> The conversion of Half Life to the Dreamcast should never have been canceled in my humble opinion. I personally think Sega should have published the game; it was almost complete and only needed some fine tuning. After all, releasing a game for a dying console at a loss is one thing; canceling a widely anticipated game for a console with an 8 million strong user-base is quite another. So, Soldier of Fortune, which is another port of another PC single player first person shooter where blowing people to gory pieces provides much of the entertainment, fills Half Life's shoes on the Dreamcast. But is it a worthy substitute? In a wise move, the venerable Ubisoft published this game in Europe (if only they had picked up the rights to Half Life too). 

     > International terrorists are running amok and arming themselves with nuclear weapons. Guess whose job it is to stop them? You assume the role of John Mullins, a war veteran who makes killing terrorists in the most violent of ways seem like taking candy from a baby.

     > This game has survived the transition from PC to DC almost wholly intact apart from longer loading times which can really drag the game down, and the frame rate sometimes dropping/skipping when the action heats up to boiling point. There's no doubt in my mind that these problems could have been fixed in due time, but the graphical problems found here are nothing compared to the inadequacies of the PS2 version (released later).

     > The PS2 version has shorter loading times and a multi-player mode, but suffers from grainy, totally washed out jagged textures everywhere. And no, the original PC version is nothing like that in case anyone just wants to blame these inadequacies on outdated PC graphics (poor logic).

     > The Playstation 2, despite choking on the flow of too much data from a needlessly complicated parallel processed bottlenecked design (high amounts of bandwidth and small amounts of texture cache for mid-frame streaming with nothing to compress the data flow over the pipes), is more powerful than the Dreamcast with the power to push more polygons into place on-screen when developers finally figured out how to synchronize the PS2's processors, but is nowhere near as efficient as the DC's second generation Power VR chipset. VQ compression delivers textures to the screen far more efficiently than the PS2 (compressing and decompressing them in real-time) at high 5:1/8:1 ratios (depending on the texture mixture) through 8 MBs of Video RAM (as opposed to the PS2's 4MBs of VRAM), deferred rendering stops the console from rendering textures on anything that isn't facing the player, and a developer-friendly environment made programming a relative breeze. Throw in a super-sampler, which renders each frame at a higher resolution and scales it out to fit the original resolution as it's being sent to the TV monitor to blur the lines for sharper looking edges, for full screen anti-aliasing, and rough edges mostly go the way of the dodo. In those respects, the Dreamcast was ahead of its time. That's why Dead or Alive 2 and Test Drive Le Mans for the Dreamcast have more vibrant (not to mention cleaner, sharper anti-aliased) textures than their Playstation 2 ports. The deep colorful textures seen in Sonic Adventure 2 and Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram can even hold their own against many modern PS2 games.