The Sega Saturn NetLink League

Did anyone here play any of the downloadable levels for Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast? I'm curious as to how they worked. Did it just download them into temporary memory? Could you save them to your memory card? Does anyone have any more information about the levels, as to which ones were available?

Actually, those werent "downloadable levels". You just downloaded a code that would unlock ,yet hidden, content. These codes were saved onto the VMU (GOD I love this little thing), only a few megabytes. I think I even have a VMU with these "codes" on it lying around in my Dreamcast-Box, not sure though. Sega regularely updated the available content, new codes or tiny little bugfixes. There were things like: The year 2000 celebration, Christmas special, Samba GP and Halloween in Twinkle Park. An awesome reminder of the good ol' Dreamcast times...

If you got any more questions, feel free to ask. You could possibly call me a Dreamcast addict ;D

I saw a video on Youtube of an AT&T level, though. Was that on the disc, too?

And do you have any of the codes handy/know how to input them?

As far as I know, all of the DLC was stored on the disc and only "unlocked" by the codes you downloaded. At the moment I cant find my special red VMU on which the codes where saved, Ill keep looking for it. Pretty hard to find 'em when most of these VMU's are red. Lets hope I didnt delete them...

You should be abled to get them off some sites on the web. The problem with method: You'll need a special device/ adapter to transfer them over to your VMU.

Sonic Adventures 2 also had some DLC's, but those were not nearly as good as the ones its predecessor had...

You might be interested in this site.
http://bswirl.kitsunet.org/main.php?lg=en&menu=on

Awesome! Thanks for the link

I need to work on getting something to send saves to my VMU. I already have Dream Explorer, which lets me do some things.

To be honest, I dont have a clue on how to do that... Because then, we could simply get the DLC's of a website and transfer it to a VMU. Sadly I never had the chance to even play Sonic Adventure 2's DLCs.

Warp2063 wrote:I saw a video on Youtube of an AT&T level, though. Was that on the disc, too?

And do you have any of the codes handy/know how to input them?

Yeah, the downloads were always small (they had to be, to be downloaded over a 56K modem and saved onto a VMU) and really only consisted of a few flat images (the AT&T billboard, the Sonic Y2K poster) that would just get plastered everywhere on the city hub stage and a few spots on whatever level the special mode was made for. You could compete in the mini game for the DLC, which was just really playing the same old level with those posters plastered around and a new mission. Then you could upload your scores on the leaderboards with everyone else. That was what I did most of the time, it was pretty fun to see how you ranked with everyone else back in the day.

My favorite bits of Sonic DLC were the launch and Christmas packs. The launch had Dreamcast posters everywhere and some balloons with the swirl logo on all the lampposts. Getting that at launch was a great experience - you really felt a sense that you were part of a huge movement. The Christmas one wasn't quite as elaborate, just showing a big Christmas tree in Station Square...but every time you'd touch it a version of "Dreams, Dreams" from NiGHTS would be sung on the system. It was great to hear, but honestly, Sonic Team were teases back then...we got that and that pinball NiGHTS cameo on Sonic Adventure, but never did NiGHTS get its own game on the DC. The Wii sequel was just too little, too late. Anywayyyyy...

DLC has certainly come a long way, but admittedly it was pretty neat to be able to download something to your VMU and have it alter (albeit superficially) a game. Too bad there weren't more games that took advantage of this. Most of the time, the only online option would be a link to the game's website.