Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six with Eagle Watch Missions

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six with Eagle Watch Missions brought to the Dreamcast a reworked version of the tactical shooter originally made for PC by Red Storm Entertainment, a studio founded by writer Tom Clancy. The 2000 console version combined the original game with the Eagle Watch Missions expansion, so players got dozens of missions for the counter-terrorist team Rainbow right away, without having to buy anything extra — a rarity on consoles at the time.

The game differed fundamentally from the dominant action shooters of the time — it emphasized a planning phase before each mission, where the player laid out the routes of individual squads, their loadouts, and the order of entry into a room, only then watching how the carefully prepared plan played out in actual combat. The execution itself was mercilessly realistic: a single hit often meant a soldier's death, and if the team leader fell, the mission ended in failure regardless of how many terrorists remained to be eliminated, forcing players to act carefully and deliberately rather than rushing in.

The port to the Dreamcast controller was a necessary compromise, since the game had originally been designed for mouse and keyboard, and precise aiming and squad control translated only awkwardly to a gamepad; even so, it offered console players a unique taste of team tactics they couldn't find anywhere else on Sega's console. The developers tried to simplify the controls with contextual menus and quick commands, which could at least partially substitute for a mouse's precision. The game thus became one of the few representatives of the tactical shooter genre in the Dreamcast library, which otherwise leaned toward fast arcade action and sports titles. By combining the base game with the Eagle Watch Missions expansion in one package, the console version paradoxically offered more generous content than many contemporary PC editions, which still makes it an interesting choice today for fans of military tactics on consoles.

Why play it: It brings to the Dreamcast tactical tension and a constant risk of death that no other action game on the console offered at the time.