This brought back a flood of wonderful memories. Tying up my parents phone line with the Dreamcast's 56k modem was a formative experience for me as a nerdy middle-schooler.
- The Dreamcast keyboard made communication so much better - I was studying French, and joined European servers sometimes for the thrill of using the language with real Francophones (VERY rudimentarily)
- I once met someone whose job was composing jingles and writing slogans for a greeting card company, which I found really fascinating for some reason, and I spent an hour peppering them with questions about it
- The lore of the "gladius spike", a supposedly really rare dual-saber weapon that never actually existed
- Being given a treasure trove of the rarest items in the game by a duper named "Cap'n PooBeard"; the drop rates were so ludicrously, absurdly low that I would never have seen some of this stuff otherwise (Chain Sawd, Spread Needle...)
- The fear and thrill of playing with strangers, due to the mechanic that you drop your weapon when you die, allowing others to steal it
- The vibey, synth-heavy soundtrack and diverse biomes
I haven't played it in decades, but I bet that it still holds up. :)
It went beyond duping, you could construct your own completely unique weapon stats with gameshark codes at the bank.
Prototypal item crafting
I had no idea. Did you take part in it?
Typically I would feel that this sort of thing is "cheating" and takes away from the fun of a game, but in this case it didn't have that effect on me. The rare loot hunt wasn't what pulled me in so much as the simple joy of grinding away at monsters and hanging out with friends.
The drop rates on dreamcast were absolutely broken, some weapons had a literal one-in-a-million (or worse!) chance at dropping. I spent over 200 hours playing the game, and the only legitimate rare I ever found was a double-saber, which isn't even that rare.