If you were lucky enough to own a Dreamcast back in the day, and even luckier to experience its online functions via the Broadband Adapter, then you may have come across Bomberman Online, a superb puzzle game that allows you to blow up your enemies in unique and mind-boggling ways.
Bomberman Online was able to be played with up to 8 players online, forcing you to blow up areas of the map to slowly edge yourself closer to your enemies, offering power-ups along the way to assist with just that. You have two minutes to win in survival mode.
This server has been created by flyinghead and Farkus, who have been working on this project for a few years now, after taking the reins from Shuoma, who started the project but struggled to find the missing pieces to complete it. As I can imagine, this was a very tricky game to get back up and running.
The team have even created an easy connection guide offering newcomers an easy solution to get their Dreamcast and their old games back online, even if the fastest route means buying an old school Dreamcast Broadband Adapter, which does cost a pretty penny, there are other less expensive, albeit more complicated routes to get this working.
Dreamcast Live states: "The other options involve the Dreamcast’s included dial-up modem. You can simulate a dial-up connection using software called DreamPi, which can run on a Raspberry Pi or on a PC via a virtual machine. You can also use a real dial-up service if you still have a landline phone. DreamPi is by far the most popular method and is essentially a pre-configured PC-DC server which uses a Raspberry Pi; this is the method I would recommend as it’s the cheapest, easiest to set up, and is what the vast majority of the community uses".
The Dreamcast community doesn't stop amazing me, it was only a couple of days ago that a Dreamcast Jr was announced by a talented community modder, and now today, one of the best online games on Dreamcast is back alive. The best time to buy a Dreamcast was yesterday, but the second is today. Huge respect goes out to the team that brought Bomberman Offline, back online!
