Check out battle of the ports

[kool kitty89]

A version of a game with a lower frame rate never is better

That's highly debatable... that's a trade-off all games make: you can have more detail (draw distance and/or complex models) or a higher framerate with the same hardware limits, and even more trade-offs with different hardware. (Sonic Adventure DX on the GC generally looks better, plays similarly well, but has some frame dropping at times compared to the DC version -granted it's more powerful hardware so the graphical difference is considerably more significant than simply trading complexity for framerate).

And it's more or less the difference of 30 FPS to 20 FPS iirc. But poly/second count is closer than that I think.

, especially since we're talking about ~20fps on PS1 here. And yeah, Sega must have paid an awesome amount of cash for games like Toshinden, Wipeout and Destruction Derby being ported to Saturn.

Umm, how many of those were published by Sega? Otherwise that makes no sense. (Sega wouldn't be paying for it)
And again, I was talking 2097, not the original Wipeout.

If you want competitive contemporaries in 1996 try the original Saturn vesion of Tomb Raider vs the slightly later PSX port. (really parallel/multiplatform development) There's trade-offs, but neither is clearly better than the other and both are very competitive.
The reason people know about the PSX game more was due to marketing funds, but almost certainly more likely due to Sony's subsequent buy out for Tomb Raider II as a PSX exclusive the following year and the addition to Laura Croft to Sony's band of mascots.
Back in 1996 when both versions came out, the publicity was almost certainly more even, if still skewed towards the PSX.

[qutote]And yeah, like you suspected, in 1997 Saturn practically didn't exist anymore in Europe. Not 110% sure how things were in the US.[/QUOTE]
That's also the year Sega fell way behind in Japan in terms of hardware sales/market share with a steep decline continuing in 98 to the point of being behind the N64 iirc.
I know that commonly posted Japanese market share charts video on YT depicts that but I've seen other sources addressing that too. (I can't remember where though, mainly in the context of the N64 vs Saturn market share -not user base mind you, but Market Share -The Saturn's big head start with strong 1994-1997 sales was significant)

[A Black Falcon]

The first Wipeout on Saturn may have worse graphics than PSX Wipeout, but the fixed gameplay makes it the infinitely superior version... I mean, how when you hit walls in Saturn Wipeout you only lose a little speed, instead of all of it like in PSX Wipeout.

Wipeout was one of the first games I got for the Playstation after I got one in early 2006, but I've never even finished the first circuit, even though I've gotten silver medals in every race in Wipeout 64, for example. However, within a pretty short time of getting the Saturn version earlier this year, I beat the first circuit, no problem. Why? Because it's not impossibly hard anymore, thanks to the fixed hitting-walls issue! As it is in the Playstation you have to 100% memorize every track to have any kind of a chance, and that is ridiculously hard. Even though there are plenty of hard Wipeout games, no other game in the series repeated that design decision, and for good reason I think.

So yeah, so the graphics are a little worse in Saturn Wipeout. The game's better even so.

As for that Youtube channel, I looked through it and it's really only Saturn vs. PSX, not anything else. I don't see any N64. Some interesting stuff, but yeah, just showing the videos without explaining the other differences in the video's not so great, the Saturn versions often have weaker graphics but sometimes added other things instead, like Wipeout's better controls or the new characters in Toshinden.

If you want competitive contemporaries in 1996 try the original Saturn vesion of Tomb Raider vs the slightly later PSX port. (really parallel/multiplatform development) There's trade-offs, but neither is clearly better than the other and both are very competitive.
The reason people know about the PSX game more was due to marketing funds, but almost certainly more likely due to Sony's subsequent buy out for Tomb Raider II as a PSX exclusive the following year and the addition to Laura Croft to Sony's band of mascots.
Back in 1996 when both versions came out, the publicity was almost certainly more even, if still skewed towards the PSX.

Or play Tomb Raider Gold for the PC, in emulated 3DFX mode, because it has more content and blows the console versions away graphically, too...

I do agree though, Tomb Raider 2 not being on Saturn definitely helped set it as a "Playstation" thing, Sony knew what they were doing when they bought those console exclusivity rights. Of course later on the series went multiplatorm, and the fourth and fifth Tomb Raider games were on Dreamcast too (and all of them were on PC), but the second and third ones being PC/PSX only definitely mattered, considering how popular the series was.

Of course you're right that even Tomb Raider 1 was most popular on the Playstation, but I'd expect that considering how much more popular PSX was than Saturn.

That's also the year Sega fell way behind in Japan in terms of hardware sales/market share with a steep decline continuing in 98 to the point of being behind the N64 iirc.
I know that commonly posted Japanese market share charts video on YT depicts that but I've seen other sources addressing that too. (I can't remember where though, mainly in the context of the N64 vs Saturn market share -not user base mind you, but Market Share -The Saturn's big head start with strong 1994-1997 sales was significant)

You really think the N64 didn't pass the Saturn until 1998, even though it sold very well its first holiday season and the Saturn only sold a couple million systems in the US? Unless you mean worldwide totals... but in the US, I really doubt that it took that long.

In Japan though, the Saturn outsold the N64 that generation, overall, probably. If those 9.5 million worldwide numbers are right, and the US and Europe weren't over a couple million each (or a couple million for the US, and less for Europe, perhaps), Sega probably hung on to beat the Japanese N64's 5.5 million total... maybe not, but it seems likely.

[gamevet]

Black Falcon is right on about the Saturn version of Wipeout. I owned the Saturn version first and did not play the psx game until a couple years later. I really didn't enjoy the Playstation version.

The Saturn version of Tomb Raider pretty much got swept aside by the gaming mags. You'd think the Playstation version came out first, but supposedly that's not the case. Something fishy was defineatly going on.

[kool kitty89]

The Saturn version of Tomb Raider pretty much got swept aside by the gaming mags. You'd think the Playstation version came out first, but supposedly that's not the case. Something fishy was defineatly going on.

Fishy as in Sony paying people off?

As for the release, the dates were so close it's almost a matter of semantics (more or less like Ray Man on the Jaguar, Saturn, and PSX) and the DOS version came out shortly after too. It seems like the Saturn version was released first in Europe but a few days after the PSX game in the US and at the same time as the DOS version. (all of that was in the period of a couple weeks though)

You really think the N64 didn't pass the Saturn until 1998, even though it sold very well its first holiday season and the Saturn only sold a couple million systems in the US? Unless you mean worldwide totals... but in the US, I really doubt that it took that long.

In Japan though, the Saturn outsold the N64 that generation, overall, probably. If those 9.5 million worldwide numbers are right, and the US and Europe weren't over a couple million each (or a couple million for the US, and less for Europe, perhaps), Sega probably hung on to beat the Japanese N64's 5.5 million total... maybe not, but it seems likely.

No, I was only talking about Japan, and market share, not net sales. I'm sure the Saturn outsold the N64, but what I was saying was that while the PSX exploded in 1997, the Saturn declined and continued to do so to the extent of falling behind the N64's sales in 1998 and the Dreamcast never even came close to N64 sales in Japan. (in terms of market share, not net units sold)

I'm sure this has been posted many times before: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdpMv5FjQ5M

I'm sure the N64 beat the Saturn in market share as soon as it launched, albeit how long it took to outstrip the Saturn user base is another matter. (and the 2 million figure is a vague generalization like the 2 million figure for the Master System or Colecovision, there's no hard figures for any of that, not even as good as the compiled 3rd party sources of Genesis sales let alone official figures like Sony and Nitnendo have)

[Thenewguy]

From what magazines were saying at the time, Wipeout on PS1 was not properly optimised for the US market, a lot of them agree that the PAL version is much superior. I don't know if more work was done on the Saturn version or not by the time it was released but its feasible that it may have been properly optimised for the US resulting in a better experience.

Wipeout comparisons were not rare in British magazines of the time, all of them felt that the PS1 version was the superior game, Wipeout 2097 fared much better but was still considered inferior.

I don't know what Germany was like, but the Saturn was still alive in Britain in 1997, it was getting the kicking of its life from the PS1 but the games and system were still getting positive coverage, there was a vocal fanbase, and many games were still getting into the monthly multi-format top 20 until sometime mid-late in the year, the Saturn dissapears from the US charts very early in 1997, and even then games were not getting into the top 5

I actually think that in Britain the Saturn may have been salvageable until mid 1997, even when the releases dry up in 1998 many of the multiformat magazines continue to review Saturn games by importing and reviewing everything they can get hold of from Japan, which to me points towards a (just about) healthy userbase that has been left dry by the failure of the Saturn in the rest of the world, it would never have come anywhere near rivalling the PS1 here, but I think it could've been a mildly healthy runner up.

In regards to whether the Saturn was more popular in Europe or the US, UK magazines seem to think that the Saturn is a huge failure in the US, more so than in Europe. Of course a lot of this comes down to perspective, the actual figures were something like 2.5 million in the US and 2 million in Europe I think, but looking at the size of the markets Europe went from ~8 million Mega Drive owners to ~2 million Saturn owners, whilst the US went from over 20 million Mega Drive owners to over 2 million Saturn owners.

I think maybe if the Saturn had just sold badly in the US as opposed to being the catastrophic failure it ended up as, then the extra push may have made it healthy in Europe, but who knows.

[OldSchool]

I clicked on the link and was greeted with a myspacelike page of a million things going on at once... so I closed it immediately. Piss on that jazz.

[kool kitty89]

From what magazines were saying at the time, Wipeout on PS1 was not properly optimised for the US market, a lot of them agree that the PAL version is much superior. I don't know if more work was done on the Saturn version or not by the time it was released but its feasible that it may have been properly optimised for the US resulting in a better experience.

The only problem noted was the control/game dynamics issues which should have nothing to do with the PAL to NTSC switch, and I think is something also solved on the PC version and later Wipeout games. (including XL/2097 and the N64 derivative of that)

The main problem is what falcon mentioned about touching the walls grinding you to a halt rather than resulting in a subtle reduction in speed. (making for ridiculous difficulty) Does the EU PSX version have that same penalty?

Wipeout comparisons were not rare in British magazines of the time, all of them felt that the PS1 version was the superior game, Wipeout 2097 fared much better but was still considered inferior.

Hmm, I wonder why: from what I remember, it retains most content from the first game but builds on it a ton, plus the N64 version added 4 player split screen. (I think one of the games also had network support for the Saturn -I forget what the PC multiplayer options were like though)

I don't know what Germany was like, but the Saturn was still alive in Britain in 1997, it was getting the kicking of its life from the PS1 but the games and system were still getting positive coverage, there was a vocal fanbase, and many games were still getting into the monthly multi-format top 20 until sometime mid-late in the year, the Saturn dissapears from the US charts very early in 1997, and even then games were not getting into the top 5

That makes a lot more sense than other generalizations of Europe kicking the Saturn to the curb fairly early in favor of the PSX, but given the UK's long held Sega loyalty, it would certainly make sense that it would hang on in tough times.
In Germany that would be the opposite case as Sega wasn't nearly as stong there and Nintendo was far more popular.

I can't see Sega totally disappearing in the US either, especially in certain regions (it's a huge country so there's going to be a lot of varying trends), even if falling far behind the competition.

And catering to a dedicated (if small/niche) userbase would have been very significant for maintaining what little Sega had left as well as putting up positive PR.
Regardless of pulling back advertising and slowing hardware production, they could have kept official support going: made it clear that they planned to not abandon their users, and keep pushing new hardware. (at very least the 1st/2nd party stuff if they couldn't persuade 3rd parties beyond such public statements regarding the long-term position of the Saturn)

Cutting the 32x like they did made for bad PR and directly hurt the consumers who'd actually invested in it, but that was still a relatively small percentage, and was an add-on, not a full console.
Doing that with the Saturn was a much bigger deal hurting more users who'd invested more into the expensive hardware and expected long-term support. (and not only upsetting them, but likely cuing many to buy competing hardware)

Any savings from pulling out Saturn support were almost certainly mitigated by negative backlash... continuing to support the Saturn worldwide for a few more years (at least into 1999) would have been a far better investment for sure. Plus continued worldwide support would mean continued Japanese support was also more practical, so Sega could continue pushing that alongside the Dreamcast. (especially significant in hindsight given the Dreamcast's very poor Japanese reception)

I actually think that in Britain the Saturn may have been salvageable until mid 1997, even when the releases dry up in 1998 many of the multiformat magazines continue to review Saturn games by importing and reviewing everything they can get hold of from Japan, which to me points towards a (just about) healthy userbase that has been left dry by the failure of the Saturn in the rest of the world, it would never have come anywhere near rivalling the PS1 here, but I think it could've been a mildly healthy runner up.

I think the same was true for the US to some extent, but for whatever reason, they pulled back heavily by mid '97, and the manner Stolar managed it certainly didn't help. (the "not our future" comment made very little sense: if anything make a POSITIVE statement about an upcoming new console, but nothing negative at all... and really in 1997 the hype should have been minimal for the upcoming DC and they shouldn't have even started pushing that until within a year of launch -and then a very gradual build up with the most focused on the couple months prior to launch)

In regards to whether the Saturn was more popular in Europe or the US, UK magazines seem to think that the Saturn is a huge failure in the US, more so than in Europe. Of course a lot of this comes down to perspective, the actual figures were something like 2.5 million in the US and 2 million in Europe I think, but looking at the size of the markets Europe went from ~8 million Mega Drive owners to ~2 million Saturn owners, whilst the US went from over 20 million Mega Drive owners to over 2 million Saturn owners.

And assuming the figures are accurate, that's about the same sold for the Master System and Sega CD in the US, albeit the figures are questionable at best for most Sega stuff. (and givne anecdotal accounts, it really seems unlikely that the Master System sold onyl about 1/2 of the 7800's 3.77 million in the continental US -let alone North America as a whole)

As for the US share in general, yeah, 2 million is a fairly small chunk of the market: but failing as major competition, and outright failure on the market are very different things. (the Master System wasn't a business failure in any market AFIK, and the 7800 certainly wasn't) Of course, low sales impacts market perception by a big margin, but retainign a nich in a loyal userbase is also significant.
And again, it may have been that Saturn sales were more concentrated in certain regions than other.
And also remember, that regardless of size and wealth, the US is still significantly smaller in population than Europe: western Europe alone has more people than the US by a fair margin, but including all of Eastern Europe it's over 2x the US population.
Albeit population and actual market size are different things. (ie the US market could easily be bigger due to a higher percentage of viable consumers in the market within the population -Japan takes that to the extreme along with an incredibly dense population totaling nearly 1/2 that of the US)
Still, that would imply that a significantly higher percentage of US households owned Saturns than European ones.

I think maybe if the Saturn had just sold badly in the US as opposed to being the catastrophic failure it ended up as, then the extra push may have made it healthy in Europe, but who knows.

Yeah, poor sales is one thing, but the Saturn was a holy mess... the Master System wasn't like that in the US for sure. (and neither was the Game Gear in spite of limited popularity compared to the GB -and it sold pretty close to the amount of the SMS and GG's supposed figures -some figures for the Saturn point to 17 million though, but I'm really not sure which are accurate)

[mick_aka]

The 9.5million figure is accurate.

I've changed it on wiki siting 4 very good references but some idiot changes it back.

[Pulstar]

There ought to be a motivational poster for Sega-16 revisionism :P

As for the original video, the author could have used a proper text-to-speech engine. They sound a bit more human-like than SAM.

[gamevet]

Fishy as in Sony paying people off?

Fishy as in Gamefan was praising the game as if it was a Playstation exclusive and sort of pushing the Saturn version aside like it didn't exist. I'd go to Electronics Boutique and see Tomb Raider at the Saturn demo kiosk, but I couldn't find a copy of the game on shelves; I ended up with the Playstation game because of that. Gamefan called the Saturn version of Street Fighter Alpha the inferior version, because it had blue shadows, and would not recognise their wrong in that review until a couple of issues later. It just felt like magazines and stores were against the Saturn from the beginning and were writing the system off long before the Playstation became the the dominant console. It just makes you wonder who or what motivated these views and practices.

As for the release, the dates were so close it's almost a matter of semantics (more or less like Ray Man on the Jaguar, Saturn, and PSX) and the DOS version came out shortly after too. It seems like the Saturn version was released first in Europe but a few days after the PSX game in the US and at the same time as the DOS version. (all of that was in the period of a couple weeks though)

It seemed more like a month after at EB.

[sheath]

For the record, the framerate differences between the Saturn and PS1 versions of Wipeout and Wipeout XL/2097 are exactly 20FPS versus fairly consistent 30FPS respectively. At least that was the case on the US consoles. As to the graphical differences, the Saturn games are running at 356x240 with no dithering versus the PS1 versions 320x240 with the common full screen dithering method. I suspect these two facts account for most of the fairly jarring color differences in textures between the multi-platform versions. I have a couple of old comparison videos that I've been toying with redoing with higher bit rate compression if anybody is interested. Even the ~7500kbps videos that Avid Free DV tied me to show the differences.

With that said, I do agree that Saturn Wipeout plays much more smoothly than the PS1 game for the reasons already stated. Wipeout 2097 solves the constant stopping problem also and adds to the "fun" by allowing me to destroy other racers.

As one example though, you can see my level one comparison of the Saturn and PS1 versions of Wipeout and XL/2097. The reason I want to redo them is because the DV format blurred things too much despite the bitrate, the original files are much higher clarity.

[kool kitty89]

Fishy as in Gamefan was praising the game as if it was a Playstation exclusive and sort of pushing the Saturn version aside like it didn't exist. I'd go to Electronics Boutique and see Tomb Raider at the Saturn demo kiosk, but I couldn't find a copy of the game on shelves; I ended up with the Playstation game because of that. Gamefan called the Saturn version of Street Fighter Alpha the inferior version, because it had blue shadows, and would not recognise their wrong in that review until a couple of issues later. It just felt like magazines and stores were against the Saturn from the beginning and were writing the system off long before the Playstation became the the dominant console. It just makes you wonder who or what motivated these views and practices.

I'd hazard a guess that it was related to retailers being left out from Sega's rushed May launch, but that wouldn't apply to Toys 'R' Us, Babbage's, Software Etc., and Electronics Boutique as they were the select stores used to carry the system...

Or maybe it had something to do with the Saturn going for months with very limited software after the early launch... (of course, by the time the PSX was out that was no longer an issue in the slightest, but the damage was done)

[j_factor]

Wipeout 2097 is supposed to be very good on the Saturn and arguably better than the PSX in some respects (iirc longer draw distance/higher on-screen poly count and better textures in some cases, but somewhat lower framerate).
Of course, that was in mid/late 1997 (after Sega started shifting priorities away from Saturn) and released in Europe only...

Actually it was released in Japan too (Wipeout XL).

[kool kitty89]

I'd hazard a guess that it was related to retailers being left out from Sega's rushed May launch, but that wouldn't apply to Toys 'R' Us, Babbage's, Software Etc., and Electronics Boutique as they were the select stores used to carry the system...

Thinking again: it could have been more than that too: not just retailers left out, but retailers included being frustrated by low volumes of Saturn hardware and units initially available with the May launch.

[retromangia]

So guys, whats the verdict here... what is THE best version of Wipeout? I'd go with the PC version, no? fast graphics and network multiplayer action!


- Retromangia