Nintendo released Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island on August 5, 1995. Shigeru Miyamoto’s response to the overly techy pre-rendered graphics of Donkey Kong Country came in the form of this game which appeared like an animated coloring book. Bolstered by the Super FX2 coprocessor the game featured dazzling scaling effects to go along with its unique art style. Like previous Miyamoto projects, Yoshi’s Island features Koji Kondo’s rich score to amplify the game’s dreamlike aesthetics. Featuring deep gameplay that almost requires you to be a geometry angle master, there’s plenty of challenge abound in an effort to score 100s on the levels. Unlike previous Mario affairs, this one features Mario as a baby piloted by the Yoshi character introduced in the game’s predecessor on a grand journey to rescue his separated brother Luigi from young Bowser. I 100% completed this in 1996, one of my finest feats in gaming. (I hope that game save is still alive.)

Quake III Arena was released by id Software on December 2, 1999, and incidentally was one of the first games I ever got the day it came out. I wasn’t much of a fan of the change in direction to being an exclusively multiplayer game, and I have to say playing the early Test, Test Demo, and Demo Test builds of the game with a Pentium MMX 200 and a Voodoo 1 card were not very pleasant at the time. The map design seemed suspect, and the effort to remove the grappling hook in Capture the Flag, bunny-hopping (turbo running), and overemphasis on balance by making all the weapons weak really diminished how high of a ceiling experienced players could reach. The game was a hit, selling over approximately 500,000 copies worldwide and has been featured in many tournaments and ladders. It had an add-on called Quake III Team Arena featuring new gameplay types, maps, bots, weapons, and powerups. Its concept was widely accepted to the point id Software released more games based on it: Quake 4 (2005) (Multiplayer Only), Quake Live (2010), and Quake Champions (2018).

The Sega Dreamcast was released in North America on September 9, 1999. Its predecessor the Saturn was an over expensive piece of hardware while the Dreamcast employed more conventional technology to reduce its cost. The Saturn itself had almost as poor of a reputation as the Genesis add-ons Sega CD and 32X, landing Sega in an unfavorable position of public perception. It was the first console application of Windows CE, intended to port PC games to the platform or produce homebrew games. This Sega/Microsoft connection is what gave way to the original Xbox later in 2001, just a few months after the Dreamcast’s discontinuation. The original intention was to have cross-platforming between both, but the mighty Sony PlayStation 2 wiped out the Dreamcast before it could come to light, leading to its discontinuation on March 31, 2001. Sega has remained strictly a software publisher ever since, many of their games being released on Nintendo platforms and finally giving way to crossover between the Sonic and Mario franchises.