I was psyched when I bought this item: 1600 blocks of memory for $19.95 at EBX in Boston. It seemed like I would be able to store all my gamesaves on this one unit, while it would also allow me to manage the gamesaves on the PC and store them on the PC as well.

Unfortunately, it turned into a very frustrating experience. Even after I initialized all eight memory banks of 200 blocks through the DreamCast, my games would simply *not* recognize the memory!. I could not save my progress in Jet Grind Radio and Tomb Raider 4 would *hang* (!) on boot-up each time the memory stick was inserted in my controller, so all I could do was turn the power off and on again on the console to try again.

The promising desktop software didn't make me feel any better either. I installed it on both my home desktop (which runs Windows 2000) and my work notebook (which runs Windows NT), but on both machine simply *nothing* happened when I tried running the program. When I checked the gameshark.com website, I found out that this software only runs on Windows95/98/Me. How utterly useless is that?! And there was *no mention* of it on the box, so I could not have known at the time of my purchase.

I went back to EBX, and as soon as the sales guy saw what I was returning he said to me: "Oh, yeah, those are very bad, they only maybe work half the time." Seemed like a true, albeit somewhat positive, statement, but why did they carry this in the first place then?

Anyway, I changed it for a $15 VMU of 200 blocks made by the DreamCast group themselves, and this puppy works absolutely flawlessly. But, after just one evening of game play, this 200 block memory stick is practically filled up already...

*Sigh* I have heard that DreamCast makes a very solid 800 block memory stick as well. I am going to look for one right now.

- Erik

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