This is the real gift SEGA gave to the world.
I played a little PSO on Dreamcast but never got far; spotty dial-up made it difficult to enjoy online play. Still a console “MMO” was mind-blowing to me at the time, and it was a beautiful game. (Q3A became my primary addiction. Much easier to just connect, mindlessly frag for a few, and not be upset when someone inevitably picked up the phone and starting dialing without listening for the modem first.)
I’ve emulated Dreamcast PSO on my Steam Deck and I know private servers still exist for Dreamcast (and it can made to get back online with an RPi and a little fiddling) but is Blue Burst the preferred game these days? PC version? I’m tempted to give it a proper playthrough sometime.
Private servers exist on the PC version. I think eden server is still a fav but it might be a new popular server.
Dreamcast was my first time going online at home, even before getting a pc, so I bought every online game I could and PSO was the best of them.
Mags and photons
I played PSO so much! I bought a Dreamcast just for this game. Also played it in Xbox and PC, and private servers on PC. One of my favorite games ever.
I’m always tempted to try private servers but never get around to it.
PSO is a crazy time sink. If you do a 2 hour play session then you’ve made approximately 0 progress in the game lol. I can’t imagine that being successful these days unfortunately, but it was amazing to get lost in the game as a teenager.
I guess it’s easy enough to leave the game open in the background on PC, not like it uses much power or RAM.
The music was phenomenal. I have a couple of songs from the OST on my phone
@B0NK3RS@lemmy.world has a section ID (Skyly) as their profile picture, so I suspect they’ve played this 🤣
god staying up until 4am in uni posting pso 1 in 2000 was the best feeling ever
I didn’t ever play Blue Burst, but I LOVED the first one on Dreamcast. It was my first MMO experience. I was 14 years old, and my parents had just bought me my own 19” CRT TV for my room.
I ran an Ethernet cable from the living room to my bedroom so I could play PSO online with my friend from school. We would play all night, and then geek out about our items the next day at school.
Man… I was just getting into making money. I got a used copy of Xenosaga and Xenosaga2 and discovered a GameCube controlller with full keyboard had been made. Ugh I missed phantasystar by this much!
Private servers if you have a PC
TTF anyone?
I was all over Ep.1&2 on the GameCube back then. So many fond memories of nights spent chilling online and grinding out whatever we were going for that night.
My main was a HUcast who made it up to level 168 before memory card corruption took him, and I didn’t have it in me to play seriously again after that.
Though the timing on this post is funny because I’ve just started Phantasy Star Zero like a week ago. It’s incredible having a game so faithful to the PSO-style gameplay with just enough updates to feel fresh. And a bit surreal to have that with an entire new cast of enemies to get used to.
Makes me regret somehow not hearing about Zero back when it came out. I did drop a few hundred hours into both PSO2 and NGS each, but it just never was quite what I was craving - a new PSO.
