It may come as no shock to you that Wave Game Studios, the guys who’ve been publishing Dreamcast games solidly for the past couple of years recently added Driving Strikers to their release slate for 2023. The game has now out and about in the wild with jewel case NTSC / NTSC-J and European style artwork and runs you around £25 directly from their website.
What you may however be pleased to find out, the PAL ‘blue case’ version which has long been rumoured and fitting in line with previous Wave releases is also on its way in Q3 2023. This edition along with a newly added limited edition jewel case variant will come with a slip sleeve, music CD and digital download costing around £40 (the PAL blue case version is £50). In addition to this, should you have a PAL box laying about, there’s an option to just purchase the PAL ‘upgrade kit’ for a very reasonable £1.99.
Another take away from all this blue case excitement is the possibility of reprints of past releases which Wave have offered in this packaging before like Shadow Gangs, Postal and Intrepid Izzy giving fans another chance to grab these rather illusive and special editions of the games, should the demand allow for it. You can add yourself to the waiting list for Shadow Gangs currently on the order page over at http://www.wavegamestudios.com .
One would hope that Yeah Yeah Beebiss II and Xenocider will be considered for this treatment too, or at the very least, PAL upgrade kits!
First off, let’s just get this out of the way; Merry Christmas to all the readers and Dreamcast fans, I hope your 2021 holiday has been filled with the excitement and free-of-drama you wanted.
Let’s catch up on some of the latest Dreamcast news doing the rounds. First up is a new game! We’ll admit, this sort of passed us by but there’s a new title called Driving Strikers coming to the Dreamcast in the near future. This game is quite unique for the console as it’s the first driving and football hybrid we’ve seen on Sega’s machine. If you imagine Rocket League parred back to run on an 128 bit system from 1998, you’re probably on the right lines. There was a recent Christmas demo that was played and recorded for YouTube by Freakdave which you can view here :
Perhaps one of the most innovative independent games to be developed for the console, it shows a tonne of promise, it actually reminds me of Neverball with it’s creative inspiration drawn from an existing franchise. Let’s hope this one gets picked up for release in the next year or so.
Next up is Shadow Gangs, this promising Shinobi style adventure has taken to Kickstarter in need of a rather huge goal to make it a reality on the Dreamcast. The developer had shown off some recently added stretch goal goodness in the form of the PAL blue plastic box, this stretch goal starts at a whopping £100. It does look rather spiffing though. At this time, Shadow Gangs is just over £10,000 of it’s £139,999 (!) goal.
Next up is Andro Dunos 1 + 2. This pair of shooters may very well have escaped your attention since the last batch of Pixelheart releases flooded the market but these two games have been held back until the early part of 2022, probably marking the first two releases of the year. You can order these two as well as the previous JoshProd / Pixelheart back catalogue by clicking below :
Next up is Watermelon! Remember them? The guys that brought you Pier Solar are back to give you Paprium for the Dreamcast (as well as a host of new systems too) which has now been fully funded, this has been offered in the attention to detail packaging you have come to expect from Watermelon with Euro, USA and Japan style box art being offered as well as a reprint of Pier Solar which has largely been unavailable for a number of years now. Let’s hope that the rocky 5 or so years that hit Watermelon is over and normal service can resume. You should be able to order the Dreamcast releases from Watermelon’s home page.
Did you know that two other Dreamcast games were released in this quarter? Well, Non Casual Encounter and Ghoul Grind – Night Of The Necromancer are both doing the rounds now, both have a very low print run so if you’re planning on getting a copy, now would be the time. I made a video unboxing both of these cool games and the information of where to order them in in the video bio section :
Last up for this round is my own show that I have created, ‘Locked Out Of Europe’ – being a UK Dreamcast collector, there’s loads of games that were never released here and I want to cover some of them on YouTube to see how easy they are to play and obtain today, I’ve started with Baldr Force EXE as I received this for Christmas this year, but I have hundreds of games I would like to cover, you’ll have to excuse the video issues, my equipment wasn’t playing nicely but this is just the start and I aim to improve over time, exposing games for our favourite system, join me on the journey!
Dreamcast Today 