Dear Future Gamer,

Right, I've had enough of this. Okay, the Saturn wasn't a success, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the games. "Popular" does not equal "good." Sega screwed up the marketing (yet again - 32X, anyone?) and Sony buried the machine, but some of the games were excellent.

"Anon," firing out snide comments about the Saturn line-up (FG21, "All hail Sony") - it may interest you to know that Tomb Raider came out first on the Saturn. And I'll bet you've never even owned a Saturn if the only games you can cite are Nights and the Sonic series. What about Panzer Dragoon Saga and (possibly the finest shoot-'em-up in the world) Radiant Silvergun? Top-quality, critically acclaimed games released right at the end of the console's life, even if they vastly undersold.

Sega have tried to make Dreamcast game development as easy as possible - for example, unlike with the Saturn, PC ports are relatively simple. And as the PC is the halfway house for a huge number of PlayStation conversions (as "Anon" is so hot on popular games, let's use the Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy series as examples) there's absolutely no reason why the comparatively inexpensive extra step of a Dreamcast release couldn't be possible. Also, let's not forget that Sega's widely used Naomi arcade board isn't exactly a million miles away from DC architecture. And what about the official Saturn emulator? Or original games like Shenmue? If you're not excited about that, you're clinically dead, frankly.

Don't dismiss the Dreamcast before it's even got going.

Jamie

FG: Sega seem to have a knack of shooting themselves in the foot, Jamie. Everything since the Mega Drive has been a marketing shambles, regardless of the quality of the machines (and while no one's going to make a case for, say, the Mega CD, the Saturn was a fine console). If Dreamcast's going to succeed, it needs the games and it needs the publicity. We can only hope they get it right this time. The fact Sega are responding to PS2 on the fly - adding DVD and backwards compatibility, for example - is a good sign they're taking things deadly seriously.