What Is Beats Of Rage?

January 17th, 2016 Phil Williams Gaming, Retro 0 comments

Years ago my motivation for learning how to use computers was pirating free music. Not long after I got the downloading process down, I came across a friend playing Punch Out on an emulator called Nester. It had every NES game all on one disc. I was blown away by this innovation. I had to have it. My first question was, where did you get your Dreamcast chipped at? He told me it didn’t even need to be chipped, playing burned CD-R’s is a natural function of the early Dreamcast.

So it turned out he was right. My roommate at the time and I both found Dreamcast’s on Craigslist for $20 each, and both got a stack of 100 blank cd’s. My roommate even got a monthly subscription to dcisozone.com so we could DL more than 5 roms a day.

Nester was just the start. We found similar emulator roms for just about every early console you can find on standard PC emularors, besides access to just about every Dreamcast game in rom form for backup purposes.

Obviously you are suppose to own a copy of the original game for the backup rom to be legal, when it comes to official titles anyway. But the beauty of the early model Dreamcast’s, is the vast open source library of emulators, modded games, tools, and Homebrew games, that are 100% legal and free. In fact, Homebrew game developers are still creating games for the Dreamcast to this day.

Vid Source - SeeJayAre

Which brings me to Beats of Rage, also known as BOR…

“As fans of the ‘Streets of Rage’ series that originally appeared on the SEGA megadrive/genesis, we always wanted to see streets of rage 4. But the waiting proved futile, and streets of rage 4 never came. That’s why we tried to correct this mistake and fill the void by making the ultimate tribute to Streets of Rage: Beats of Rage!!
Beats of Rage is one of the most revolutionary homebrew games to ever hit the Dreamcast. Not only is it a fantastic game on its own, it is also possible to modify the game in many ways (similar to the way people can create TC’s for Doom and Quake). Out of Beats of Rage, many new games have emerged, giving birth to an entire community based around the game and its modifications. Said developers of BOR.”

Vid Source - Gaming&Technology Variety Channel

Couldn’t have said it better myself. So I didn’t. Haha!

BOR is amazing. You can download it for yourself HERE. With a little bit of leg work, its very simple to track down many variations in Google search. I tracked down a couple examples on YouTube.

If you’ve never gotten into the Dreamcast, I highly recommend you track down an early model capable of playing CD-R disc. There is no modding required. Its as simple as downloading a rom, downloading a free burning program, and burning the rom to disc.

The Dreamcast might be known as the console that put the nail in Sega’s console making careers coffin, but like the Sega Saturn, I consider it one of the most underrated consoles of all time. Check out my article on the history of Sega that includes a excerpt of a conversation I had with the creator of the Sega Dreamcast 2 petition, Ben Plauto here.