All-time Favorite Sega system?

[retrospiel]

It's sooo sad how Saturn is the ultimate 2D gaming machine but was released at a time when no one cared for 2D anymore...

[kool kitty89]

It's sooo sad how Saturn is the ultimate 2D gaming machine but was released at a time when no one cared for 2D anymore...

Except that it wasn't even that... There were some significant bugs (namely broken sprite transparency forcing developers to use dithering or software rendered sprites), and it wasn't the most powerful 2D machine out there either, if you want to get technical. (Jaguar by design was more capable and indeed would have showed it more had the market not turned so heavily towards 3D, and had Atari been in any real position to market it properly -arguably they could have done better but that's another topic)

Then there's later systems which, with less to no emphasis on 2D, simply exceeded power to such a degree that they could do everything the Saturn (or Jaguar, or high end 2D arcade boards) and much more.

Hell, the PSX proved to be capable at most 3D the Saturn pushed, one of the often sited weaknesses not even tied to the 3D oriented architecture, but to lack of RAM expansion.
Hell, the N64 probably could have been pretty damn good in 3D had that even been a minor area of concern (ie have a 2D emphasized microcode implemented)... even as it was the N64 might have been better at 2D than the PSX had the turbo 3D microcode been used. (by the sound of it it stripped added effects down to roughly PSX level for far more polygon throughput -more peak polygon rates would mean more 2D tiles as well -almost triple that of the PSX it seems)
It certainly had the RAM for a lot of animation (not to mention expansion), plus fast streaming from carts for supplementation.

[N.Saibot]

Not to mention how capable of 2D graphics a PS3/Xbox360 would be, if only someone
would program a 2D game for those beasts

Seriously kool kitty, why bother comparing the theoretical 2D capabilites of consoles like
Jaguar and N64? The Jag is just some niche product for collectors, the N64 never did 2D
at all (to my knowledge at least) and PSX was not better at 2D than Saturn.

Saturn on the other hand had a fair amount of high quality 2D games that would blow
people away even to this day imo. Of course, on a modern PC you could do everything
you like with 2D, but there is nothing done.

So the Saturn still remains the home console that would bring you the most amount of
high quality 2D games, hence "the ultimate 2D gaming machine".

[Thenewguy]

Kitty, I think you're overthinking most of this, at the end of the day if you walked into a shop in 1999 and found a PS2 with its whole library available in the shop, and a 360 next to it with 50 odd games selling for cheaper don't you think most people would buy the 360?

Added to that brand names are very important in Europe (unfortunately) if you had the choice between buying a console made by a company famous for making the most state of the art arcade games, or a company famous for making game n' watches what would you choose?

Added to that sports games are important for Europe, what the hell Soccer games did the NES have available? no one here gives a crap about Tecmo Super Bowl, or RBI Baseball, those sports are ultra unpopular in Europe.

Lets have a look at some NES Soccer game reviews from the time -

There's nothing like a good football game, and Nintendo World Cup is nothing like a good football game. Squat, toad-like parodies of players flicker their way around the pitch kicking the ball with only one intent - keeling over and dying at the first opportunity

After the ghastly shambolic mockery they called Nintendo World Cup, I thought that maybe this would be a decent soccer game. I couldn't have been more wrong. Goal! is another Nintendo footballing debacle, a dire travesty purporting to be a simulation of our top national sport.

I didn't think there could be soccer game worse than Nintendo World Cup, but I was wrong and how! Goal! is a crippled, retarded excuse for an NES football game

I was really hoping that I wouldn't have to write another comment that says "Oh no! Not another disappointing Nintendo soccer game". But here it is. Oh no! Not another disappointing Nintendo soccer game. It's not quite as bad as Nintendo World Cup and Goal!, but Hyper Soccer is still poor.

NES Kick Off makes a mockery of the finest soccer game ever and once more leaves the NES without a decent footy game.

It's the utterly brilliant player control and game logic that makes Master System Super Kick Off the superb, highly playable football game it is, and it's the utterly dreadful player control and game logic that makes NES Kick Off the sad, almost unplayable football game it is.

I must say that as a kid I did kind of enjoy playing Nintendo World Cup LOL, but everyone over the age of 11 was having none of that, most people owning a NES just bought Blades of Steel and pretended it was Soccer LOL.

[kool kitty89]

Not to mention how capable of 2D graphics a PS3/Xbox360 would be, if only someone
would program a 2D game for those beasts

Which is exactly what I meant by:
Then there's later systems which, with less to no emphasis on 2D, simply exceeded power to such a degree that they could do everything the Saturn (or Jaguar, or high end 2D arcade boards) and much more.


That and PCs...

Seriously kool kitty, why bother comparing the theoretical 2D capabilites of consoles like
Jaguar and N64? The Jag is just some niche product for collectors, the N64 never did 2D
at all (to my knowledge at least) and PSX was not better at 2D than Saturn.

I was simply arguing the point of the Saturn genuinely being the ultimate 2D machine... and No the PSX was not technically better in some areas (at least its transparency worked right -and it had some other trade-offs in 2D vs the saturn -some advantages but the biggest disadvantage was the Saturn's BG generator -which doesn't really show in most 2D game of the era).
But my point was that the PSX managed close Saturn level 2D in many cases (with some advantages -but the different architectures hurt ports from both sides)
but one of the major points often pointed at the saturn for 2D "superiority" is animation/content of arcade ports, often in context of the RAM cart, and that's not at all related to the Saturn's 2D capabilities. (and would be the area where the Jaguar would also be at an even greater disadvantage, and the reason I mentioned the N64 -more RAM, actually slightly less than the stock Saturn, though unified rather than dedicated to subsystems, and the RAM expansion was full speed not slow RAM as on the Saturn -with the 4 MB RAM cart on the Saturn it still had more total RAM than the N64+expansion PAK, but that was split up so a somewhat different context)

Saturn on the other hand had a fair amount of high quality 2D games that would blow
people away even to this day imo. Of course, on a modern PC you could do everything
you like with 2D, but there is nothing done.

Well, there's a little... but then if you take into account that you can actually emulated advanced 2D arcade games better than most/any console ports... (I think many high-end 2D arcade boards are better emulated in MAME than the Saturn)
But again, in many cases the PSX pulled off quite impressive stuff as well, and there have been several good arcade compilations on the Xbox/PS2 and more on the 360/PS3, plus some on PC (other than emulation) and Virtual coneole as well as PSN and XBLA.

So the Saturn still remains the home console that would bring you the most amount of
high quality 2D games, hence "the ultimate 2D gaming machine".

Not so much given what I already mentioned... and that would only leave the saturn exclusives, which are limited. -Many arcade ports with better modern compilations -often more than what was ever on the saturn -including Sega own Ages collections for the PS2, 2D games that were on PSX and/or later ported -several superior to Saturn counterparts, though mainly due to catering to the PSX foremost -though there were things like the broken transparency that had to be worked around on the saturn and some other effects the PSX could do in hardware that the Saturn couldn't -the BG layers, again, are the Saturn's strength, but that doesn't show often. (the PSX was pretty much as good with "sprites" both used textured polygons in special modes: the "sprite" mode on both used unscaled rectangles, single point positioning, no scaling, rotating, or warping, Saturn used textured quadrilateral primitives, PSX automatically paired triangles into rectangles for sprite mode, Saturn also supported 2-point objects with scaling and I think rotation, but I don't think the PSX did, both supported fully scaled/rotated/warped 4-point tiles as well, that's actual 3D positioning being applied -PSX of course, supported 3-point traingles as well and had hardware transparency -then there's software effects too, an audio of course)


Another point I was making was that the Saturn didn't need the emphasis on 2D to have good 2D capabilities for the time. The PSX did fine (more so had it supported RAM expansion) and the N64 probably had the potential to be significantly more capable than the PSX in 2D, possibly the Saturn. (definitely from the respect of sprites, not sure about simulating the BG generation the Saturn can do)
Hell, the 3DO is pretty good in 2D, but it's got other limitations. (it used quadrilateral tiles like the Saturn and had workign transparency, but bottlenecked resources, namely CPU/GPU memory contention and no cache on either, plus generally lesser resources than the later consoles -much less powerful CPU even with the contention aside)


Also, don't forget things like the X68000 and FM Towns (and the Marty if you want to go consoles). The PC FX is notable but had an oddly weak sprite engine. (just the PCE's, not even SGX's, but it added a ton of BG layers...)

[kool kitty89]

Kitty, I think you're overthinking most of this, at the end of the day if you walked into a shop in 1999 and found a PS2 with its whole library available in the shop, and a 360 next to it with 50 odd games selling for cheaper don't you think most people would buy the 360?

Huh? It would be really helpful if you'd quote the post you're responding to.
How does that comparison fit in? Are talking about the Saturn vs PSX, or what?

Added to that brand names are very important in Europe (unfortunately) if you had the choice between buying a console made by a company famous for making the most state of the art arcade games, or a company famous for making game n' watches what would you choose?

Oh, so you were talking about the NES vs SMS? Umm... In that case... The SMS was generally more expensive or similarly priced in the US from everything I've seen.
The 7800/games was far cheaper and indeed made by a well know and capable arcade brand (well, the same brand at least -the actual arcade portion was separate and Atari Corp was TTL renamed and with ownership of Atari Inc's consumer properties... Atari Games was more or less much of the classic Atari coin-op people still making arcade games -and publishing under the Tengen label). It didn't have the marketing budget or fsoftware development to back it up though. (actually no 1st party software development unless you include GCC's commissions -GCC designed the console) In Europe's case, Atari Corp had their name in the computer market as well, but in that case, you'd probably opt for the ST anyway (much cheaper games, better graphics, etc), better graphics and sound than the SMS much of the time too, though scrolling was often weak. (some games pulled if off quite well though) And of course the Amiga, but that was more expensive (especially early on) and then the MD followed that; only common disadvantage to computers was the common use of only 1 button joysticks with others occasionally supported but rarely. (other than keyboard support)

The NES had more and better games and superior sound capabilities (more in line with the C64, though even the Speccy 128/ST/CPC were better than the SMS), but the main thing was the marketing was awesome compared to Sega at the time combined with a killer pack-in. They had the budget too, but not the marketing management or the killer games early on. (even Tonka did a better job than Sega had with the SMS in north America -looking at TV and a couple print ads and WTH was with the box art and cartridge design?)

Added to that sports games are important for Europe, what the hell Soccer games did the NES have available? no one here gives a crap about Tecmo Super Bowl, or RBI Baseball, those sports are ultra unpopular in Europe.

More reasons it would have done well in North America.

In Europe, not only did Sega have better marketing and a more fair playing field (due both to Nintendo's late entry and the home computer market balancing things out), but Nintendo also had weaker marketing and less emphasis on games. (and a general lack of RPGs, as niche as they were in some parts of Europe, Sega still released many of their RPGs)



The SMS is a good machine, nothing wrong there, I was just reasoning why it did so much better in Europe... Hell, the PCE/TG-16 likely would have had a better chance in Europe: I'd go as far as saying that, as it was, it could have been smarter to put the main emphasis in western markets on Europe, especially if they could beat the MD there, but that's another topic. (as it was they didn't even bother to go past North America... and the lacked the head start advantage they'd had in Japan over the MD)
It was also 2 years newer than the NES/Famicom, so it had better be more capable... it really should have had sound expansion from the start though. (even a doubled PSG would have been better than nothing -especially if clocked at a different frequency to given a different pitch range as with several sega arcade boards)

[tomaitheous]

The PC FX is notable but had an oddly weak sprite engine. (just the PCE's, not even SGX's, but it added a ton of BG layers...)

No, it had two VDCs like the SGX. But you could combine the sprite and/or BG layers from both VDCs for 256 color cells. Other wise in normal form, you have an SGX style setup. Still nothing compared to the Saturn or PSX as far as sprites go.

[kool kitty89]

No, it had two VDCs like the SGX. But you could combine the sprite and/or BG layers from both VDCs for 256 color cells. Other wise in normal form, you have an SGX style setup. Still nothing compared to the Saturn or PSX as far as sprites go.

Or the Jaguar or 3DO for that matter. (from what I understand the jaguar has a killer sprite engine -one of the key features of the object processor, only scalable though, any rotation/warping has to use the blitter for texture mapping)

The PCFX's main feature was the 6 scrolling BGs (is that including the PCE VDC layers?), to the Saturn's 4, and PSX's which had to simulate BGs with textured tiles or software rendering iirc. (I'd imagine 2D on the N64 was handled similarly -Yoshi's Story, Rampage World Tour and Universal Tour, etc)

[bobbledick]

Except that it wasn't even that... There were some significant bugs (namely broken sprite transparency forcing developers to use dithering or software rendered sprites), and it wasn't the most powerful 2D machine out there either, if you want to get technical. (Jaguar by design was more capable and indeed would have showed it more had the market not turned so heavily towards 3D, and had Atari been in any real position to market it properly -arguably they could have done better but that's another topic)

Then there's later systems which, with less to no emphasis on 2D, simply exceeded power to such a degree that they could do everything the Saturn (or Jaguar, or high end 2D arcade boards) and much more.

Hell, the PSX proved to be capable at most 3D the Saturn pushed, one of the often sited weaknesses not even tied to the 3D oriented architecture, but to lack of RAM expansion.
Hell, the N64 probably could have been pretty damn good in 3D had that even been a minor area of concern (ie have a 2D emphasized microcode implemented)... even as it was the N64 might have been better at 2D than the PSX had the turbo 3D microcode been used. (by the sound of it it stripped added effects down to roughly PSX level for far more polygon throughput -more peak polygon rates would mean more 2D tiles as well -almost triple that of the PSX it seems)
It certainly had the RAM for a lot of animation (not to mention expansion), plus fast streaming from carts for supplementation.

this and the sega marketing team really screwed the pooch on the saturn by rushing it to the market to beat the PS1 instead of waiting to let developers finish their games.

[Thenewguy]

In regards to the earlier Saturn hate, I was just reacting to the Master Sytem bashing

Saturn is a decent console with a large library of good (if a bit overated and overpriced) games.

The SMS was generally more expensive or similarly priced in the US from everything I've seen.

More reasons it would have done well in North America.

In Europe the Master System started off cheaper, and people did care about Soccer games (this was in reply to your mentioning that the UK was Sega biased), buying the console which offers the games you want at a cheaper price does not make us biased, we wanted Soccer games, we wanted Outrun, we wanted Afterburner (), we wanted Space Harrier, we wanted Hang On, we wanted Shinobi, we wanted Wonder Boy (in opposite fashion to the US nobody over here knew Adventure Island was Wonder Boy)

At the end of the day what I'm saying is that I think that all said and done the Master System was simply the better console for the UK market anyway, for the reasons you mentioned

• NES released too late and looking outdated in comparison to 16-bit computers and Master System)

and the ones I mentioned,

• Game library that caters to the UK better with soccer games, and the highly popular in Britain Sega arcade conversions,
  
• Cheaper price, and budget software available (this was very important at the time, people here had less disposable income and the razor blades model was hated, getting negative press constantly in newspapers, saying "they trick you into buying the console cheap and then rip you off with the software") the cheapest Master System games were £10 brand new (card games) whilst the cheapest NES games were closer to £30, in this way you could consider the card slot as possibly a notable feature (and even when the MS II arrived missing the card slot feature the popular card games like Ghost House were all re-released here on cartridges for the same £10 budget price)
  
• Brand name, Sega name was associated with hardcore arcade games in smokey, dirty arcades, Nintendo's was always associated with handhelds and uncool (kiddie) childrens products.
  

The NES had more and better games

No, it had more games, yes, but not better games, the Master System had high tier quality games representing all genre's, there was no lack of quality, just the NES' numbers of good games.

superior sound capabilities (more in line with the C64, though even the Speccy 128/ST/CPC were better than the SMS)

This was a complete non-issue for the most part. I was embroiled in many NES vs Master System arguments as a child and never once did it even occur to me to rub in the technically worse sound chip, I, and everyone I knew on the anti-Master System side just thought the Master System sounded different to the NES, not worse, I wouldn't even know where to start at working out which was better by listening to music, the only reason I know the MS chip is worse is because you all told me. All arguments at the time were based around games (SMB vs Miracle World) or graphics.

In this area I think you also need to take into account that this was before the days of emulation and access to huge amounts of games. Most of us would've only heard like 10 odd NES games and 10 odd Master System games, if you end up playing a lot of Master System games with good soundtracks and NES games with bad then you're going to gravitate towards the Master System having better sound capabilities anyway. Its not like we had heard a mass of Sunsoft and Capcom NES soundtracks at that stage.

In Europe, not only did Sega have better marketing and a more fair playing field (due both to Nintendo's late entry and the home computer market balancing things out), but Nintendo also had weaker marketing and less emphasis on games.

I'm not entirely sure about the marketing side at this stage dude, the Mega Drive now that was marketed waaaay better than the Nintendo consoles, I just looked through some old UK magazines for first year MS/NES adverts and the first thing which is noticeable is that Nintendo have 2 page spreads in the magazines and Sega has 1 page adverts.

In regards to release dates, remember that Nintendo only gained a later release than the Master System in two European countries, Britain, and Italy (2-3 months head start) everywhere else in Europe the NES was released an entire year earlier than the Master System.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to dig up much sales data for the other European countries, though I've seen indications that it was close in France even taking into account the NES' head start (one person on a forum stated with conviction that the NES 1 year sales lead was the only thing keeping it ahead in France), I've heard murmurings that the Master System also outsold NES in Spain and Italy but again, I wouldn't put too much stock in that info.

[bobbledick]

This was a complete non-issue for the most part. I was embroiled in many NES vs Master System arguments as a child and never once did it even occur to me to rub in the technically worse sound chip, I, and everyone I knew on the anti-Master System side just thought the Master System sounded different to the NES, not worse, I wouldn't even know where to start at working out which was better by listening to music, the only reason I know the MS chip is worse is because you all told me. All arguments at the time were based around games (SMB vs Miracle World) or graphics.

In purely technological terms, the default Master system sound chip is inferior to the NES sound chip. It lacks the DPCM channel which provided so many memorable soundtracks on the NES. In every other way, the sound chips of both systems are about dead even. The only other big difference is that the NES uses two pulse channels and one triangle instead of three square waves like the master system uses.

[roundwars]

In every other way, the sound chips of both systems are about dead even. The only other big difference is that the NES uses two pulse channels and one triangle instead of three square waves like the master system uses.

Not true. The NES has greater pitch range and pitch precision and it has multiple available duty cycles for the pulse wave channels. Additionally, the SMS white noise channel has very limited frequency control unless you sacrifice the frequency control from one of the square wave channels. One item in the SMS's favor though is the fact that the NES triangle wave channel has no volume levels available aside from 0% and 100%.

I also vaguely recall hearing that one of them had linear-based volume and one had log-based volume. Not sure which is better or why.

[retrospiel]

You gotta remember that not all games sounded great on NES. And the good Master System games sounded great too: Wonderboy, Sonic, Ninja Gaiden, Sagaia, Streets of Rage, Alex Kidd, Aleste/Power Strike, Golvellius, Psychic World, Phantasy Star, Fantasy Zone, Land of Illusion, Lucky Dime Caper... - they all sounded great!

I think it's just in the review that if you take the average it becomes pretty obvious that the NES has the overall much better sound capabilities.

[Thenewguy]

if you take the average it becomes pretty obvious that the NES has the overall much better sound capabilities.

No, I disagree on this, both chips sound too different to each other, in fact most sound chips have such a distinct sound that I think there's always going to be some level of preference anyway.

Just look at you guys talking about the Mega Drive sound chip, with people even saying its better than the SNES sound chip, as far as I'm concerned the SNES sound chip pretty much utterly wipes the floor with the Mega Drive one overall, with a hugely more noticeable gulf in quality than the Master System/NES ever seemed.

I was a NES owner, and as I said I never realised it technically had a better sound chip than the Master System, and many people I knew hated the NES sound chip the most, a lot of people said the NES sounded like it had a broken sound chip, buzzing with fuzzy distortion.

Heck there were haters out there for all the sound chips irrespective of how technically advanced they were (Mega Drive gets tons of flack itself for being "Scratchy" I've heard a lot of people saying they think the NES sound chip is better than the Mega Drive's).

[retrospiel]

No, I disagree on this, both chips sound too different to each other

In some games it seems hard to tell whether it was generated by the SMS' or the NES' PSG.

Just look at you guys talking about the Mega Drive sound chip, with people even saying its better than the SNES sound chip, as far as I'm concerned the SNES sound chip pretty much utterly wipes the floor with the Mega Drive one overall, with a hugely more noticeable gulf in quality than the Master System/NES ever seemed.

Yes and no.

Yes, because the difference couldn't be greater.

No, because I've not seen too many SNES games that come even close to how epic the MD can sound.

Perhaps I just need some examples of what a good SNES game sounds like. My personal favorites (by music) are F-Zero, Mario Kart, Star Fox, Axelay, and the Final Fight games, but I don't know too many games and haven't played much SNES in years.

I was a NES owner, and as I said I never realised it technically had a better sound chip than the Master System

It comes out in a couple of games that don't have anything comparable on SMS. Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of them.


Ninja Gaiden is a good example of the difference you'd hear in some of the better late NES games:

NES:


Master System:


Both are very different games but this is about the sound chip and the way it's been utilized, not the games themselves. You can definitely hear that the NES has a deeper, richer and more pleasent sound, while the SMS sounds a bit more empty (but still awesome!).

Mega Drive gets tons of flack itself for being "Scratchy" I've heard a lot of people saying they think the NES sound chip is better than the Mega Drive's

There are several issues involved:

1. The sound engines: Almost all US/EU developed games sound terrible. Exceptions: Everything by Matt Furniss.

2. The hardware: Almost all later hardware revisions sound terrible, this affects most model 2s (except for the last batch) and one of the model 1s (the last batch). Personally I think *this* is the reason why people think it would sound "scratchy".

3. Emulation: Emulation always messes up the MD sound, never improves it. I feel that's the opposite with NES and SNES.