The SEGA Dreamcast is one of my all time favorite consoles. It was the first console of the last generation that I purchased. It’s kid of hard to believe that it has been ten years since it was launched. Eurogamer is running a retrospective on the little console that could (but didn’t.)

I liked the Dreamcast for a couple of reasons:

• Shenmue (I and II) – I played Shenmue I and II on the Dreamcast, and I even went through the added steps to continue my saved game from Shenmue I with the import copy of Shenmue II.
• Piracy – The Dreamcast started to teach me about the downside of piracy. I spent a log of time grabbing games from usenet, burning them, and then verifying that they would boot, but I didn’t spend a lot of time playing them. The lesson was that my time was better spent paying for and playing the games that I really wanted than downloading and burning games that didn’t.

In many ways I consider the Xbox and Xbox 360 to be decedents of the Dreamcast. To me the Xbox is more like a Dreamcast 1.5 (imagine a Dreamcast with DVD, and ethernet, and you’ll have an idea of what I’m getting at.) It doesn’t hurt that my number two Dreamcast game was only released on the Xbox for the US market.