The Sega Dreamcast is hailed by legions as the best videogame system ever created. Gaming fans new and old revered Sega’s final foray into the competitive market of console gaming as their greatest achievement yet. The Dreamcast was more than just a gaming console – it represented a defiant protest of century-old Nintendo, a last stand against the staying power of Sony, and stood out as the ideological opposite of the soulless, ball-less piece of three-headed Hydra shit Microsoft calls an Xbox.

The Sega Dreamcast had the best repertoire of first- and third-party games of any console, the first mainstream integration of online play, and clear, beautiful graphics. Many games boasted 60 frames per second (FPS), making racing games and shooters like Unreal Tournament very exciting, and leading many to wonder, “Wait how many FPS was it before?”

Dreamcast even had a web browser (with an upgraded 2.0 version!) so young children, who didn’t yet know how to delete their browser histories, could safely download pornography without fear of parental retribution – right on their very own standard-definition TVs!

Behold, The Legendary Sega Dreamcast

To the average mouth breathing redditor, this looks like your average videogame console with a sexy Dreamcast logo on it. But what would you know? Part of the Dreamcast’s charm is in its subtlety. The Dreamcast had a little orange light that, when the system powered on, glowed bright orange and inspired the original design scheme used by the mysterious and fabled Elf Wax Times publication which – according to legend – reigned supreme for a better part of the previous decade. But who knows for sure? The system advances through several stages of power until its fans kick on and Phantasy Star Online bounces to life. Oh yeah, but if your VMU battery is dead, the VMU screen will appear faded, and Dreamcast itself will scream at you by emitting a long, ear-piercing tone from a tiny speaker built into the console. This is a gentle reminder to change your VMU battery. The tone gets longer based on how dead the battery is. You change it because you do as you’re told, and you don’t want to hear that noise anymore. Sega thought of everything!

What’s a VMU battery?

Upon closer inspection, the most observant of retards may notice there is a tiny screen on board the Dreamcast controller, which was revolutionary at the time. Dreamcast controllers also feature two analog triggers that fit nicely in the hands, like dual-wielded pistols with clitorises for triggers. Useful as a heads up display, the removable memory device known as a VMU (Visual Memory Unit) powers the tiny screen, which changed to fit whatever needs game developers chose for it. Oftentimes it displayed ammunition data, hit points or even jokes and small bits of game lore. Admittedly, it sounds kind of gimmicky. Fortunately, there’s more to it than that. You could download games onto that bitch, straight off your Dreamcast game discs, then jerk it out and play it like a fucking GameBoy. No shit. Look:

Sega just didn’t give a fuck. In the game Sonic Adventure, you collected Chao eggs. You can load eggs – or a hatched chao – into your VMU and then when you go to school, or work – where you no doubt suffer as a result of being apart from the Dreamcast – you can play Chao Adventure on the VMU, leveling your Chao’s stats to make him stronger for when you load him back into Sonic Adventure. Now that’s metagaming!

PowerStone contained three games available for download. There were fighting games, gun games and puzzles. There are a bunch more but that’s all I can remember off the top of my head. As a kid, I worked for my own videogame (and weed) money, so I didn’t have every game. Sorry, cunt.

If the VMU had anything going against it, it was the watch battery in the back that’s always dying, trying to meet the demands of all the awesomeness inside our VMU. When you needed a new one, you had to walk up to some sad person at Wal-Mart who acted like he was doing you this unspoken favor of constantly supplying you with these flat, quarter-sized watch batteries. It’s not opium, Rajiv. It’s just a fucking battery. I don’t remember what they cost.

Probably the coolest thing about the Dreamcast was just owning a god damn Dreamcast.

Tell you what, that’s the end of this game review, and there’s no looking back now. Now fire up your Dreamcasts and put on Slave Zero.

Masturbate, don’t procreate.