Driving Strikers Officially Goes on Sale

Driving Strikers is now on sale physically and digitally for the Dreamcast after going up on publisher Wave Game Studios’ website last Friday. The landmark indie-developed vehicular soccer game is the first online-capable fan-made effort for the Dreamcast. It can be purchased here.

Physical copies cost £19.99 and come with a digital download, while a digital download alone costs £14.99.

Physical purchases can choose among European, North American and Japanese style covers.

The digital version can be downloaded now and either burned to a CD or added to an SD card for play via an optical drive emulator, but physical copies won’t begin to ship until July 24.

That’s also when Driving Strikers is set to release on Steam. It originally was meant to hit that PC digital retailer the same time as the Dreamcast version, but it was pushed back by a couple of weeks.

The game’s programmer, Luke Benstead, aka Kazade, said on Twitter that the PC version will include a few changes from its Dreamcast one, including language auto-detection, a choice of resolution between windowed and fullscreen, networking fixes, a quick chat function and higher resolution textures in some places. Gameplay will be identical between the two, he added.

And that’s important because there will be crossplay between the Dreamcast and PC versions of Driving Strikers, a feat only seen in a couple of the Sega console’s retail releases — namely, Quake III: Arena and 4×4 Evolution.

A Linux version is planned for the near future, and that’s expected to have crossplay with Windows and the Dreamcast, too.

Driving Strikers is a two-on-two top-down soccer (football?) game in which players control cars instead of people. The comparisons to Rocket League are hard to avoid, but Driving Strikers has its own vibe that feels right at home on the Dreamcast with “Blue Sky Beach” written across arena walls overlooked by sunkissed palm trees.

The ball bounces around with believable physics, as do the cars when they bump into each other and the walls. The arena is small, giving matches a fast pace with a lot of action followed by a camera that dynamically zooms in and out of the 3D playfield.

Wave Game Studios’ product page says that Driving Strikers is region-free and fully supports PAL’s 50 Hz video standard as well as NTSC’s 60 Hz. Not only that, it’s capable of displaying a 480p resolution and in anamorphic widescreen for TVs that support those features.

The site lists other features of the game, including:

• Single-player Quick Match and League
• Online multiplayer (2-4 players)
• Local multiplayer (1-4 players)
• Optional AI-controlled cars
• Six unique stadiums
• Eight car designs
• Autosave to VMU (required – 2 blocks)
• Jump Pack support
• Online League Table

Driving Strikers has been in development since November 2021 by a group calling themselves Reality Jump. They include Benstead, the programmer; David Reichelt, who created the stadium and menu art; and George Ryan, who produced the music.

No homebrew Dreamcast game has ever featured online play before. The feat was made possible by creating matchmaking services that hook into networking code in KallistiOS, an open-source homebrew Dreamcast software development kit, as Benstead told Shiro when a demo of the game released in October last year.

Benstead discussed on Twitter what’s coming up next now that Driving Strikers’ Dreamcast version is released:

“First up, the Steam Windows and Linux release is close to being finished with a release date of 24/7. After that I’ll be polishing up the Reality Jump web service, adding leaderboards, password reset etc. Next I’ll be looking into an Android port of the game.

And on the side, there’s the potential for a PSP port of Strikers … we’ll see :)”

— Luke Benstead