entering 3D territory and the format wasn’t fully developed. Sidestepping and making use of the full arena wasn’t a thing and the game was more of a 2.5D fighter than anything else. The weapon system might as well not have been in the game as it takes ages to pull out and a single hit will knock it from your hands. The AI isn’t consistent in difficulty and the penultimate fight against Goro, who has far too much health and deals absurd damage, is more frustrating than enjoyable.
It’s hard to recommend to anyone that isn’t a die-hard MK fan. Even fighting game enthusiasts should probably skip this one in favor of other titles. — C. Dawson
# 170. Sports Jam
July 20, 2001
WOW Entertainment
Agetec
A pre-Wii Sports collection of athletic feats in which Slappy, the evil dummy from the Goosebumps series, embraces his inner devil and forces you to compete in his timed quadathalon. No, I will not explain further.
Shit, editor says I have to. Ugh.
It’s an incredibly faithful port of what’s clearly an arcade sports title, but there is a distinct evil in this game. The sports games themselves are timed and pass extremely quickly, leaving you little to no time to even know what to do, which forced me on some Quixote-esque quest to actually finish any of them because why tell me ghosts exist if they can’t be busted? Beyond that evil, though, is if you play the Arcade mode, which presents the games as some sort of game show hosted by a man that looks uncomfortably shiny and hair gelled up to look like some sort of horns like he’s a glossed up ventriloquist dummy. That’s right; this dumb sports game has a Satan forcing you to dance for him four SPORTZBALLZ at a time which is metal as FUCK, bro. — W. Quant
