On the thread subject, I'm not sure I actually had ten Dreamcast games. There were a few I never got around to picking up – Rez, JSR and Ikaruga for instance – and I wasn't much of a fighting game fan, so my library has some huge gaps in it.
As a result, there are only eight games I have particularly fond memories of playing on the machine itself, though some of those come with pretty big caveats around their lack of modern design conventions.
Skies of Arcadia is the only one that unquestionably holds up. Its art style hasn't aged as badly as most of these, but the music and menu-driven, turn-based combat are timeless. The bright blue skies and optimistic, heroic characters and story still feel like outliers in the JRPG space, especially after the gritty industrial aesthetic FFVII brought in. The only real problem is its aggressive random battle schedule, though that may also be responsible for its straightforward difficulty curve.
Shenmue is still reasonably solid, based on my time with the HD remaster at least, and its commitment to realism still impresses me more than it frustrates. The controls are, however, awful – and despite Yu Suzuki's fighting-game pedigree, the combat is an exercise in frustration more often than not, with unblockable enemy attacks that will reliably interrupt Ryo's combos.
Power Stone was great and honestly still holds up pretty well. I never gelled with the sequel's four-player mode and shifting battle maps, but my brothers and I taking turns jumping into the air and RT-kicking our way across Londo until someone made contact was endlessly amusing to us.
Headhunter, as mentioned above, is my all-time candidate for "greater than the sum of its parts". Dodgy animation, clunky controls, Jack Wade's laughable budget-Clint-Eastwood voice… it shouldn't have worked, but a compelling Robocop-lite story and soaring musical score really elevated it.
The lack of a ChuChu Rocket remake/remaster in this era of online gaming is definitely a staggering oversight by someone, somewhere. A hundred-player, Tetris 99-style battle royale version seems like a no-brainer.
Crazy Taxi has aged pretty poorly: it's utter chaos, with twitchy controls and over-excited physics, and in most modern incarnations lacks the soundtrack that introduced me to an all-time favourite band. But pushing the time limit just a few more seconds to pick up another fare, finding the right angle to shortcut off an overpass; when it clicked together it was tremendous fun.
Metropolis: Street Racer was always tougher than it should have been, for my money; the karma system was interesting but often got in the way of racing. (I don't know if PGR ever figured that one out, either.) I always have fond memories of unlocking my parents' car in the game and customizing it with their numberplate though, even if it never did manage to take a top time around San Francisco.
House of the Dead 2 was my first – and only? – home lightgun game. I don't know how my parents were okay with its gouts of gore and disgusting creature design (especially with our ten? year-old brother in the room), but we played enough of it to see the ending at least a couple of times, which would have been unheard of in the arcade (without a few hundred pound coins anyway).
