The Audi TT is a beautiful automobile. And With Bleem for the Dreamcast, even the PSOne car model looks pretty darn good. |
Upon putting the bleem! disc in the Dreamcast a title screen comes up while the disc is being read. Since bleem! comes with no written instructions, the programmers saw fit to provide four separate information pages (correlating to the A, B, X, and Y buttons on the controller) which can be accessed from the title screen if you wish. The most important of those pages is the advice screen on how -- once you're in the game itself -- to set up the controller for playing Gran Turismo 2. The setup they recommend for the DC controller is certainly the best way to do it.
Once you have looked at the preliminary screen(s), you can take out the bleem! disc and put in your own Gran Turismo 2 Arcade or Simulation Mode disc (you might want to start with the Arcade disc since it has the intro movie on it), then press the start button on your controller. Yes, you need to own your very own GT2 disc -- it doesn't come free with the $5.95 bleem! disc! From this point out you will see what's on the GT2 disc -- intro movie and all. Right from the start, Gran Turismo revs you up for a very good racing experience. The intro is fun to watch and there's no video-stutter to be found -- so far, so good. As you scoot through the menus, the screen changes occur at a rapid pace, just as they would when playing the disc on a PlayStation. A good place to go first is the options menu where you can set up your controller buttons. It's actually a piece of cake to accomplish this task, so don't sweat it.
Nice reflections!!! |
After seeing a couple more screens you will get to pick a vehicle (class A offers the really fast ones) and then select an automatic or manual transmission. Pick your track, and it's off to the races.
Before I go into discussing the Dreamcast bleem! graphics enhancements, I must tell you that after I first played Gran Turismo 2 on my Dreamcast, I took out the disc and put it in my PlayStation for the sake of comparison. What I saw on my Playstation really shocked me. I was looking at a pixellated, grainy-looking, washed-out videogame that I -- just a year before -- used to think of as a graphics showcase. It truly looks pathetic compared to all those fancy Dreamcast racing games I have been enjoying lately -- namely Test Drive Le Mans, F355, Sega GT, and MSR. The lettering on the cars was hard to make out, some of the signs from a distance appear to have blobs instead of words, and the roads and much of the scenery look like a pixelated mess. Other graphical shortcomings include pop-up (or reverse pop-up which is especially noticeable in the review mirror) and occasional seams in the tracks and on the cars that tend to detract from the overall look of the game.
Bleem! has cleaned up the graphics in such a dramatic way that it's really hard to believe that it's the same game. The roads look cleaner, the scenery looks well-defined, and the cars -- oh man -- the cars look so much better! I should also mention that the reflections on the cars are much sharper -- maybe they should have called it gleam instead of bleem! Get the VGA adaptor cord for your Dreamcast and you're in for a real treat. If you're wondering about the frame-rate, it's still cranking through at 30 frames-per-second and there's not even a hint of slowdown. GT2 has not been hindered in any way -- no doubt about it.
VMU game saves are easy to pull off by going to the Options menu. The GT2 menu shows that you can access either a left controller memory card (DC controller port 1) or right controller memory card (DC controller port 2). This feature may come in handy if you're using a PlayStation controller adapter (with no memory card plug) in port 1.
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