Yes, our current build displays some rather ghastly frame rate problems, especially in the later levels.
that is until you encounter a room full of nasty aliens, grenade tossing commandos, or a roomful of headcrabs and snarks. The frame rate stays at a pleasant 30 fps. That's not to say there's room for improvement in the Dreamcast version. The Dreamcast version of Half-Life has, so far, been adhering to those elements. But that was what made Half-Life receive so many accolades when it was released to the gaming public rather than making a good first person shooter game by focusing on the multi-player aspects, Valve, the original developers of Half-Life made a fantastic first person shooter with excellent pacing of action, brilliant story telling, and relying on suspense, rather than gore or blood, to scare the crap out of us. Try playing Quake II, Unreal Tournament, or even Rainbow Six's single player mode, and you'll get a decent one-player experience. But that's the mistake of categorizing Half-Life in the FPS genre dominated by titles that concentrate on deathmatch maps, teamplay modes, and online features. A first person shooter without any type of multi-player feature is basically unheard nowadays having a mutli-player feature in most FPS titles gives a definite boost in the game's longevity. Of the latter group, the biggest complaint was the lack of any multi-player support and to some degree, I agree with that point. There are, however, a good number of emails stating who cares about a game like Half-Life. Numerous emails have been flying in, most of them thanking the holy hardcore gaming gods that Half-Life is still coming to the Dreamcast and happy that it's looking very good. But thankfully, as you've seen through our weeklong dissection of Half-Life for the Dreamcast, the game is nearly complete with a target release date in early June.
With SEGA's shift in becoming a major third party software company, several titles that we've been anticipating have been cancelled or on "extended holds" that will eventually lead them to be cancelled: Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2, Legend of the BladeMasters, Gorka Morka and others. The road that Half-Life has traveled has been a long one, and at several points during the history of the Dreamcast, there was certainly the notion that the game would never make it on the SEGA system.