On Sega, birthdays and hedgehogs

9/9/99 was a special day for any western Sega fan: The Dreamcast was launched in the states. After four years of development and many obstacles left behind Sega was starting its comeback, putting their hopes on a new console and, while at it, starting the 128 bits era.

As probably most of you already know, the Dreamcast wasn’t as successful as Sega expected (mostly due to their own screw ups) and the white fun machine would be pulled off production just two years after (screwing the fans once more).

Fortunately for me, I had a Dreamcast while it lasted, so I was able to enjoy classics like Soul Calibur, Power Stone, Shenmue, Sonic Adventure, Phantasy Star Online, Ikaruga and many more firsthand. Heck, now that I think of it, I was playing online games in a home console back in the year 2000. One day I’ll talk about this console, I have very fond memories of it.

For the time being, Happy Birthday to you Dreamcast! :D

In other, pseudo-related news, Sega and BioWare have published a developer diary video about Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. Yes, BioWare. Yes, Sonic. And yes, a RPG for the Nintendo DS. Here’s the video for those who haven’t seen it yet:

In my humble opinion, it looks good. As a few colleagues already pointed out, it remains to be seen how the Sonic character cast and story plot fare for a role-playing game, but I’ll give them the benefit of doubt at least.

Regarding the video, the fact that one of the developers states that the game is pretty much finished but not yet up to BioWare’s standards talks quite some about who’s the project boss, doesn’t it?

Only time will tell I guess, September 30 isn’t that far away.