The COMPLETE History of Sonic VMU Gimmicks

growing up the Dreamcast wasn't just a gaming console in my house it was the centerpiece of neighborhood Gatherings while other kids were obsessed with their PlayStations and Nintendos and don't get me wrong I was two I was also the one kid who actually had a Sega Dreamcast thus my living room became a hot spot for playing awesome games that nobody else could play otherwise friends would come over just to play Sonic Adventure 2 and we'd battle it out for hours in the two-player versus mode to see who would come out on top as the ultimate Victor however there would be a catch whoever was player two usually the winner of the previous match in order to make it fair had to Humble themselves by using a bizarr looking Fishing controller since it was the only second controller I had at the time but it was such a shame the Dreamcast controllers were so cool and unlike anything else at the time I mean just look at this bad boy I really felt like I was robbing my friends of an entire experience when they'd used the Fishing controller because aside from being extremely awkward to use they were missing out on one of the coolest and most Innovative features of the entire console it's memory card or V U but the vmu wasn't just a memory card it was a total Game Changer literally and I don't think any other game utilized them as creatively as the Dreamcast era of Sonic games so what's so special about the vmu and how did Sonic utilize it to enhance its own games welcome to chics and today we'll be taking a deep dive into everything that Sonic did with the vmu during the Dreamcast ERA this video video is made possible by today's sponsor better help now much like the virtual pets we very much love taking care of it's important to also look in the mirror and realize that that person also needs to be taking care of themselves mental health is extremely important and I truly believe in the power of professional help when times are tough think of it this way when a child is neglected it becomes sad and can't Thrive like it should but when you begin nurturing it providing it with attention and Care You See It Grow happier and healthier right before your very eyes we as people honestly aren't so difficult and that's exactly where better help comes into play better help is an easy and convenient way to connect with a licensed therapist they start by offering a platform where you can answer a few questions and get match with a professional who has experience in dealing with situations just like yours you can communicate through phone calls video chats or messaging whatever is most comfortable for you one thing I really appreciate about better help is how quickly they work to connect you with a therapist usually within 48 Hours allowing you to get started as soon as possible your mental health is important so don't keep putting it off let betterhelp connect you to a therapist who can support you in the comfort of your own home so use the link in my description or go to betterhelp.com CHX huge thank you to betterhelp for sponsoring this video and with all that being said let's continue with today's episode the vmu or visual memory unit was sega's Innovative Twist on the conventional memory card because while other consoles had memory cards Sega took it further than anyone else thought possible the vmu was truly on a different level yes it served as a memory card for your Sega Dreamcast allowing you to save your game data but unlike your typical memory card the vmu had its own LCD screen enabling it to display various game related information directly on the device while slotted into the Dreamcast controller but the Innovation doesn't stop there because the vmu doubled as a standalone miniature gaming device this dual functionality transformed what was once thought to be a mundane device used to Simply save your data into a fully interactive accessories that could enhance your gameplay not only while playing but also even on the go completely away from the console because the vmu operated on two 3volt batteries so it had power even when unplugged from the controller not only that but when you unplug the memory card from the controller it would reveal the d-pad and Buttons used to control the device allowing users to navigate the menus and manage their save data but more importantly playing the aforementioned mini games so how did Sonic utilize the vmu both in game and outside of the game well let's go through each Sonic Dreamcast title one by one and see what this bad boy could really do Sonic Adventure being launch title for the Dreamcast and the flagship mascot of sega's entire company had some significant expectations to meet in order to prove the capabilities of the new console a lot of eyes were on this game to show what sega's new console could really do especially after the disastrous lifespan of their previous console the Sega Saturn so because of this Sonic Adventure had to be an extremely ambitious game it would feature not only Sonic but several playable friend and Side characters each with their own play style lightly showcasing various genres it was sega's way of saying hey look how how many cool things our system can do so Not only was the game a platformer it also featured onreal shooting gameplay similar to something like Star Fox third person shooting with e102 gamma levels fishing levels with big the cat and the Chow Garden an extremely intricate miname where you could raise and nurture your very own adorable virtual pet I think Sega knew that Chow would be a hit because not only did they put a ton of resources into this silly little mini game they also designed a lot of the vmu interactivity around the Chow after all the vmu would have to be just as ambitious as the rest of the game it was a pretty big selling point of their console so how did Sonic Adventure utilize the vmu for starters like most other Dreamcast games the vmu is often used to show off the logo for the game which can be seen here right in the main menus a cute little touch here we can take a closer look at the vmu LCD screen it has an insanely tiny resolution coming in at only 48x 32 pixels you may also notice it's in black and white a true one- bit gaming experience which is honestly kind of cool but don't for a minute think that these limitations hold it back from from having some really nice and expressive Sprite art if we head into gameplay we can see the vmu cycle through Sprite art portraits during the game's cut scenes of all our playable characters and even Eggman most of the art is based off of the character key art drawn By Yuji uawa the artist for the Sonic Adventure series we can see Sprite Recreations of Tails Knuckles Amy and e102 but some of these characters have Sprite art portraits that I don't seem to recognize from anywhere else so that means it must have been completely custom made but honestly they did a surprisingly impressive job with the one bit low resolution Sprite art limitations I love how they all look anyways it's during actual gameplay where things finally start to get a bit more interactive when in the various Hub worlds and levels controlling your character has a lively little Chow inside of the bmu mirroring and reacting to your actions obviously he has this little walk cycle when the player is moving or stationary but anytime the player leaves the ground we can see him frantically stumbling in the air with a horrified little expression poor guy occasionally the child can randomly trip at least as far as I can tell there isn't anything specific that causes this it seems to be pure chance he's just a clutzy little guy when Sonic revs up his spin dash we can see the Chow doing one of two things either winding up a punch or kicking some kind of sack I'm not really sure what this is but he's sure showing it whose boss the Chow can also occasionally swing and miss when punching causing him to stumble again a clutzy little guy he can't help it if you leave the game idle for a minute or so the Chow will actually doze off and we can see him catching some z's until he's awoken by the player finally moving also I got this once and it took for ever to figure out how to do it again but I guess if you jump up as Sonic land in this pose and wait for a little bit the Chow starts playing on a beach ball if we head into an actual level we can get a few more funny interactions it seems that whenever the player enters the near vicinity of an enemy or collectible such as a shield or a bundle of rings in an item capsule the child will fall on its ass in awe completely dumbfounded by the marvels of life he is full of joyous Whimsy and wonder if you manage to get hit by something the child will stagger back with x's over his eyes no longer is he full of joyous Whimsy and wonder and whenever a character clears a level we can see the Chow cheering for Joy it makes you feel good it's like having your own personal cheerleader now if we head to the Chow Garden we can see one more fun little interaction if we wait a second we can see a chow bashfully peek out from the bottom of our vmu as if it can't believe we actually came back from the gas station with milk he'll kind of just poke out at different points and shimmy back and forth at the bottom of the screen watching your every move with his cold dead eyes he knows what you've done but yeah that's pretty much everything the vmu displays when playing Sonic Adventure 1 compared to most other Dreamcast titles the CH vmu companion was a charming and light-hearted form of interactivity meant to keep you entertained and provide some nice companionship while you played the game it probably was also meant to serve as a reminder to go to your Gardens and take care of those little guys they're probably neglected and starved wait around any longer and you're probably going to get the child protective services called on you just saying anyways that wasn't all this game had to offer for vmu interactivity oh no my good friend like I said Sonic Adventure needed to go above and beyond to sell the Dreamcast this L Sonic Team to develop an entire miname playable on your vmu called chow Adventure in any of the Chow Gardens you can pick up your chow and drop them off into this device with a giant vmu on it this Strang looking device will transfer your selected Chow straight from your game into your memory card and from here we can remove the vmu and embark on an entire Adventure on the go welcome to Chow Adventure an entire miname extension of the Chow raising experience all playable on your vmu in chiao adventure we travel across various maps with our Chow in order to raise its stats and even gain exclusive items one cool thing we're able to do here is actually see our Chow stats because unlike the GameCube versions of Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 we actually have no way to do that otherwise Chow Adventure is basically the hyperbolic Time Chamber of the Chow Garden because not only can we level up our Chow stats pretty quickly here but this is also all done without aging the Chow something you otherwise might need to be careful of in the main game since Chow have actual life cycles the gameplay of chow Adventure is pretty simple it's mostly automated as we have our Chow walking down a path as he attempts to make his way to the next area each area specializes in a certain stat and the higher that stat the faster you can get through anytime the chw is walking it uses the Run stat if they're swimming it uses the swim stat climbing uses the power stat and flying uses the fly stat when the child travels a certain amount of distance and makes it to the end of the area they ask the player which direction to take next we can see here on this map that the areas keep branching out and that there are five total layers it kind of reminds me of the multiple paths from Shadow the Hedgehog in total there are 15 possible areas you can travel to and depending on the route you choose you'll have the chance to meet up with a special character who will give you a stat boost I eventually met up with Sonic so naturally he gave me a boost to my run stat during your stroll you'll eventually encounter Bly Chow who challenge you to fights you'll need to time an a press on this white colored block to land a punch otherwise you'll miss and do no damage I found the timing to be pretty deceiving there is quite a bit of delay so you'll want to press the A Button probably two or three blocks before the white one if you win you'll get to choose from one of three treasure chests they usually contain some type of food that increase various stats but but you can also get unlucky and get an empty chest or a lazy nut which when the chout eats will have them get distracted by doing some kind of leisurely activity you'll just need to press the A Button whenever this happens to get them to continue their route the Chow can also get distracted randomly by themselves even without the lazy nut so you'll want to be on top of checking your screen and make sure they aren't distracted because one time my child won a battle and then went on to brag about how strong he was only to immediately trip good job buddy you're doing great throughout your journey your Chow will ask various questions it's here where you can actually name your Chow he'll also s times ask questions about the player he'll want to know your name your birthday if you're a boy or a girl and uh your phone number bro is this guy trying to dox me the child will even try to give you a quiz at certain points like in this one where he asked me how many Chaos Emeralds there were well if you watch my video you'd know that this number is actually pretty variable but for the sake of convenience we'll just put seven there's also a matching mini game you can play to gain stat boosting items it's actually really fun it's pretty much a game of memory where you have to match pairs of each card three times though and you'll lose so you'll have to make sure to memorize as many as you can when they're all flipped up at the beginning this is probably the fastest way to level up your Chow which is probably what you're going to want to do if you're looking to battle other players see the vmus are able to slot into each other by joining at the top like some sort of combining meca Gundam I always thought this was the coolest thing ever too bad I didn't have any friends with a Dreamcast to do this with though anyways if two players playing Chow Adventure connect they're able to battle each other with the same karate gameplay as when fighting against the bully Chow players can also made their Chow when connected I mean what better way to celebrate after a tough one-on-one battle by you know very cool Sega thank you my child wasn't mature enough to do this apparently though my vmu started yelling at me that the Chow was still a child FBI open up but I'm assuming if you get two consenting adult Chow they can create an egg I'm not sure what determines who gets the egg though maybe both players get their own egg I unfortunately didn't have the time to raise two Chow into adults to test this so we may never know Chow Adventure is pretty fun although especially if you have a lower level Chow getting through areas takes a hot second a lot of this gameplay is actually spent just waiting for something to happen you can go minutes without anything happening and it can be easy to miss that your Chow was face planted in the gravel the entire time waiting for you to press the a button to help it back up but I think this game was designed to be played alongside Sonic Adventure as you do levels by the time you'd be done with a level your child would have something new to say or show you and you'd be leveling them up while playing through the story The Ultimate multitasker strategy but despite all of this I think Chow Adventure 1 is a really Charming miname it's definitely worth playing if you have the equipment to do so it has a lot of soul and it's honestly worth it just for the hilarious dialogue alone in my opinion because whoever wrote this game's dialogue was a genius the Dreamcast had a couple other titles besides just Sonic Adventure though the next Sonic title on the Dreamcast utilizing the vmu would be Sonic Shuffle a party game developed by Sega and Hudson soft the same people who made the Mario Party series we've of course got the logo displayed on the vmu in the main menus but in actual gameplay is where things get interesting Sonic Shuffle has players traversing through board game like Maps using cards to determine which spaces they can move to the fun or I suppose the not so fun part about this game depending on how you look at it is that players can all use each other's cards however using another player's cards is a gamble because normally you aren't able to see what cards are in their hand that's because each player's hand is only visible on their vmu making it so that only they know what cards they have yeah no screen cheating around here this is a super cool concept honestly and if you really think about it isn't this pretty much what the Wii uu is doing 15 years later kind of crazy to think that some of these ideas were literally a decade and a half ahead of their time but that's just the Dreamcast in a nutshell that's all there really is though for a Sonic Shuffle it's a pretty self-contained simple game but this is still a really good use of the vmu if you ask me next up is Sonic Adventure 2 and as soon as you boot up the game you're greeted with a cool little one bit Sega and Sonic team logo yeah I love that we then get the logo for the game itself which is pretty much all you're going to see anytime outside of actual gameplay during the gameplay however instead of cycling through the characters like in Sonic Adventure 1 the vmu strictly displays the character you're playing as and we get some really nice Sprite art of all the main playable characters as good as the Sprite art was for Sonic Adventure 1 I got to say they somehow found a way to step it Up all the characters look super detailed even with a limited palet in resolution we of course have Sonic Shadow Knuckles Rouge tails and Eggman but if we jump over to the multiplayer mode we can also see the Sprite art for the other playable characters like Amy Metal Sonic tall chaos cowo and big but unfortunately these cool portraits come at the cost of the silly interactive walking Chow from Sonic Adventure 1 it really does kind of suck because I do feel like even though the Sprite art is better in this game its bmu gimmicks are noticeably less ambitious even in the Chow Garden all we get are the static character portraits no child creeping on you to see what you're doing I kind of miss him I'm not going to lie however this game does have one more surprise to look into luckily Chow Adventure has returned as Chow Adventure 2 so what are the changes well similar to the first game you're able to pick a Chow from your garden to transfer into your vmu and from here you can experience another portable Journey with your Chow just like before you're able to see your Chow stats here because again you actually aren't able to see them in game like the GameCube ports allowed you to do here we can see that chow and Sonic Adventure 2 have two extra stats that we didn't have in the first game luck and intelligence and I believe that playing through this mini game is the only way to increase these stats we also have a third new stat stamina which was introduced in Sonic Adventure 2 once again Chow Adventure 2 has you taking a stroll through various maps with your Chow but this time you're walking towards the screen rather than sideways this is true gameplay Evolution right here but no the biggest addition to Chow Adventure 2 is probably the overarching story lines each time you start you'll get a different plot there's actually quite a handful of them that change up each playthrough and depending on your decisions your route through child Adventure 2 will change and different dialogue options and events will pop up your choices also change the course of the storyline which in a way replaces the routes system in chow Adventure 1 where you simply got to choose which area to go to next this game still has different areas to travel to though I personally went to the hills the forest and the city on my first playthrough all of which have some neat scrolling environmental Sprite art for this first playthrough my child wanted to take pictures of things and would ask me questions like what he should take a picture of we coincidentally ran into Knuckles uh eating flowers and took a picture of him during the Yep this one is definitely going into the cringe compilation then we saw omo Chow winding himself up and took one more picture for the cringe compilation we also saw Amy fishing but had to run away because my Chow was scared of her I guess my Chow also tried taking a bunch of pictures in the city but only realized afterwards that he had no film but I guess apparently was for the best because uh he didn't want to expose everyone's Secrets what huh again during the journey you'll encounter several bully Chow the fighting is very similar to before but you actually have more white blocks to land on giving you a greater chance to land a hit but just like the first game you'll still want to be about two to three blocks early when pressing because of the delay you also get to choose from one of three treasure chests and I swear to God I had the worst look because I kept picking the empty ones your Chow can also get distracted or stop progressing for whatever reason in which case you can either pet them or scold them and they'll get right back on their way we can also play games with our Chow in the form of slot machines that's probably not good to teach kids you're able to change how much you're willing to bet which doesn't really seem to have any sort of effect from what I could tell and the items you get from this don't really seem to actually raise your stats at all like they did in chow Adventure 1 honestly I was actually pretty disappointed with this mini game not only because of this but also because it's basically pure luck rather than the skill it took to win at the memory mini game in chow Adventure 1 rolling the slots also just isn't as interactive I had way more fun playing the matching mini game and testing my memory anyways during your journey your child will ask you questions about yourself like before like your name if you're a boy or a girl your birthday your blood type what's this guy going to do steal my kidney and my sleep he'll also occasionally tell you cool Chow facts like how a FIA flower represents innocent love or that a FIA flower represents innocent love he would then tell me that a FIA flower represents innocent love and that a FIA flower represents innocent love I'm learning so much here thank you he was also almost about to tell me what a chow flower represents but then told me he couldn't tell me come on you little anyways you can't mate or battle with other players in chow Adventure 2 at least as far as I could tell I thought this would be a given but apparently not but any item you get from this game mode you get to bring back to the Chow Garden for instance at the end of my quest I got a seed very epic anyways once you hit the goal at the end of your journey you're sent to the beginning and can start a new storyline while the plot aspect of chow Adventure 2 is admittedly pretty cool and has some fun dialogue I got to say the gameplay here is a bit of a Down downgrade from Chow Adventure 1 on top of it feeling like a less viable way to quickly level up your Chow because the food items don't seem to increase your stats the mini games just aren't as fun but don't get me wrong it's still a really neat experience I'd say as far as these one bit tamagachi virtual pet games go it's still has a lot to offer the vmu was truly a Marvel of its time and there hasn't been anything like it since for a short time they tried to keep this Innovation alive with the use of the Game Boy Link cable and certain Sonic Game Boy Advance titles each one usually had a tiny Chow Garden mode where you'd be able to raise and nurture a Chow in your Game Boy in between the levels of the main game and with the Game Boy Advanced Link cable you were able to transfer this chow into the GameCube ports of Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 but in many ways this was still a bit less ambitious than Chow Adventure 1 and 2 sure there were a few extra mini gamess and the graphics were way better but it didn't have that same feeling of Adventure that the vmu games had since you couldn't really leave this Garden area and there's just such a wonderful tactile Sensation that comes with slotting this bulky ass memory card with the screen into your controller and transferring data in and out of it I don't know it's hard to replicate because the thing is we could totally do this kind of thing with a technology we have on our phones and it would probably be like 100% more convenient and advanced but I guess not everyone was able to see the potential of what Sega was doing here with the vmu anyways that's going to be it for today's video slap that like button if you liked it and subscribe for even more way past cool Sonic content such as this in the comments below let me know if you've ever even used a vmu before huge thank you to my amazing channel members and with all that being said I hope everyone has a fantastic day peace [Music]

Channel: chaomix

Views: 27,718

Keywords: sonic, sonic the hedgehog, sonic adventure, sonic adventure 1, sonic adventure 3, sonic adventure remakes, sonic adventure remastered, sonic 2022, sonic rangers, sonic frontiers, sonic leaks, sonic news, sonic discussion, chaomix, sonic movie, sonic movie 2, sonic trailer, chao adventure, chao adventure 2, dreamcast chao, dreamcast vmu, dreamcast memory card, retro gaming, sonic 2024, sonic vmu, chao vmu, dreamcast, chao garden, sonic adventure 2, sega dreamcast

Id: JPmkC0gqoRo

Length: 21min 14sec (1274 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2024