A new game is available today, though probably not for one of the platforms you were expecting. It’s a brand new bullet hell romp called Redux: Dark Matters, and it launches today for none other than the Sega Dreamcast.
The Dreamcast is easily the most intriguing console to ever be released. It took the world by storm ever so briefly, burning like a bright meteor in the night sky, and then disappeared just as quickly. Sega’s final home console before going strictly into the software business, the Dreamcast was gone, but never forgotten. To this day, indie developers continue to make new games for the console that’s more than a decade old and workarounds have even been established to let players continue to enjoy their online games.
Internet-ready, sporting online play, a screen in the controller and edgy games that walked off the beaten path, the Dreamcast was well ahead of its time and, thanks to a combination of the PlayStation 2 and games that were ridiculously easy to pirate, the console only thrived for a couple of years before meeting commercial failure.
Still, thanks to developers like the guy behind Redux: Dark Matters, a game or two still launches every year or so for the defunct console, giving Dreamcast faithfuls new reasons to keep coming back for more.
Thanks to the support of 649 backers, Redux cleared its $25,000 Kickstarter goal in 2012 by a little more than twice the needed figure. The game had fallen completely off of my radar, and then Joystiq comes along and stokes the flame this afternoon, letting the world know that, not only was the Dreamcast version of Dark Matters complete, but it’s ready to ship out. Available for 36.00 Euros, Redux: Dark Matters can be yours, offering up “arcade style visuals, six stages with huge boss enemies, tons of weapons, arcade gameplay and addictive scoring system and an awesome soundtrack composed by Andre Neumann,” according to its listing at Hucast Direct Game Store.
So, why the Dreamcast? Well, it’s cheap to develop for, relatively easy to get a project up and off the ground and, as stated above, there’s still a decent community of gamers out there still hungry for fresh content. It’s a perfect situation for indie developers looking to make a physical product, one that would be much more difficult (or impossible) to pull off for anything that came before or after the Dreamcast.
If you’re tired of last-gen consoles like the PS3 and Xbox 360 and don’t have enough to keep you busy with the new gen machines, maybe it’s be worth your time to take the Dreamcast out of storage and give Dark Matters a chance to prove that you can actually teach an old dog (a dog many thought to be dead, actually) new tricks.
