Just over a decade ago, I found a player who kept a record of his internet rankings for the Speed Challenge. No footage of Dreamarena and times aren't spectacular, but nice to have come across an MSR player from the 2000-2001 time period. This particular webpage is no longer online but has been archived (link below).
"Now for my MSR Netrankings:
| Metropolis Street Racer World Speed Challenge: London | ||
|---|---|---|
| Date | Ranking | Time |
| 08/04/2001 | 227 | 1:17"170 |
| 30/05/2001 | 231 | As Above |
| 25/09/2001 | 239 | As Above |
| 23/02/2002 | 245 | As Above |
| Date | Ranking | Time |
| Metropolis Street Racer World Speed Challenge: San Francisco | ||
|---|---|---|
| Date | Ranking | Time |
| 08/04/2001 | 141 | 1:08"060 |
| 30/05/2001 | 146 | As Above |
| 25/09/2001 | 156 | As Above |
| 23/02/2002 | 160 | As Above |
| Date | Ranking | Time |
| Metropolis Street Racer World Speed Challenge: Tokyo | ||
|---|---|---|
| Date | Ranking | Time |
| 08/04/2001 | 198 | 1:04"603 |
| 30/05/2001 | 137!? | As Above |
| 25/09/2001 | 222 | As Above |
| 23/02/2002 | 615!! | As Above |
| Date | Ranking | Time |
| Metropolis Street Racer World Speed Challenge: Total Of All 3 Circuits | ||
|---|---|---|
| Date | Ranking | Time |
| 08/04/2001 | 96!! | 3:29"833 |
| 30/05/2001 | 100 | As Above |
| 25/09/2001 | 109 | As Above |
| 23/02/2002 | 117 | As Above |
| Date | Ranking | Time |
Not bad eh? 96th on the time of all 3 circuits combined!! Now down to 117th, which ain't bad considering I haven't played MSR in months."
Original link:
RJAY - I know this is a long shot, but do you happen to have a leader board of the entries/winners from the competition?
ReplyDeleteI was in the top 25 for the London challenge and actually won a Swatch watch for it. I still have it unused. It came with absolutely no fan fare at all in a parcel (no winners letter, leader boards, acknowledgement etc). However, I've often thought of mounting it in a display with a copy of MSR to remember it.
Thank you for commenting and stopping by. Nice to hear from an old MSR player from the 2000-2001 time period :) I did not start playing the game properly until 2007!
DeleteUnfortunately I do not have any copies of the original Dreamarena leaderboards other than the screenshots/magazine pictures shown in my old blog post here: https://msrdreamcast.blogspot.com/2013/04/speed-challenge-competition_3.html (recently updated). However these only show the winning times.
I have actually been trying to locate these leaderboards for over a decade, however as they were stored within Dreamarena (password restricted), they were not automatically archived. The only way that someone (outside of Sega staff) could have preserved them while Dreamarena was active would have been to either hack in via a PC (it was possible) or record Dreamarena webpages onto a VHS tape (connecting a DC to a TV via a VCR). Dreamcast racers like Ferarri F355 Challenge and Sega Rally 2 had their old rankings preserved by their hardcore players. Unfortunately those same hardcore players did not seem to like MSR and therefore did not preserve anything. I did try contacting Sega Europe over a decade ago to see if they had any copies, however they were unable to help.
I assume the Swatch watch you have is not the MSR watch that came with the game on launch day? https://msrdreamcast.blogspot.com/2020/07/msr-wristwatch.html
Can I ask if you remember anything much about the Dreamarena rankings at all? I know that there were delays in getting the Kudos ranking up and running (not active until January 2001). Did you remember anything about the New Time Trials and World Time Trial rankings (did they even get finished)? Was there a ranking for 50hz and 60hz players? It was also quite easy to hack MSR saves and use Action Replay codes to alter times so do you remember any problems with fake times/kudos scores? And finally, did you participate in any Dreamarena Chat rooms/message boards devoted to MSR?. Apologies for asking so many questions.
You may be interested to know that a fan MSR ranking has been made. If you still play the game and can link up your Dreamcast to the web via DreamPi, you can access this ranking via MSR's online browser. Here's a Youtube video showing the fan ranking: https://youtu.be/n0OAfaMkPPs?t=2294.
Many thanks again.
RJAY63
Thanks RJAY63, appreciate you checking. I'll keep searching and maybe one day I'll find the times!
DeleteYou are correct, it's actually a Swatch Chrono 1998 - SCK413 in a very fetching orange. I've no idea if every winner had the same, or whether we just got whatever swag Swatch had available.
I did have that other MSR wristwatch however! My memory of it was that it was very cheap and either the strap broke or the logo rubbed off very quickly.
My memories of the rankings are a bit hazy unfortunately. I remember competing in the speed challenge regularly, but maybe only the other time trials a handful of times. You're probably right in that it was delayed which may have pushed me more to the speed challenge and . I don't recall a 50Hz/60Hz leader board (or submitting different times for each) - I don't know if they code optimised for 50Hz so the times would be identical?
I don't recall having any conversations or concerns about fake times, but I think I reached as high as 5th in the rankings and thought how difficult it would be to improve from there. Yet others did manage to improve their times. I think just for fun I checked in maybe a month or two after the competition ended to see if I could improve and noticed the winning times had been beaten, maybe by a decent margin that I just didn't think was possible. However I think by that point I'd moved into playing Phantasy Star Online.
Thanks for the heads up on the rankings. I do have all my DC stuff so may get myself back online at some point!
Thanks for replying. That's a nice watch; I know Swatch had some kind of deal with Sega Europe regarding MSR ('Swatch Timing' appears during gameplay). IMO, I think your prize was better than the Dreamcast steering wheels the winners got!
DeleteYes, the grey/black MSR watch is just a cheap digital model with the MSR logo sprayed on. Mine still works although the light died ages ago.
I did play MSR in 50hz recently and noticed a big increase in my lap times. Therefore it seems this game was optimised for 60hz play. I found nearly all the empty 'New Time Trial' VMU files on an old Angelfire website and they were all 60hz (50hz players cannot use 60hz files and vice versa), hence my curiosity about a separate ranking.
Apparently it's very easy to hack VMU saves for MSR and alter times/scores (as per this Usenet archive thread: https://groups.google.com/g/uk.games.video.dreamcast/c/-8gxwPhZfac/m/vbVptxSxrwQJ). You also have Action Replay/Xploder/Gameshark codes which you may have also encountered as a PSO player. So I dare say some of those post competition times were fake.
Sadly in that era, a lot of companies simply wiped any internet rankings without trace. This happened with original XBOX Live racers; if there was cheating, they would clear the whole ranking instead of deleting suspicious or unproven scores/times. Very few pictures/videos of Dreamarena exist post-closure and I doubt Sega Europe had preservation on the forefront of their mind (MSR and Dreamcast were both commercial flops and Sega were exiting the hardware business). A fan may have kept a copy on a dead website that's somewhere in the Wayback Machine, however it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. I will keep looking however and any interesting information I find in the meantime will get posted on this blog.
Finally, do you remember participating on any dedicated Dreamarena messageboards/chat for MSR?
Thanks again for replying.
RJAY63
In hindsight yes I'd agree that the watch is quite a nice prize!
DeleteI definitely remember a lot of 'duping' in PSO through cheat devices and loads of modified weapons etc were always being shared the longer the game ran for, so I agree it was probably a case of further cheating. I wonder if it deteriorated to how some online times ended up for other games where the winning times end up 00:00:00 as any pretence of real times disappears (I think this happened in maybe Dirt 2?).
My only other thought on the times would be whether they'd have been printed in a magazine somewhere. CVG in the UK used to have a pull out centre section with cheats, guides and times etc for a few years. However it seems unlikely!
No sadly I don't recall using any messageboards/chat around MSR or much else to be honest. I may have, but just can't remember. I seem to remember doing a bit of searching for hidden MSR content as I remember the developers wanted to model Alcatraz as an additional track but didn't have the time to implement (this may have been covered in Edge magazine).
Thanks for replying.
DeleteWhile Action Replay '0.00' times on MSR are obvious and could be ignored, 'hex edit hacking' VMU saves to manually adjust times is much more difficult to prove as fake. For example, if the best time on the London track was 1'10.422, you could have simply adjusted your time to something like 1'10.225 and upload it. Apparently, there is no protection on the save file so I guess it was easy to get away with. You also couldn't upload/download ghosts on the Speed Challenge ranking due to the way the game saved them (they are saved as standard 'ghost attack' files and do not reappear on Speed Challenge when you quit/resume a game), nor does the game have any replay files (a la Daytona USA 2001).
I also notice that the above player's Speed Challenge times did not drop down the rank significantly over those 10 months (with the exception of Tokyo). That indicates that MSR's Speed Challenge rankings were not particularly popular after the competitions. I would say that most people who went online with MSR would have been interested in the Kudos ranking, however that would have been pretty much broken from the outset.
Unfortunately CVG stopped doing the 'Freeplay' pullout months before MSR was released (I checked scanned copies of the magazine around the 2000-2001 period). The only magazine that gave coverage to the Speed Challenge was ODM: Official Dreamcast Magazine from March 2001 (Issue 17) which did a strategy guide on the Speed Challenge courses and where I took the London leaderboard screenshot from. No other screenshots or time listings appeared. I have checked Dreamcast magazine scans from the UK, France, Germany and Spain, and the best I found were brief mentions (no times/competition results). There was a chance that ODM's website mentioned it on their news pages, however I've checked the remains at Archive.org and found nothing from that time period. Even the interview with the San Francisco Challenge winner ('Sirus') mentions no times.
I know there was a MSR message board on Dreamarena as an old Angelfire website gave a link to it. I guess that was where the majority of Speed Challenge discussion took place as no other message boards (that I have found) really discussed it. Bizarre Creations' own EZboard forum (before they upgraded) didn't mention it at all. Only the old newsgroup uk.games.video.dreamcast archived by Google Groups makes any reference to it but even that's very basic.
Oh, the Alcatraz subject was mentioned in ODM issue #16 (Feb 2001) on page 21. It's part of a 'Best Of The Best' feature that included MSR; you can see it mentioned under the 'Did You Know?' sub-heading.
DeleteI think my username at the time was Ryu17 (maybe Ryo17)
ReplyDelete