In 2001, at 16 years old, I snagged a brand new Dreamcast with five or six games for dirt cheap from a local game store. The DC had already been discontinued at that point, the PS2 was about to launch or just did, and retailers were just offloading the Dreamcast merch. Shenmue was one of those games, and was the game I ended up spending the most time with. There really just wasn’t anything like it, it was this epic action story of loss and revenge with this sprawling open world with all kinds of sidequests, mini-games and interesting NPCs to explore. The most painful thing for me at the time was the damn cliffhanger at the end, and I never ended up getting a chance to play Shenmue 2 (I think it only made it’s way stateside on Xbox). It was definitely a memorable, once-in-a-lifetime experience. There were flaws, to be sure, but they were easily overlooked due to the expansive, ambitious nature of the game.