1. Toy Commander (SEGA/No Cliché)
Since the Dreamcast died, I have re-bought the console along with dozens of games on two occasions. And both times Toy Commander is the first thing I've re-played all the way through again: getting every gold trophy along the way. A lot of the games get a play through out of nostalgia, but Toy Commander is just an amazing game deserving of attention. It's an ingenious concept. Basically it's like one of those scenes from the start of a Toy Story movie, where Andy is playing with Woody and Buzz, creating his own world. Except, as in those movies, we don't see the child at play. We simply see (and control) the various tanks, trucks, F1 cars, planes, boats and whatever else in his toy collection, going on epic missions around the rooms of a perfectly scaled house. Each room of the house has a number of missions, each of which must be completed within a given time limit in order to unlock the zone's boss fight. Once all the missions in each of the rooms have been bested you get to take on the main baddie, playing as all the previous boss toys acquired throughout the game. Toy Commander is just packed with imaginative, fantastical missions and the detail put into the environments is terrific (for instance hobs, lights switches and blenders can all be turned on and off). The physics also warrant a mention and indeed some of the levels require manipulation of the environment to succeed. One early level sees you using an army truck to push an egg around an obstacle course, up a ramp and into a waiting pan of water, before having you switch to controlling a plane in order to turn on the stove and boil the egg. Other missions simply saw you racing in toy cars, dogfighting in toy jets or rescuing other toys from fires as a toy fire truck. An incredibly rich and varied experience from start to finish. Some reviewers took issue with the game's extreme difficulty - and many of the later challenges are incredibly hard - but these days most games are made in such a way that completing them is more an excercise in time than skill. Toy Commander takes a lot of both if you do it properly! It came with some pedigree behind it too, made by French developer No Cliché: the studio formerly known as Adeline Software and headed by Frédérick Raynal - PC game developer behind
Little Big Adventure 1 & 2 (incidentally LBA 2 would be top of my "best PC games" list) and the original
Alone in the Dark. Today one of the game's killer features - the awesome four-player deathmatch mode, which saw you able to select any of the game's vehicles and huge levels - is rarely likely to get a play (it's difficult to get others to want to play an old Dreamcast game against you - especially when you're too good at it). But the single player experience is more than good enough and you should check this game out immediately if you own a Dreamcast and have never done so. SEGA-owned No Cliché were broken up when the Dreamcast died, with Toy Commander - and the pocket money spin-off Toy Racer - their only titles. A survival horror game called Agartha had been in development, but we'll never see what the studio had up their sleeve with that one. Never seeing that game accounts for by far my biggest sadness at the untimely loss of this great machine. These are the great games we have to remember it by, but how many might there have been?
This is a subjective, personal list and - obviously - I haven't played every Dreamcast game ever made. There are probably some awesome Japanese imports and obscure titles you know about that I don't, so let us know about them below!