/vr/ - Retro Games

Fucking uncomfortable

The Dreamcast controller and memory card were bad.

Let's start with the good. The controller is certainly comfortable. It's large, all the buttons are easy to reach, nice triggers and good grips. The analog stick is highly responsive. The VMU screen is occasionally useful, like in Resident Evil. It's nice that you can transfer saves between VMUs just by connecting them to each other.

Most glaringly, there is a severe deficit of buttons. The complete lack of a second analog stick means that the camera in 3D Dreamcast games consistently suffers. Some games map the camera controls to the triggers (Sonic Adventure) or d-pad (Legacy of Kain), but that still limits inputs since you can't look up or down, which is incredibly limiting. Ports of shooters such as Quake or Half Life suffered massively. Compare the Dualshock and it's a simple step backwards. It's in fact a step backwards from Sega's own Saturn 3D controller, since it's also lacking the C and Z buttons. With a console as rich in fighting games as the Dreamcast, it seems like a pretty bizarre decision to remove these buttons.

The analog stick is not comfortable to use for very long. While raised into a comfortable position, the hard plastic that it's made from does not have the grip that the sticks on a Dualshock do. Or again, you can compare the Saturn 3D controller. The d-pad is also mediocre and too floaty.

The VMUs are severely underutilized. 90% of games just display the game's title on the screen, and that's all for the whole game. The minigames that you could use on them were worthless, They drain batteries so quickly that it's not worth replacing them. Worst of all, the capacity was completely pathetic; 200 blocks of 128KB, same as was insufficient on the PS1 4 years prior. Except that's not the full capacity - there are actually 241 usable blocks, with the surplus being arbitrarily disabled.

All in all, it seems like the Dreamcast controller and its VMUs were more about novelty than functionality.