I'm not a console guy. OK, wasn't. I put the blame squarely upon the shoulders of Crazy Txi and Crazy Taxi II. I was at a friends place, he'd been hooked by Crazy Taxi whilst down the shops and therefore bought himself a Dreamcast. As you do :)

And so, addictive as it is, I ended up getting one too. Now they're cheap-as-chippies, $199 (Aus) isn't much to spend considering how much technology is packed up into the little thing. I figure Sega must just have bad advertising because I reckon it's a system that actually deserved to succeed.

Yes, graphics are impressive, I believe the graphic engine isn't as good as the one on PS2, but at least as far as Crazy Taxi goes, I can't pick the difference.

The thing that I think is really cool is the 'visual memory unit', like, a memory card. Except it plugs into the controller, and has a little LCD screen in it. So while you're playing games the LCD display can offer additional information (though I must admit it usually doesn't). But, it also has controls so you can use your memory unit as a game in itself when away from your Dreamcast. The game that takes most advantage so far that I've found is Sonic Adventure II, where, to cut a long story short, you find little creatures in the game that will basically function as a souped-up tamagotchi when in the memory unit. Cute. Or annoying, depending on your viewpoint :)

The memory unit is cleverly designed so it can easily talk to other memory units - just plug them together and you can transfer saved games, or in the case of the downloaded Sonic Adventure II mini-tamagotchi thing, your mini-tamagotchi things (OK, they're called Chao) can talk to each other and , I dunno, have conversations about how annoyng they are being, I guess. Anyway, it just strikes me as clever uses of technology.

Anyway, yes, I'm going to see about getting Linux onto it one day :)