"It's thinking."

Creepy eye logo aside, I didn't know what to expect from Sega's new console after the Saturn, but I swear I'm probably still recovering from the sleep deprivation that more than a few of its titles had caused me.

Powerstone was the first game that I and my friends had picked up for the Dreamcast. We just dove into it after peeling it out from the clear, crinkly plastic. Instructions? Manual? That thing with pages? You can go ahead and read it while I hit you with my rocket launcher, punk. Here, eat some table with that while you're at it!

Who were these people? Who cares? Let's get fighting!

The chaos was a lot more fun to play through that way, with each new, wall-plastering move, getting everyone asking the question of how that was done. We had no idea if there were actually movesets (which was fine for a button masher like me), or even how to kick and throw half of the props that were in our way, or which characters did what. So we picked characters based on who looked the coolest along with a little anime know-how instead.

At first, a lot of us just charged at each other expecting some kind of 3D Street Fighter thing with wide open spaces or movesets until someone threw a chair in someone's face. Things went downhill from there (in a good way), especially with the Powerstones.

Skies of Arcadia is also one of my favorite RPGs on any system and I wished that the Dreamcast had more to pick from. Piracy in the skies, flying ships, your own pirate base, and going as far as the sky would let you go in seeking out those discoveries made the crazy encounter rate bearable. Upgrading your ship so that it could pick on much larger vessels at will was also a major plus. Besides, we were the good guys!

Shenmue blended together adventure gaming and Virtua Fighter into a fine adventure game that was a lot better handled than Blue Stinger (which I still enjoyed despite the godawful camera and hokey story). Doing jobs around the city was a much better career choice over another session of rat killing in some dank dungeon, and the QTEs made the scripted action sets interesting...if not occasionally frustrating.

As the PS2 and the Xbox came out, the Dreamcast's library of titles began to wane towards the end. There were still a few gems that came out at this time, however, in much the same way that the Saturn had Shining Force III and Panzer Dragoon Saga. A port of SNK's The Last Blade 2 and a Diablo-esque dungeon crawler, Record of Lodoss War (based on the anime series), had managed to hit the shelves before it was all over.

Record of Lodoss War's world was pretty open, making it ridiculously easy to get mobbed and killed within seconds of stepping into the wrong area.

By then, we all saw what was happening and were afraid that it would end up as the Saturn. The momentum that its rivals hit the holiday season with, the scarcity of the PS2s...these were omens of things to come. And then Sega pulled the plug.

There were a lot of reasons for what happened at the end, but I thought it was a fantastic console despite everything else. I could always count on the Dreamcast to offer something with enough of a strange twist to be unique, like Tech Romancer's colossus-busting battles.

Even today, the Dreamcast enjoys an unexpected amount of support from the homebrew crowd and a few independent developers continue to plug away in creating titles for the fans. ScummVM, an app supporting older adventure titles, has also opened it up to adventure classics such as Under a Steel Sky or the first Broken Sword.

It's still hooked up alongside the PS3 and the Xbox 360 over here and even though it doesn't get as much play nowadays, powering it up and hearing the telltale drip drip of the logo just before dipping into a classic never gets old.