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Well, I finally got a hold of a sega saturn a few months ago. I've only played a couple of games, but its clear that some of the developers must have been smoking something bad. (NiGHTS).
I think if Sega would have skipped the saturn entirely and held the Genesis until the dreamcast they would have been much better off.
I think they should have concentrated on more 2D and 2.5D games, which was where the Saturn's strength was. They could have brought over more games to beef up its domestic library too. Some decisions were just stupid, like passing up Thunder Force V (wtf?) and Deep Fear (it was already in English!).
Hindsight is 2020.
Genesis could've easily survived to the late 90's, the same way PSone survived until just recently, and snes survived until late 90's
Sega shouldn't have given up on it so quickly.
<sigh>
I would snag a Saturn, but I'm not about to wade into that market. Faaaaaaaar too pricey for this gamer.
Most domestic titles are cheap, with the exception of the final three or four releases (Burning Rangers, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Shining Force III, House of the Dead, etc). Most imports are cheap too.
Of course, Radiant and things of that nature will cost you a kidney....and your first born child.
I was very impressed with Street Figher Alpha 2, but not so impressed with Nights. Nights was fun and fast, but it was no sonic.
Don't know if it was worth the money i spent on it.
But its more sega stuff I didn't have before =)
Well maybe you shouldn't try to play NiGHTS like Sonic ;)
Because quite frankly, SFA2 only entertained me in Multiplayer.
In any case, NiGHTS was created to reflect the readings the team did on Dream research and philosophy. So it more or less reflects the mind of some old European author.
But then again, Naka did come up with Billy Hatcher...
Now there's a sugar coated acid-shroom for ya :shock:
La La lala LA lalala LA LA LALA LAA -do do doot doo-
Also (3D wise), the Saturn was designed to work with 'quads' rather than polygons. Which gives the Saturn the graphical edge over the PSX when compitent 3D programers are involved. Since many western developers sucked at the time, they didn't know how to work with quads. The Saturn COULD technecally do normal pollygons, but it somehow took extra effort to get it to work that way...to a lesser extent even.
In any case I love my Saturn...and find it to be 8x the console the DC ever was.
I think the biggest mistake Sega did with Saturn was that they didn't do enough sequels to Genesis hits. We didn't get new Sonic, Streets of Rage 4 or Phantasy Star 5. Personally, I don't care. Instead we got Nights, Burning Rangers, Guardian Heroes, Panzer Dragoon Saga and many other great games. The majority of gamers didn't understand the greatness of these games, because there wasn't a number after title of the game. Their loss, not mine.
Altough I started my gaming career with Mega Drive, Saturn is my favorite console. Only drawback is that you have to buy import games, or you miss many gems. And many games are ridiculously overpriced.
The system was also overpriced when it was released, making it easier for the other companies to take over the marketshare.
Saturn's real problem is that it was marred by stupid politics within Sega. Sega Europe had proven themselves capable of handling their own affairs by managing two great successes in a row, and SoA's Tom Kalinske had proven himself a competent decision maker, but SoJ decided to seize more control for itself and overrode certain business decisions. SoJ proceeded to make worldwide decisions based solely on Japan. Naka's threatening to leave the company certainly didn't help, nor did the company's unwillingness to get decent dev kits out in a timely manner (A few third parties actually created their own dev kits from scratch because it was easier to do that than work with Sega's!).
In any case, it's a great system with plenty of great games.
I was just recently reading over a discussion on the ins and outs of developing for the Saturn, and apparantly it's one hell of a tricky beast to get the most out of. What I didn't previously know was that Sega designed the Saturn hardware to be nearly 2D gaming exclusive. It wasn't until Sega realized the sudden surge in the popularity of 3D that they decided to make changes to the Saturn hardware near the end of its development to allow for significantly stronger 3D capabilities. Whoopsie.
I've wanted a Saturn since first playing a demo of Panzer Dragoon at a Blockbuster years and years ago, but have never got around to owning one. After reading through a bunch of mid-nineties Gamefans, the Saturn has once again peaked my immediate interest.. once some more disposable income becomes available, I think I'll buy'er proper. Panzer Dragoon, 'tis been so long..
heh, if it wasn't for the two extra 3d processors it'd be a lot closer to the 32x than they would ever like to admit.
Pity, the 32x had potential.
That's just a common misconception; it's not accurate. The original design was based around doing two things, the foremost being arcade ports for both the System 32 (2d) and Model 1 (3d) boards. It just so happens that both System 32 and Model 1 are based around the same chipset, even though one is designed for 2d games and one for 3d. The latter of the "two things" is that Sega was looking to better the 3DO in every aspect, and 3DO was the first console designed with any 3d graphics capabilities in mind.Quote:
Originally Posted by Drixxel
What is accurate, however, is that the old design was based around one central processor, with the design changed in order to beef up its capabilities without going completely back to the drawing board.
It's inaccurate to imply that Sega just happened to "realize" the sudden surge in popularity of 3d -- their Model 1 hardware debuted in 1992.
Thus concludes another lesson in "Don't believe everything you read on the intraweb."
Sorry to spew out falsified info. There were two people claiming to be Saturn developers talking to each other in that discussion I was reading over, I assumed they knew their shit. It would seem theirs was untrue shit.
No apologies necessary, I've heard much worse. :PQuote:
Originally Posted by Drixxel
People tend to jump to the conclusion that designing hardware for 2d and designing it for 3d are two mutually exclusive things. It's not really the case.
I remember reading an interview with someone from Realtime Associates who said that the early dev kits were made in such a way that you basically had to use 2d programming techniques for 3d games. The hardware design had been tweaked pretty late and the dev kits were rushed, and Sega anticipated that developers would continue to focus on 2d games until they made a slow transition to 3d. He explained that as the reason Bug!, being a 3d game, used sprites and scaling.
I also heard the saturn was harder to program for, this is around the time they were transitioning from Assembly programming of consoles to C or C++ programming.
That was what supposedly made 3rd parties shy away from it. It was notorious for being hard to work with, and very few developers could match what Sega themselves were able to put out.
Add that Sega was reluctant to share their development libraries and it's no wonder no one wanted to work with the Saturn.
The Saturn is probably my favorite videogame system ever. Back when it was "new" (as in, games were still being released in the US), my friends and I had so much fun playing games like multi-player Saturn Bomberman (some multi-taps and about 8 human players is great fun), Guardian Heroes, and various 2d fighters. Even now, the games haven't diminished in quality for me, so it isn't just nostalgia. In fact, a couple of my friends had a Saturn Bomberman tournament a few weeks back.
As for Nights, I thought it was pretty fun...especially Christmas Nights, that was one of the coolest Christmas presents I recieved video-game wise (Sega gave it out free at various store-chains).
NiGHTS is pretty much my favorite game ever. It's absolute genius, and infinitely replayable.
Has anyone installed a mod switch?
I wanted to, since I've heard that they're very easy to do. Never got around to it though.
I have all the stuff to install the switch, I just haven't had time to install it... I was playing sonic 3 most of this weekend.
Remember Genesis is relatively new to me, since I never owned one, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit.
My old Saturn had a JP-US mod switch (I just used an ST Key for PAL games). I didn't know what I was doing at all, and yet I managed to do it just fine.
Guardian Heroes ain't cheap.Quote:
Originally Posted by Melf
Saturn being more of a 2D machine (despite what was attempted in America), it holds up better than the fugly 3D majority of PS games today. Same thing with SNES and Genesis -- I'd argue they look much mmore pleasing to the eye than a great number of PS games.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mustadio
I love all the systems mentioned, but some of the 3D from the mid-90's is atrocious. Saturn ironically has some of the worst examples -- Daytona makes me scream in horror. But it's the only version with the classic "Daaayyytona!" song -- damn the remixed Dreamcast version.
The Saturn had some great games, no doubt, but IMO it pales in comparision to the DC and especially the PSX's library. Not enough games came out in the U.S. and too many that did focused on the atrocious 3-D of the time. It was the main reason I stuck with my Genny for so long. To many people the DC was the true succesor to the Genesis as the DC brought that Sega goodness that we had felt during the Genesis days, too bad is wasn't enough as Sega had burned too many with the Saturn.
The Saturn WAS designed with 3D in mind, but not neccesssarily with polygons.
It worked better with 'quads' than it did with polygons. . .which took more effort to produce.
In essence, it could have out-performed the PSX 3D-wise across the board (rather than just 1st party) had sega decided to share their tools.
If that's the case why are Sega made 3-D games like Fighting Vipers, Burning Rangers, Panzer Dragoon series, Shining Force 3/Wisdom/Holy Ark, even Virtua Fighter 1&2 so horribly bad looking compared to what was available on the PSX? And these are games that looked alot better than most of the crap 3rd parties pumped out! I have no problem going back and playing my Genesis games, but putting one these Saturn games in, even when they happen to be really great games, is such a painfull visual experience. Early 3-D was just quite frankly a horrid time, visually speaking, for video gaming.
Ummm, Vicman... when did the Saturn fall out? Pretty Early in the PSX life time! Say for Shining Force 3... put it against say FF7. SF3 used FULL 3D realms where FF7 used only 3D characters on 2D backdrops that were prerendered 3D. (The only 3D was in the world map) Compare these graphics. Hrmm, the SF3 seems about the same if not better 3D wise on the characters IMO and they pull that off all while displaying a full 3D world around it.
Take Burning Rangers. Again Full 3D world, compare it to other PSX games released the same time... the were on par if not better. This game moved smooth with a LOT going on at once.
Again the Panzer Series was a huge game with tons going on.
Compare all these games to games at the same time. PSX didn't start shelling out better looking games until late in its appearance when developers had a lot of time with the machine and everything. (if time didn't improve graphics then why doesn't FF7 look like FF9????).
Or lets take a game that is on BOTH consoles. Tomb Raider... IMO the saturn looks and feels better then the PSX one (though the computer one is the best all together). Controls were tighter, graphics cleaner, framerate better.
But then again, RE was much better on PSX... maybe but then again RE was made for the PSX first.
And wait a second... compare VF 1 and 2 (which 1 was a pre Saturn title in the Arcades!) to fighters released that freaking early in the PSX's life! I can not recall any of the 3D fighters that early in its life playing any better then VF!!!! VF was amazing for its time! How do you think its got its name as being a great fighter!? Shit its the FIRST 3D fighter, they are the founders of it and it plays just as good, actually better then 3D fighters that came out just after it.
The Saturn Version of Tomb Raider actually looks better than the PSX version. It was originally supposed to be exclusive to Saturn and PC untill CORE and Eidos sold out.
VF2, and the Panzer games looked better than the PSX during their time, but as you know, the saturn died rather early in the states. I remember reviewers absolutely raving about VF2 and all the Panzer games. But since the PSX got more games in the end, there are usually more comparisons drawn between more recent PSX games.
It got to the point where games were designed with the PSX in mind, and later ported to the Saturn. . .which wasn't easy to do pollys on.
The Saturn version of Powerslave is also a nice example of a job well done over the PSX version.
Beyond the issue of play -- VF is generally seen as the best playing 3D fighter ever -- Toshinden which came out around the same time as Saturn VF kicks the crap out of it and anything else the Saturn was doing at the time graphically, which is where the argument as to Saturn's capabilities lies.
Or compare Ridge Racer on PS to Daytona. An in-house game from Sega themselves, Daytona is one of the ugliest arcade ports I have seen in the modern era -- in fact, that's probably an understatement; more like it is the most pathetic big-name arcade to console port graphically I have seen. AT least in the 90's.
Just two examples. I don't know if the Saturn had some awesome 3D power that was hidden within it, but I think it's obvious that if this is true it was just buried too deep.
And again I'd rethink that Panzer Dragoon comment.
I only recently played Panzer Dragoon saga about a year ago - year and half ago. Even after owning an XBOX PDS was breathtaking to me with its beautiful graphics. the maps were gorgeous (especially the ancient lake) the battles were VERY detailed. Boss battles insanely detailed with gigantic bosses. The 3D graphics in this game are extremely nicer then FF7 and only released a mere 5 months after it. Shit it was released before 8 and the graphics wow me even more then FF8 did! Yeah Panzer Dragoon 1 looks kinda meh... but then again Panzer Dragoon is one of the very early 3D games for it, being released a mere 3 months into the PSXs life time. Check some release titles on the PSX and compare them to Panzer Dragoon! BIG DIFFERENCE.
TOSHINDEN!?
WHAT! that game plays like ass... much prettier then VF1 true (but then VF1 was a port of a 2-3 year old arcade game...)
In the long haul, yes the PSX certainly out performs the Saturn. It sure did put out some great games though that graphically could compete with the PSX at the time. There just wasn't enough of them.
I'm not talking about playability, I'm talking about graphics -- one of the true tests of a system's abilities from the base standard of its chips, as opposed to playability which can still be found on an Atari console of your choice today.Quote:
Originally Posted by lordofduct
But even more tellingly, it was a lousy port. The Saturn was just too much of a bear to program for, even for Sega's teams.Quote:
much prettier then VF1 true (but then VF1 was a port of a 2-3 year old arcade game...
I'd actually say that the PS looked great early, as opposed to Saturn which remained hit or miss for the majority of its existence. I can't say that there were too many later PS games that wowed me though -- it didn't continue to improve late in its life graphically to the extent that the SNES or Genesis did the previous generation. But then, I can't say that for any of the consoles from Sony's initial era in the business -- I can't think of an N64 game that looks dramatically better, or generally as good, as Wave Race 64 for example.Quote:
Originally Posted by lordofduct
VF2 is a great looking game on Saturn though. The biggest blunders of the Saturn beyond the graphical issues were really about timing -- it was released too early with unimpressive software for the price, whereas Sony came in cheaper with better looking software overall and tons of positive hype. The Saturn didn't really get its killer apps until the holiday season had arrived, and in this case it was too late. The timing for Sega was just screwed that year, and it led to their downfall -- more specifically, their choices did. The early Saturn release has to stand as the decision that, from the line of events as we know them, doomed the system here.
Here's an easy comparison since you guys want to make it seem like it took forever for PSX games to look better than Saturn games. Virtua Fighter 2 came out in Japan for the Saturn in 12/01/95 according to Gamefaqs. Soul Blade, the precursor to Soul Calibur, came out in 12/20/96.
VF2:
http://www.videogamecritic.net/image...a_fighter_2.jp
http://www.retrogaming.it/saturn/virtuafighter_06.jpg
http://www.retrogaming.it/saturn/virtuafighter_07.jpg
Soul Blade:
http://www.videogamecritic.net/images/ps/soul_blade.jpg
http://www.emulatronia.com/fotos/soulblade1.jpg
http://www.vidgames.com/ps/screens/soulblade4.jpg
Here's another comparison. SF3 came 12/11/97, FF7 came out 01/31/97:
SF3:
http://www.geedorah.com/img/upl/d0af...rce_3_0012.jpg
http://guidesat.free.fr/screen/shiningforce3-32.jpg
http://guidesat.free.fr/screen/shiningforce3-37.jpg
http://www.rpgfan.com/pics/sf3/sf3-22.jpg
FF7:
http://www.gamingbliss.com/games/uns...alfantasy7.jpg
http://www.gamingbliss.com/games/uns...fantasy7_1.jpg
http://www.rpgfan.com/pics/ff7/ff7-30.jpg
One last one DOA Saturn:
http://www.classicgaming.com/reviews/doa/doasaturn8.jpg
DOA Playstation:
http://www.classicgaming.com/reviews/doa/psx4.jpg
Man that Saturn one looks great doesn't it? And these 2 versions only came out a month apart.
Top this with the fact that:
Burning Rangers 02/26/98 JP
Panzer Dragoon 03/10/95 JP
Panzer Dragoon Zweii 03/22/96 JP
Panzer Dragoon Saga 01/29/98 JP
Shining Force 3 12/11/97 JP
So outside of Panzer 1 most of these games came out in the middle of the 32 bit era (1994-1999). And again and again in those pictures above the PSX had better lighting and particle effects than Saturn's best games. And not as you guys have suggested way late into the PSX's life span but around the same time these first party Saturn games were coming out. Are you telling me PSX's best graphical games took till 1998/1999 and beyond to start beating out Saturn's first party games? Please, that's just pure bunk.
As far as VF2 versus Soul Blade, though the two were a year apart in release VF2 remains the Saturns best looking (and playing) fighter, but outside of resolution it pales in graphical prowess next to SB. The backgrounds were 2D on SVF2 which allowed the programmers to up the polygon count on the characters, whereas the arcade version of VF2 and PS port of SB (which ran on Playstation hardware in the arcade) had 3D backgrounds.
I don't think there's much doubt that SB could not have ever have been pulled off at or near the same level on Saturn.
Nonetheless Sega lost me as a fan during that timeframe. I fell in love with them not only for their games but for the way they treated their userbase. They worked hard to earn my family's money during the Genesis era. They didn't do that during the Saturn era, and by the time they tried to make it all up during this era with the DC it was too late for most people unfortunately.
I am a gamer first and a Sega fan second. If and when a company I like starts to screw with me and my money I have no problem taking it elsewhere. It's the reason I don't like Nintendo all that much and don't like Sony that much anymore either. Sega at least made up with the DC, they tried so hard and it was a shame that system didn't last longer than it did.
IMO Gaming history has repeated itself in almost each generation as the downfall of a once gaming giant happens when their arrogance superceeds their intelligence. It happened to Atari, then Nintendo, then Sega, and eventually it'll happen to Sony as well if they price their PS3 @ $400 USD. A company earns it's position via great/big name games and aggressive pricing/marketing. After it's name is established it can ride on it's laurels, but only for so long, eventually its arrogance/liberties taken with consumers will come to bite it in the ass.
Yep, I became a sega fan, AFTER everything went down. Good development house, bad corporate structure.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vicman
I agree, each generation history has repeated itself, with the arrogance of corporate management.
Generally I don't like the microsoft behemoth. And I don't appreciate Sony's behavior and marketing with the ps2. This generation I really enjoyed the cube the most.
I'll be keeping a close eye next generation, but it seems that nintendo has the right idea by making a const concious and fun system, ala' Dreamcast.
If you look closely at the DOA pics you'll notice that the PSX version never even tried to do full 3D backgrounds like the Saturn version.
There is also favortism in Team Ninja toward the Saturn Version. As it was included with the DOA-U release instead of the PSX one.
Those FFVII shots look like they were taken from the PC version. The PSX never had resolutions THAT sharp. Even FFVIII had horrendous jaggies.
Sega lost my loyalty during that time as well for how they managed themselves. Very little good was happening.
But I still Love my Saturn,