RSS Feed
Twitter
Everyone knows I have two loves (besides my family): comic books and video games. More specifically older video games. I collect both comics and video games/systems and spend more time playing my SEGA Dreamcast than any other gaming system.
I can’t exactly explain why I love the system, maybe because it was the only system I purchased on the official launch date. September 1999 was the first month of my teaching career and I blew part of my first ever paycheck on the Dreamcast. My love for the Dreamcast today may be credited to the ability to easily download and play almost any game released for the system.
First off, I want everyone to know that I don’t encourage pirating software since I am a collector. I enjoy rummaging through garage sales and flea markets looking for more games to add to my collection, but recently a wave of Dreamcast games found their way to the internet as part of the Dream Resurrection project. A fellow who goes by the name of TuxTheWise has been playing with the files of Dreamcast games and rearranging them in ways that make these new downloadable games more optimized and sometimes better than the originals. If you have a Dreamcast and a few extra CDRs sitting around I recommend that you try some of his “optimized” games – trust me you will notice a difference.
Along the same lines of taking games and improving them, my friend Mozgus remixed some of the sound tracks of a couple games and he has optimized two popular games: Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Tony Hawk Professional Skater 2. Both of these releases have improved sound tracks and are optimized to load fast and play flawlessly.
The wife and I played Mozgus’ MVC2 Accurate Mix for almost three hours Tuesday night. The game played flawlessly; no lag and fast loading without the GDDrive grinding, just like Tux’s version. If I never played the game before I would have to say that the music Mozgus chose fit perfectly, as if it always belonged to this game. But… I am familiar with the crappy non-adrenaline inducing original music the game had, and I have to say his choices are far superior.
As for Tony Hawk, I never played the game that much before, so I sucked at it and did not participate in too many of the levels. Now, I did play Tux’s version just so I could compare the music and noticed that both games play well, not my ability to play but the Dreamcast’s ability to play them. As for the music I liked both versions, and did not play enough to tell which music fit the game more since, as I said earlier, I sucked at the game. I will admit that Mozgus’ musical selection seemed less “generic” and more upbeat, which I feel would help in a game like Tony Hawk 2.
So to summarize my opinions, I have to say that MVC2 played better than any other downloaded version (excluding Tux’s since they are equal) and the music was an awesome improvement. For TH2, the music seemed more upbeat and less generic even though I spent considerably less time playing this game. I recommend anyone who enjoys either of these game, or anyone who has a Dreamcast, needs to check out these games ASAP.
Mozgus has also replaced the sound tracks to Capcom vs SNK 2, Super Street Fighter 2X, and Street Fighter 3 Third Strike. These releases may not be optimized for better performance, but the sound tracks have been upgraded.
Again, I AM NOT PROMOTING PIRACY!
Instead I am recommending anyone who loves the Dreamcast as much as I do to at least check out the work TuxTheWise and Mozgus put into improving games that are no longer sold on the Dreamcast for the original company’s profit.
Check out TuxTheWise’s Dream Resurrection and make sure you read the info about each game to see what exactly he did to improve the original game.
Also check out Mozgus’ remixes and videos of them in action here:
