Shortly before Sega took down their United States servers for Phantasy Star Online (in 2003 I think), I went online to play it for the last time on my Dreamcast and also recorded my gameplay to help preserve the memory.

I recently ripped the VHS tape to my computer and uploaded the video to youtube. You can watch it on the game's page here or you can watch it below.

rcarter2 :
Rasenganfan2 :
alexanyways :
MegaRevolution1 :

Since you guys are fans of the Dreamcast, I figured you guys would appreciate something like this. Not expecting any of you to watch the entire video but you can skim through it using the chapters (available in the description of the youtube page) in order to get a taste of this nostalgia.

This is exactly why I was sad that my parents would not let me hook my Dreamcast online when I was a kid. I will never get to know the enjoyment of this one. I always wanted to play Phantasy Star Online for Dreamcast, but no point when I can't even get online Great video. (at least the pats that I skimmed through).

Memories this was my first online experience. This game contains such nostalgia to me. Thank you for posting this!

rcarter2 : I'm one of the very few people I know who was fortunate enough to experience the Online days of the Dreamcast. Other games that I use to play online for the Dreamcast include Alien Front Online (even had mic support), Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament and I think one of the NFL 2K games. I'm pretty sure there's another game that I played online, maybe it was Bomberman, can't remember though. The games I played online the most were Quake 3 Arena and Phantasy Star Online.

There actually are a few Dreamcast games you can still play online using user hosted servers, not really sure how many people play online these days but the DC still has a decent following. But since most people don't have dialup and since the Dreamcast only has a dialup port, you need to get a Broadband adapter for the Dreamcast to even consider trying it out and those things go for a ton, like $100+.

There were many games that had online content. For example (and this should excite you), Shenmue had a Passport disc that let you go online and get just tons and tons of information about literally every single character in the game, it was really cool. What was even cooler, Shenmue had leaderboards. The leaderboards basically ranked you based on your score in various things, such as your highscore in Hang-On, Space Harrier and your best time in the Forklift race.

I participated in the online scores a lot. There were tons of people who did worldwide and before the Shenmue servers were taken down, I got into the top 10 worldwide for Forklift and I think top 25 for Space Harrier. Those were some awesome days, I really wish I would've recorded more stuff back than.

redskiller76 : Yeah same here. The Dreamcast introduced me to online gaming and it wasn't until the Xbox 360 that I got back into it again. It was so ahead of its time.

PSO was my first mmorp!! It is nice  to watch the video and remember... I forgot about the dragon!

I also played Quake on DC, well more than playing I would run around getting lost and not knowing what I was doing...I have never been good with shooting games.

This is the problem with console MMOs... server goes down and it's all over, you can't get anything out of the game anymore. At least with PC ones, people can make their own fan servers to run the game even past when the official ones are no more.

My god. The game was great and still somewhat play it today (offline though). Still having trouble in the third stage with my hunter (purple/robot) but eh... Never have I though played online so it's nice to see a vid from those days.
BTW, heard about that PSO is making a new one soon.

I love that this thread is sparking some great DC memories

Leezte : PSO was definitely my first MMORPG and really the only MMORPG I've ever got into. I would have gotten into more MMORPGs but I've been just too busy over the past few years. The days of the Dreamcast was when I was a kid and still had a lot of free time.

superdan : I think Sega pulled the plug on it in 2002 but there have been a lot of people since who have helped keep it alive in many ways.

Crazy Li : Refer to what I said to rcarter2. It is possible to play PSO and a few other DC games still using fan servers.

becerra95 : You would've been what, 8 during the online days of the Dreamcast? Yeah there's a Phantasy Star Online 2 coming out soon (PSO2 not PSO part 2). It'll only be for the PC and Vita.

Yeah, I was definitely aware of Shenmue online. I badly wanted to try it out but never did. It sucks that one was flat out closed down. I used to hear rumors of reopening Shenmue online to see what the reaction would be. They supposedly wanted to see the reaction to help their decision on Shenmue III. But I guess that was just one more un-lived rumor  

rcarter2 : I actually found a video of someone who captured the Overall rank, I placed 232:


Fast forward to 1:14. I honestly had no idea my overall rank was that high. I'm still more proud of my Space Harrier and Forklift rank but I can't seem to find those anywhere

Davideo7 : Oh wow I totally missed that... surprising they were able to pull that off for a console game though. It seems a lot easier to fan server a PC game. How do you even run the server off a console?

Crazy Li : The Dreamcast is probably the easiest system to mod. I've never played any DC games online using a fan server so I wouldn't know how they do it but I'm sure it's not hard to do based on how easy the Dreamcast is to mod. You don't even need to hard mod your Dreamcast to play homebrew, roms and burnt games - in fact, some of the burnt games self boot.

Thanks for the time capsule, David. If only Sega had waited another year or 2 to release the dream cast...

Rasenganfan2 : yeah it was just too far ahead of its time, some people just weren't ready for it.

In other news, I just got a Broadband Adapter for my Dreamcast a few weeks ago (they're like $150+ though). I got online with it using Phantasy Star Online and I connected to a user hosted server. There's actually a lot of people who still play it online and there's a community that puts together events on when they all meet to play online together. I thought that was pretty cool. If I ever join them on a few missions, I'll have to record that as well.