So, what can we do to celebrate these events? What I have planned for all of us is a special look at the rarest version of MGS ever manufactured: the Dreamcast version!
Er, the Bleemcast version.

MGS was huger than huge, and if you don't believe FF7 was the greatest PS1 game ever made, then you believe this was. (Everyone who said "FF8"...get off my site.) At the time, Dreamcast was the newest console available, and also the most hackable. So....a small company decided to make a disc that would let you play MGS on your Dreamcast, with improved graphics. Was that legal? Well.......it was a gray area.

"Bleem!" was already in trouble with Sony Corp. with its original release, a commercial emulator for the Playstation that would allow you to play any game for that console on your computer. Emulators, technically, are not illegal, but what you do with them might be, yadda yadda yadda, we know all that by now. Of course, no one had yet tried to sell one in a real market, and when Bleem! did just that, you can bet they were hit hard with litigation.

Bleemcast for Metal Gear Solid turned out to be Bleem!'s last release before they were sued into oblivion. Let's inspect it thoroughly, shall we?

Bleemcast for MGS is a two-sided boot disc: one for Disc 1 and the other for Disc 2.

The Dreamcast's boot screen had a built in "Licensed by Sega" notice. The third-party's logo would appear below it...in Bleem's case, it had to be a disclaimer instead. By the way, anything Bleem! produced was always drenched in rebellious sarcasm, case in point:

And there it is--the screen that confirms you can now play MGS on your Dreamcast. It doesn't take long....first the "legal stuff" screen appears, and then this, and you're good to go...though you can look at some other screens by pushing the listed buttons:

They're unfortunately right about saving your game...you need an entire VMU just for this one title. Sony had nothing to worry about. Before Bleem! put this out, the PS2 was released, and it performs the exact same enhancement techniques on all PS1 titles that Bleemcast does for this one game. There is no point in owning this whatsoever (it's my cousin's copy).

COMPARISON ONE: THE KONAMI SCREEN
Boy, the PS2 one looks TERRIBLE! ....It's not the PS2, really, it's the fact that my capture device seems to like the Dreamcast better.

COMPARISON TWO: THE TITLE SCREEN
On all comparisons, the Dreamcast is on the left and the PS2 is on the right. The only difference I can see here is that the Dreamcast displays the game brighter.

COMPARISON 3: THE CODEC SCREEN
This was probably unnecessary...oh well, I did it anyway.

Another thing I notice here is that the PS2 smoothed out the pixels in a more natural way than Bleemcast did. On Bleemcast, the stains on the metal box appear in clumps. The colors are also richer on PS2.

Again, the graphics look smoother on the PS2, while they're brighter on the Dreamcast.

The most hideous difference is that Bleemcast smoothing attempted to smooth everything, even the fonts. Bleem! claims it was unavoidable, yet on the PS2 it was clearly avoided.

In short, Bleemcast for Metal Gear Solid is only worth owning for the serious MGS collector...like my cousin, who has a lot more than this. If you own "The Document of MGS2" or even know what that is, you either want this rare disc or have it already. As for the rest of us, you've just seen all you could possibly get out of it.

Click HERE to return to the main page
OR
click HERE to read the full list of things the glitched Colonel says at the end of MGS2...you know you want to.