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Logan:

I personally believe that the Sega Dreamcast deserves its spot on any list of the greatest consoles ever. I once heard the comparison that back in the 16-bit era, the Genesis achieved a higher market share than the Super Nintendo for a time period because while Nintendo would churn out one or two A+'s a year, Sega would bombard gamers with B's. While I believe that Sega had its fair share of A's, this is a very valid observation. The Dreamcast followed a similar strategy of churning out games at a constant pace, except that the games they released were almost exclusively A's and A+'s. No console has ever displayed so much innovation, ingenuity, and passion in such a short amount of time as the Sega Dreamcast. The Dreamcast ushered in online console gaming as well as digital distribution. It was also the first console to explicitly incorporate motion controls (yes, before the Wii): Samba De Amigo with maracas and Virtua Tennis, Soul Caliber, and Sega Bass Fishing with the decade-old fishing-rod controller are sights to behold (there was even a proto-type remote-control shaped motion controller in development for use with a Dreamcast installment of NiGHTS). Titles like Jet Grind Radio, Phantasy Star Online, Seaman, Skies of Arcadia, and Shenmue are all glorious testaments to the joys that a perfect marriage between innovative technolgy and boundless creativity can bring. The Dreamcast's only shortcoming lies in its short, two-year life-span, resulting in a “small” library of games. In regards to the “small” statement, I once attempted to make a list of the top 20 Dreamcast games, and still felt it was incomplete for leaving a good number of games out. It ended up being a top 35, and still difficult. Enough said. The most beautiful thing about the Dreamcast is that from a business standpoint, Sega had no justifiable reason to shell out the last of their dwindling dollars on the system; there was no feasible way for the company to survive, so they smartest thing to do would've been to move directly into the software business, and cut their hardware legacy short at the Saturn. They went through with it the console anyway, and destroyed the remains of their company purely out of passion. They were out to rectify all of their past failures, and to prove to current and former Sega-loyalists that they WERE a competent company on ALL fronts. They made you proud to have stuck by Sega, because they were finally showing their true worth, plain and simple, by delivering the most innovative hardware and software the industry has ever seen. And personally, I think it sent a message to the industry that I hope is never forgotten: the rampant and unforgiving greed displayed by companies such as Sony (and Nintendo in their younger years. See: lawsuits) is not without its repercussions; while these business decisions to destroy competitors may be benificial to the company in the short-term, it is not good for the industry as a whole. Because of the death of Sega, the current console wars consist of two companies with endless pockets who solely exist to buy rights to third-party games, and another once-great and innovative company which is now completely content to release primarily mundane crap, generating cash-flow solely off of a gimmicky fad. This lack of real innovation will not be kind to the industry in the long-run, and the behemoths who run the industry will have no one to blame but themselves.

Thus, I believe that the Dreamcast is the greatest system of all time, and while it ultimately failed on the market-place, it fully succeeded at what it set out to do: be the best little console Sega could make. And that, my friends, is a damn good console.

Sorry for being so hopelessly long-winded.