Dreamcast-Talk.com

Hi all! Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I would like to know the exact licensed NTSC-U games that were completed but never officially saw a release during the Dreamcast's lifespan. Anyone have an up to date accurate list?

Regards,
Alex

You only want completed games? That would be a very short list considering the only one is Propeller Arena. Oh and you might count Dee Dee Planet which wasn't released because of a game breaking bug. If you're asking for ALL unreleased games then Sega Retro has one but it's not complete. Unseen64 is a good resource as well. It would be very hard to compile a complete list as I'm positive there were many games in development that no one even knows about. There are some that are barely mentioned online aside from brief mentions in old forum posts. I have a YouTube series on cancelled Dreamcast games so I'm very experienced with trying to find cancelled games and info about them. I've actually found games on the archived developers or publishers website that aren't mentioned anywhere else online. It's possible they might have been in video game magazines at one point.

pcwzrd13 wrote:I have a YouTube series on cancelled Dreamcast games so I'm very experienced with trying to find cancelled games and info about them. I've actually found games on the archived developers or publishers website that aren't mentioned anywhere else online. It's possible they might have been in video game magazines at one point.

Yup. I enjoyed that series, and did in fact learn a thing or two I didn't know from them.

Which at this point is not an easy task any more... lol

krssn wrote:Yup. I enjoyed that series, and did in fact learn a thing or two I didn't know from them.

Which at this point is not an easy task any more... lol

Happy to hear you're enjoying it! It might be a bit ambitious but I would like to eventually cover every cancelled Dreamcast game. Problem is, many games are little more than just a title. One game that comes to mind is an MMO that was in development by Sega very late in the Dreamcast's life. I don't remember the name of it but the the only things known about it are the title and genre. It's hard to make a video about that.

Wasnt Half-Life 100% too, but due to the load times, Valve cancelled the release?

Cornerb0y wrote:Wasnt Half-Life 100% too, but due to the load times, Valve cancelled the release?

What it was it it ended up suffering at least 2 different delays. Originally it was supposed to come out in Q4 of 2000, then it was delayed to March of 2001. Then afterwards it was supposed to be released by June of 2001 with a mail order standalone multiplayer including Team Fortress 1.5 (Classic) and an earlier build of Counter Strike by Q2 of 2001. By around early spring the publishers of Half Life at the time, Sierra Online, ended up pulling the plug after Sega announcement of pulling out of 1st party and into the 3rd party.

However the game had long load times which happened more frequently than the PC original and there were in general like 2-3 seconds shorter due to the limited memory that the Dreamcast had. This was coming from the time where PC games that took like 20-35 seconds to load was expected due to the CPU processing power at the time. It was also superiorly better than the PS2 since that can't apply bilinear filtering, nor texture compression. The framerate was also all over the place since the game ran on the WinCE libraries from what I can gather which I might be completely wrong about. Also this was not mentioned all that much but DC-UK did end up reviewing it and did not report the save/load game memory management issue that plagued the beta we got back in 2003.

I can not say that much about the performance since I had a hacked version which got rid of a lot of fluff which sped up the load time by like 5-7 seconds while sacrificing the iso boot order and frame rate. Another member on this site who comes here fairly often, Anthony817, had the near original gdi dump of the game hosted out there in the internet somewhere, but I am not naming the site in general because that would be considered online piracy.

pcwzrd13 wrote:You only want completed games? That would be a very short list considering the only one is Propeller Arena. Oh and you might count Dee Dee Planet which wasn't released because of a game breaking bug. If you're asking for ALL unreleased games then Sega Retro has one but it's not complete. Unseen64 is a good resource as well. It would be very hard to compile a complete list as I'm positive there were many games in development that no one even knows about. There are some that are barely mentioned online aside from brief mentions in old forum posts. I have a YouTube series on cancelled Dreamcast games so I'm very experienced with trying to find cancelled games and info about them. I've actually found games on the archived developers or publishers website that aren't mentioned anywhere else online. It's possible they might have been in video game magazines at one point.

Oh wow! So technically Propeller Arena and Dee Dee Planet were they only complete unreleased games for NA?

I remember seeing other roms floating around claiming to be complete? Games like...

- Half-Life
- Half-Life Blueshift
- Toe Jam and Earl 3 Mission to Earth
- Geist Force
- PBA Tour Bowling 2001
- Hell Gate
- The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas

Any news on these above? **Also, what is your channel on Youtube? Would love to check it out and support by liking and subscribing

It depends on your definition of "complete".

Half Life still needed a lot of optimization and suffers from slowdown in places, long load times, and a glitch that causes save files to increase in size every time you save.

ToeJam and Earl was maybe about 75% complete. The game is playable for the first nine levels or so with some slowdown in places but will eventually crash.

Geist Force wasn't even close to completion; the levels are all there but it suffers from a lot of slowdown, it crashes very frequently, and a lot of things are missing (enemies, textures, a menu, etc.).

PBA Bowling actually might be complete but I'm not sure; I haven't playing much of it.

Hellgate made it to a beta stage and while most of the game is there, it lacks polish and is quite buggy (I haven't actually played this one).

The Flintstones is hard to tell because it's really just a horrible game. My guess is that it's not quite complete though as it has slowdown in quite a few places, especially when shooting enemies. It could also use a lot more polish.

My YouTube channel is in my signature below. The Games That Never Were is the series about cancelled Dreamcast games.

I don't think The Flintstones is that bad a game. Single player plays well, it's just rough around the edges (somewhat loose controls and acceleration needs to be balanced). It's multiplayer that's very hard to play. I'd even wager that, since this is a kart racer, the state of multiplayer may have been a cause for the cancellation. Complete speculation though.

pcwzrd13 wrote:It depends on your definition of "complete".

Half Life still needed a lot of optimization and suffers from slowdown in places, long load times, and a glitch that causes save files to increase in size every time you save.

ToeJam and Earl was maybe about 75% complete. The game is playable for the first nine levels or so with some slowdown in places but will eventually crash.

Geist Force wasn't even close to completion; the levels are all there but it suffers from a lot of slowdown, it crashes very frequently, and a lot of things are missing (enemies, textures, a menu, etc.).

PBA Bowling actually might be complete but I'm not sure; I haven't playing much of it.

Hellgate made it to a beta stage and while most of the game is there, it lacks polish and is quite buggy (I haven't actually played this one).

The Flintstones is hard to tell because it's really just a horrible game. My guess is that it's not quite complete though as it has slowdown in quite a few places, especially when shooting enemies. It could also use a lot more polish.

My YouTube channel is in my signature below. The Games That Never Were is the series about cancelled Dreamcast games.

Subscribed! Cheers my friend and appreciate all the help!

Ah the dreaded "definition" of things. I am quite the purist, so I would want to know what officially complete games i.e. fully functional and ready to release titles there were for NA. So from what I can hear only Propeller Arena and Dee Dee fit that bill?

Just to play devils advocate... Is there a list you would be able to recommend that would be classified as "playable unreleased games?" Even if they include slowdown etc? So not 100% complete persay...