Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I’m a self proclaimed pack-rat and collector, but if I ever had to sell my gaming collection to feed my family these are the games I’d hang onto. If my wife let me, anyway.

Ah, the good ol’ days of the Dreamcast. My fondness for this system knows no bounds, as it was responsible for introducing me to the “next gen” of gaming back in ’99. Pretty much all of my favorite genres today were introduced or refined for me on this system: racing, sports, fighting, platforming and MMO’s.  Yes, you read that right, MMO. Phantasy Star Online was the first MMO I ever played and it was my gateway drug to EverQuest, City of Heroes and the mighty World of Warcraft. I suppose these days you’d call PSO more of a Co-Op game than MMO, since your parties consisted of only 4 people, but you could log in over SegaNet (I loved Sega’s ISP, it was so much better than AOHell) and interact with hundreds of other people in the game’s lobbies before landing a party and setting off for adventures. I have great memories of dungeon crawling with friends until late hours of the night, grinding out XP and hunting for rare weapons and upgrading our MAGs.

I still fire this up on my second Dreamcast (connected to my PC monitor via VGA adapter) and play my 71st level HUcast. Graphically the game still looks nice and is a lot of fun even if you can’t play it online anymore. Someday I’ll hit level 100 and then retire the game for good. Or start a new character and let the grindfest begin anew.