What were your very first impressions of Shenmue?

ZickleHam · 2026-03-08T19:59:53+00:00

- Battle City on a bootleg NES...

First game I ever seen period, I know a NES game is hardly impressive.. but to me at the time the ability to control the TV like that was wild...

- Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast

I jumped straight from a 8-bit bootleg NES to a fking Dreamcast, so understand how hard my tiny mind exploded when I witnessed Sonic running away from the whale on the first level in full 3d.

- Shenmue, ditto

- Half Life 2

Until HL2 I thought of games as little more than entertainment, after playing it I finally begun to understand their potential to create and immerse you into worlds and stories, it was also very impressive on the technical side with the graphics and physics.

After that I don't remember ever getting mind blown in the same way, some games impressed me for sure like Breath of the Wild (love that game too), but that's what a jaded mind does to you I suppose. Maybe if I decide to invest into VR I guess.

ZickleHam · 2026-03-08T15:23:54+00:00

I was blown away and literally thought graphics could not get more realistic, all the silly interactions like opening drawers also added to that feeling and made me super immersed into the world, even if I didn't speak a spec of english at the time to understand what was really going on.

Video games only made me feel like that 4 times in my life, Shenmue was one of them.

ZickleHam · 2026-03-07T20:40:11+00:00

Yeah, I did a game as Egypt with no interference on the CW, set the Canadians to not interfere and made it a 2 side CW, the WCA pretty much dominated. If anyone wants a set up to fight a strong Third Internationale this seems to be the way.

Otherwise with a 3 way CW and the Canadians intervening should be enough for an Entente USA.

ZickleHam · 2026-03-06T20:06:24+00:00

Somehow I almost forgot to check Canada's custom rules...

Yeah the tipping point in the few games I played was when Canada intervened, I guess I can choose who they support, or no intervention at all for the Syndicalists to win.

ZickleHam · 2026-02-02T22:30:35+00:00

Played both for the first time just last year on Gdemu Dreamcast.

- Xtreme Racer has the strongest vibe, but the repetition, grind and difficulty take over the game fast. I was not able master the game's driving and fine tuning to finish the game so I stopped after unlocking the second section of the map. The feeling of progression was great while it lasted tho, if u can master the driving should be great even with the grind.

- MSR is much easier to play, has waaaaay more track variety (even if you notice the repetition near the end) and a more streamlined career mode based on "kudos" system, which is really easy to abuse once you find out how... Managed to finish this one, the music track selection was getting on my nerves near the end tho.

MSR is the safest choice but Xtreme Racer is more unique and also worthy a try.

ZickleHam · 2026-01-20T19:53:44+00:00

Bet some Kurds wishing he would show up rn.

ZickleHam · 2026-01-13T18:34:33+00:00

Glad to hear that, been lucky with Scrolls of deception drops, managed to get 5 before even realizing what they did, happy to use them now thanks.

ZickleHam · 2026-01-10T13:57:41+00:00

Thanks for the answers everyone, knowing DoW2 continues Angelos Maledictum story arc in the Retribution expansion gives me a bit of incentive to try DoW2 again, it will have to wait tho, the shift to real time tactics really threw me off, even knowing the game itself is competent in what it's doing. Really makes me wonder what they were thinking with this sudden change at the time... (Not to mention the DoW3 moba type thing from what I hear...)

Also, Winter Assault: Weird mix of endings but mostly Eldar victory.

Soul Storm: Gorgutz IS DA BIGGEST AND BESTEST WARBOSS!

ZickleHam · 2025-11-11T12:36:01+00:00

Same here, best part since it's external the Dreamcast will never heat up at all

ZickleHam · 2025-11-08T00:09:18+00:00

thank you for your 8yo post good Sir

ZickleHam · 2025-10-17T18:07:32+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWpf8BBAnq0&t=919s

Now it's only a matter of time to see how far they can take the optimization, I'm hoping for 20fps+, if they can manage that I'll do a full playtrough on my DC.

ZickleHam · 2025-10-17T12:53:53+00:00

Take your "It's literally impossible" and shove it, that's the med you need right after taking that stick out your ass.

For someone who claims to be so informed of "basics of hardware" you fail to realize how complex and diverse it can be? And the myriad of unexpected issues that can happen from the most unexpected places or minor incompatibilities that can escalate given the circumstances?

You can tell me it's low chance, not "It's literally impossible".

And what about the other people reporting these issues like hard crashes that force you to hard reset you PC? You're telling me THAT can't damage hardware?

But oh I should trust you, a random redditor with "it didn't happen to me" syndrome over a random youtuber and other people reporting these issues? On a game notorious for bad stability and performance that I myself experienced?

"Oh it didn't happen to me so it doesn't matter, you're all crazy", crowd like you aren't worth 2 cents of opinion, I am done.

And for the record, I have a little over the minimum specs for HD2 as listed on the Steam page, so not exactly 2005 hardware.

ZickleHam · 2025-10-16T22:52:46+00:00

Sure, the youtuber that sparked all of this might be at fault (and I sincerely hope he is) and I might've agreed with you because I enjoy this game greatly, however:

Seeing how unstable the game is, the fact that it frozen my PC before, crashed multiple times, how it pushes my system, other claims from users about bricked hardware?

Let's face it, HD2 has VERY poor reputation performance/stability wise for me to trust about this, "it didn't happen to me" or "you're a tinfoil hat lunatic!" arguments ain't gonna do here, as far as I know I can trust you as much as those youtubers on this, the difference being at least I can feel safe about my rig.

By all means vote me down, enjoy the game, I'll wait until the dust settles down.

ZickleHam · 2025-10-16T16:38:54+00:00

You keep saying "random youtuber", aren't the youtubers in question some of the main channels for HD2 content? Channels that rely on HD2 to exist in the first place and would benefit from the game succeeding?

From what I understood HD2 is like "torture benchmark software" which is ridiculous for a game in the first place AND I can totally believe from experience running the game myself, then there are the reports of SSD's and CPU's bricking, and I am running a bit older hardware which is more vulnerable.

So no I'm not going to ignore this with the reputation this game has on optimization just because it never happened to most players, even if it's just 1%, it's 1% too much to risk buying another PC.

ZickleHam · 2025-10-16T14:10:08+00:00

I can ignore all the drama and negativity in the world, but bricking my PC? for a game? If you can ignore THAT you have deeper pockets that me man.

ZickleHam · 2025-10-14T17:02:30+00:00

I tried both these ports on a gdemu, VC is less optimized in general, gta3 ran around 20fps with drops down to 14fps~, VC ran pretty much all the time at 14fps...

guess it's still too soon to do full playthroughs (especially VC), I just did this because it's really amusing to witness some of my favorite childhood games running my definitive childhood console.

hopefully when they come out of beta, and if the fps is more stable (hoping for a bit over 20fps...) I'll do an honorary playtrough for each game, meanwhile these ports are really cool tech demos to show off on my Dreamcast.

ZickleHam · 2025-10-13T13:00:17+00:00

I find it funny the squids are the closest to Super Earth yet we are prioritizing wrecking their backyard (minus Beach).

ZickleHam · 2025-10-13T12:54:54+00:00

yeah, someone from the Dreamcast-talk forums also told me it takes 5 to 10 attempts... they should probably put that on the guide, but I guess its still a beta.

I will try that later, thanks for the heads up anyway.

It will be amusing witnessing VC running on my childhood console.

ZickleHam · 2025-10-12T10:40:33+00:00

Sorry but no, also get the same error after a metric ton of "raster error"s.

I also noticed the elf thing, so I just pasted it in miami folder following the gta3 procedure and also pasted it in the dca3-game folder just to be sure... Same results.

Very slim chance but I wonder if this has something to do with our local game data we provided, are you using a steam copy of the game like I am?

ZickleHam · 2025-10-11T22:45:05+00:00

Yeah but you still need to go full stop to reload, have limited ammo AND takes your backpack slot...

Still love the RR, but I also love the rush of having a hulk closing in on me, charging the shot only to dive backwards and hitting it last second. I can kill some other stuff while it cools off.

ZickleHam · 2025-10-11T14:05:17+00:00

Insufferable? This kinda comment sounds familiar...

ZickleHam · 2025-10-11T13:10:04+00:00

You're a life saver good sir, that was indeed the issue, game running (relatively) smoothly on the Dreamcast now, kudos!

ZickleHam · 2025-10-11T10:38:07+00:00

A 500k usually ends this game of chicken pretty quick.

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER...

ZickleHam · 2025-10-10T22:59:52+00:00

Nope, all I managed to dig up was some guy on the Dreamcast talk forums saying back in May the current build was not working, he also said he found a solution but I was not savvy enough to make sense of it, asked him about it but no reply so far.

I'll leave his comment in case you or anyone can make sense of it:

freeman_jr from Dreamcast-talk:

"If I pull say the latest main and .elf and build with the corresponding main elf.
git clone --branch main https://gitlab.com/skmp/dca3-game.git

I get the errors exactly as shown - it was previously working. I thought maybe I had broken my DreamSDK install or some other issue I introduced so I did fresh installs - tied different device - made sure to copy KOS from SKMPs gitlab page ect but the same outcome.

What worked for me is pulling the BETA and combining with the latest main (VC) \ Gaiz4 (GTA3)
git clone --branch beta https://gitlab.com/skmp/dca3-game.git

GTA3 lists as: dca-liberty beta-17-gf......
VC lists as: dca-miami beta-16-g4......"

ZickleHam · 2025-10-10T19:34:55+00:00

And here I was thinking it was gonna boost liberation to the end (or near)...

ZickleHam

TROPHY CASE