Category: Sega

AirForce Delta

Completed AirForce Delta.
Despite planes and landscape looking great for Dreamcast, the effects could be better. The explosions look like there’s three frames of animation, and shot down objects straight disappear.

Mission 12, that has you taken down a flying fortress (straight from Ace Combat 1) and a whole base is quite brutal.

But what really got me was Mission 14. It’s “shoot a crashing satelite” mission, but with enemy planes shooting at you. And with an incredibly tight time limit. I seriously considered dropping the game at this point, as it isn’t clear whatever the game wants you to do.

Then there is corridor run, where you fly though a mountain tunnel. But you also have to fight an enemy ace.

Then there is submarine hunt in the Arctic. Somebody was seriously copying Ace Combat 2 homework.

The penultimate mission is a marathon of time and missiles. There are so many targets, even hitting all of them almost depletes your stock, and so many enemies I continuously died from chip damage. And if that’s not enough, there is also a time limit.

Don’t know if it’s just my console, but half of the time I got killed on that mission, I had to hard reset as well.
I actually liked the last mission, though. It’s nothing special, just a duel between you and a fictional plane. But unlike Ace Combat 3 or Ace Combat Zero it doesn’t have any gimmicks like having to shoot it with a machinegun only. Yes, it is frustratingly maneuvrable, but nothing more.

Tags Airforce Delta

Dreamcast Sega

Airforce Delta

Not sure if that’s a problem with GDEmu or the game, but I had to go through three different versions until I found one that’s working. First version would show “Please insert a disc”, second version would show the logo on the gamepad, but black screen. Turns out not HDMI adapter uses VGA interface, and not all of Dreamcast games were VGA compatible 🤯

Technically, it’s such a blatant Ace Combat clone I’m not even sure how it exists. The setting of a aerial border conflict between two imaginary nations, the style of the briefings, the music. Even how the reticle changes once you get into machine gun range.
Visually, it is what you’d expect: not as sleek as Ace Combat 4 on PS2, but obviously much more detailed than Ace Combat 3 on PSX. One example is how cockpit hood is transparent here, something PSX wouldn’t be able to pull.

They adopted a system from Ace Combat 2, where if you lose a plane, you need to buy it again. Which is a bit pointless, since you can always load your game.
Like Ace Combat, you carry ridiculous number of missiles. They home much better than in Ace Combat, but it’s a blessing and a curse, because they are also much harder to evade. One quirk I have is how it’s also hard to tell you were hit, there is almost no visual indication.

Of course there is a ravine flight mission. What kind of Ace Combat clone that would be without one?
Ironic that I’ve made the same mistake in this game I’ve once made in Ace Combat 2: kept playing on Novice controls for multiple missions until I understood what’s going on.
Speaking of controls, since Dreamcast didn’t have shoulder buttons, whose aren’t as good as Ace Combat. And unfortunately they also can’t be remapped.
One bit the game added is showing you the attack route on the map. That’s actually a nice touch.

The mission with the trains is impressive. There was a train in Ace Combat 3 already, but here you need to intercept multiple trains coming from different directions.

Tags Airforce Delta

Dreamcast Sega

Dreamcast

Last upgrade I planned for my Dreamcast was battery replacement. Dreamcast has a rechargable battery soldered to the board. Once it went dead (and those were made in 1999) the console would ask for a date every single time it boots.
Disassembling Dreamcast is easy. The solder points are also clear and unambigous. But when I tried to boot it, GDEmu would blink (so there’s some current), but the orange light won’t turn on. Turns out, the ribbon cable can be pulled on both ends, and while pulling it from the board, I also half disconnected it from the motherboard.
I also installed OpenMenu, a game dashboard, since GDEmu itself is very bare-bones, and doesn’t even have a list of games.

Dreamcast Sega

Soulcalibur

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date August 18, 2025

Soulcalibur was one of the first games I managed to emulate on Demul, back in 2007, and I’ve been playing it ever since ocassionally.
But I never knew that the arcade version was actually inferior to the Dreamcast one, which almost never happens:

Also, I was under the impression that every time you completed Story mode for a character, you unlocked their “twin”. Mostly those were reskins, but some of them would grow into distinct characters later. Turns out that’s incorrect. You open charactacters based on how many times you finish the arcade with distinct characters, not with which character you finish it. Yoshimitsu always opens after 2nd completion, while Cervantes requires 10.

Tags Soulcalibur

Dreamcast Sega

Resident Evil 3 (Dreamcast)

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date August 1, 2025

I’ve played and even completed Resident Evil 3, but it was some 23 years ago. And I also suspect it was a ripped version without the movies, as I don’t remember any of them. So I decided to give the game another go. The intention was actually to play Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 3 Remake, but as always, I didn’t even get past the second game in a row.

In any case, I consider myself rather good in Resident Evil games. But this game is brutal. It can throw 4-5 zombies at you room after room. And even the zombie dogs takes twice as many bullets. I guess you should compensate by having the ability to create your own ammo. But it’s not exactly a fair trade.

There’s also some kind of randomization going on which I don’t remember in other games. Sometimes you would see Brad running out of the basement with the shotgun. Sometimes you need to open the door first. Once I went into the corridor in the Police Station and found there four zombies and two red herbs. Another time: two dogs, and no herbs at all.

The game does keep up with the tradition of keeping something special in STARS locker. But speaking of randomisation, once I found a Magnum there. Then after a load, same locker contained Grenade Launcher. One is better than the other, for those unfamiliar.

Tags Resident Evil

Emulation Sega

Snatcher

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date December 9, 2024

Completed Snatcher.
Don’t assume that all the combat episodes are as easy as the first few. The one in the air duct gets quite brutal.
Guess it’s MSX heritage, but the game can get quite… sugestive at times.
Third chapter starts with a lot of revelations. Gillian and Jamie were found in cryosleep chamber. Harry, the technician that gets killed in the end of 2nd Act, is actually their son, now older than his parents by 20 years. Yeah, that plot twist from Fallout 4? Kojima thought about it 25 years before.
Snatchers kidnap Jamie. There are two more excruciating shooting sequences. Then a 20 minutes long monologue of creator of the Snatchers.
First, Soviet Union has develop a virus called Lucipher Alpha that could wipe an entire city. Then, they developed androids, that would replace the now dead population, adopting their looks. Both Gillian and Jamie were researches on that team, but Gillian was also CIA agent. The head of research was Professor Modnar, and he had a son, Elijah, who became envious of Gillian and Jamie.
So when Soviet Union collapsed, Elijah releases the virus and puts himself, Gillian and Jamie into cryosleep, while his father and Harry, Gillian’s son, manage to escape.
Ten years later, Elijah wakes up from his sleep and resumes the Snatcher program, developing kind of a god complex. When he starts his operation, his father in turn develops an android that would hunt other androids: Random Hajile, being Elijah Modnar in reverse, looking the way Elijah looked when he put himself to sleep. While snatchers are imperfect, unable to withstand ultraviolet for long, Random is perfect, and doesn’t know he’s an android. Now Elijah recoverd Random’s body and plans to make his snatchers perfect as well.
But Random is not dead yet. He grabs his original by the neck, allowing Gillian and Jamie to escape while the facility is blown from space, proving that he’s more human than human.
The game ends with Gillian and Jamie promising to reunite, and Gillian departing to Moscow to destroy the original snatcher factory.

Overall, I’m very impressed with this game. It’s a solid cyberpunk adventure that is still playable 30 years later, without a guide. The only complaint I have are the final figth sequences. I don’t know if the original game was running at a lower frame rate, but I found them to be ridiculuously hard. Other than that, even shameless plagiarism of Kojima can now be viewed as “subtle references”, I guess.

Tags Snatcher

Emulation Sega

Snatcher

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date December 6, 2024

I tried to continue to play on Nintendo Switch. First hang, on Factory, I managed to circumvent by copying save file from PC to Switch and loading from it. The second, after the bathroom scene at the end of Act I, I solved by ejecting and loading image again in the emulator.

The game uses an interesting progression method of number of actions spend instead of the only correct path that many other adventures use. What that means is that at some points you’re expected to do X actions, no matter which, in order for a new even to occur and move the story forward. You can just look around 8 times, and something will happen.

There is a lot of manual work to be done in this game. A lot of story progression is based around video calls. The first time, you need to remember the number that someone tells you, and only when you deal it it will be saved. Even then, you need to input the number manually every time. Same with informant. Despite having infinite cash, you need to handle him cash multiple times during the dialog to advance it.

Tags Snatcher

Emulation Sega

Snatcher

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date December 1, 2024

After comparing the versions, I decided to go with SegaCD, as this is the only official English translation, and I didn’t particularly like the style of PSX/Saturn.
It is impressive how shamelessly Kojima steals Blade Runner and Terminator visuals.

It’s also funny how Kojima references his Metal Gear series by introducing a tiny companion robot called Metal Gear.

There are fighting sequences, but luckily those aren’t very though. More like a wack’a’mole, there enemies appear in one of 9 sections.

I started the game with RetroArch on Switch, but it would go into endless animation during the factory transition, something that should happen only to ISO+MP3 version, not the BIN+CUE one. This didn’t reproduce on the same core with RetroArch on PC. So I’ll continue the playthrough with this setup.

Tags Snatcher