The Saturn Appreciation Thread

[Haribokart]

3 hours ago, Rex Grossman said:

Tekken couldn't compete with Virtua Fighter 2?

 

Virtua Fighter 2 is definitely a better game than any of the PS1 Tekken titles, no question about it.

[Kevvy Metal]

17 minutes ago, Haribokart said:

 

Virtua Fighter 2 is definitely a better game than any of the PS1 Tekken titles, no question about it.

 

...and VF2 is not as good as Fighters Megamix. 

 

Although, in saying that... for my money Tekken 3 is the GOAT of that generation. 

[Down by Law]

Virtua Fighter 2 on Saturn made Tekken 1 on PSX look like baby's first fighting game. Tekken 2 was when it found it's feet and the over the top hitsparks and characters undeniably captured the mainstream moreso than the rather vanilla VF2 did. VF2 is very technical and punishing, Tekken 2 can be enjoyed by anyone and you fight a devil at the end with laser beam eyes. Both are fantastic games that I loved back in the day, and the soundtracks oh man do they ever hold up compared to the absolute pump you get these days. VF2 on Saturn on a CRT through a good scart cable is proper witchcraft though, like damn that Hi Res mode was severely underutilised. 

 

 

[SMD]

51 minutes ago, mash said:

 

That's how the Saturn rolled that whole generation. With hindsight, gamers realised they were wrong and the Saturn has had a critical re-evaluation. In the same way films which were disregarded at the time are now considered classics. 

 

 

 

I think it's more that when people have an entire library to assess, it's easier to evaluate games on its own merits rather than the context of the time. No one gave a shit that I had Fighters Megamix back in the day, they just wanted to play Tekken but now they're not in competition, its valued beyond just the small number of Saturn owners of the day.

[merrychan]

1 hour ago, ianinthefuture said:

 

My PAL Saturn has a switchless mod and works fine with the Satiator. It's a really wonderful bit of kit, as I'm obligated to say every time I mention it. Just such an elegant solution, Professor Abrasive needs a fecking knighthood or something for it.

Thanks and yeah, I've got 2 Japanese Grey Saturns, one with the switchless mod that is plugged in to the downstairs TV via framemeister and a stock one upstairs connected to an old BeoVision 1 for potential light gun games*.

 

*I rarely use either

 

[megamixer]

Tekken 2 and 3 are better than VF2 imo but VF2 was definitely in a different league to the original Tekken.

 

Fighters Megamix is better than anything though (and yes, I am biased going by my username). That game blew my mind with all of the VF2 and Vipers characters, all the bizarre AM2 guest characters, and the amazing music. I fucking love that music from the Urabahn stage (think it might have been Sanman's theme in Fighting Vipers).

[Rex Grossman]

2 hours ago, mash said:

 

That's how the Saturn rolled that whole generation. With hindsight, gamers realised they were wrong and the Saturn has had a critical re-evaluation. In the same way films which were disregarded at the time are now considered classics. 

 

 

I don’t think people felt the Saturn was bad at the time just that the PlayStation had a much bigger and better library. The multi format games were almost always better on the PlayStation*. The only reason to own a Saturn was to get Sega exclusives and even then Sega didn’t always give people what they want. 

(2D games were often the exception but the PlayStation did those better than people remember - it’s just the Saturn usually had a slightly better version.)

[Oh Danny Boy]

Was a lot of bias against the Saturn at the time in the gaming press which affected people’s opinion. Flaws in Saturn games were always highlighted while being overlooked in PlayStation releases. Case in point Tekken 3 was raved about in the press but I thought the Pal version was butchered, was like playing a game in slow motion, for me it was unplayable but was getting perfect marks across the press. 
 

[SeanR]

I have started preparing for a Satiator.

 

bin/cue files for all the games I own, and a 512GB SD card ordered.

 

I could order it now, and it ships in a week, or I could wait until the next payday and have the money for the custom charges on top...

 

has anyone played PuLiRuLa?

[Shimmyhill]

2 hours ago, Rex Grossman said:

I don’t think people felt the Saturn was bad at the time just that the PlayStation had a much bigger and better library. The multi format games were almost always better on the PlayStation*. The only reason to own a Saturn was to get Sega exclusives and even then Sega didn’t always give people what they want. 

(2D games were often the exception but the PlayStation did those better than people remember - it’s just the Saturn usually had a slightly better version.)

 

Im down a YouTube well of Saturn stuff and its remarkable how much better 2D stuff was on Saturn side by side with PS, the PS was closer to the SNES on some of the fighting games than Saturn  

 

I also saw a vid today that said the Saturn could actually push more textured polygons (squareagons?) than the PS could but was stupidly hard to get to sing, Sony were clearly impressed and tried the same tactic with the PS3 (worst pad ever, its the law I have to say that when PS3 is mentioned (worst pad ever))

[Oh Danny Boy]

Exactly. A lot of the PlayStation’s 2D wasn’t real 2D but flat polygons made to resemble sprites. 

[Rex Grossman]

5 hours ago, Down by Law said:

Virtua Fighter 2 on Saturn made Tekken 1 on PSX look like baby's first fighting game.

Isn’t that part of the problem? Sega thought they could get away with making hardcore games for a niche audience while Sony knew they couldn’t get away with it due to their lack of pedigree. 
 

I’ve seen Sega loyalists say how difficult and technical VF2 is in comparison with other fighting games. Well, great, it helped ensure Sega’s devastating downfall. 
 

The idea that the Saturn’s library is getting reassessed decades later is cold comfort.

[megamixer]

I had a period of collecting and playing the Capcom fighting games, specifically the VS series for the Playstation and Saturn. The Saturn was the only choice really, even though the later games (such as X-Men Vs Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes Vs Street Fighter) were expensive imports and needed RAM cartridges.

 

PS1 Marvel Superheroes and the first Darkstalkers were pretty good though - didn't see anything too terrible when playing those.

 

From what I remember, 2D being done well relied on the console's video RAM. The PS1 has 1MB of V-RAM while the Saturn had 1.5MB (I think) which could also be boosted by up to 4MB with the top-end RAM expansion cartridge.

 

It's crazy though that the PS1 also hosted ports of the very late 90's/early 2000s Vs fighters: Capcom Vs SNK + Marvel vs Capcom. These were arcade and then Dreamcast games but the PS1, even though it struggled with Saturn ports such as X-Men Vs Street Fighter, still got ports of the next-gen 2D fighters. Both games do actually work in fairness but they are badly compromised with long load times, missing animation frames, and one (or maybe both - I can't remember) had the tag feature completely missing.

[Down by Law]

13 minutes ago, Rex Grossman said:

Isn’t that part of the problem? Sega thought they could get away with making hardcore games for a niche audience while Sony knew they couldn’t get away with it due to their lack of pedigree. 
 

I’ve seen Sega loyalists say how difficult and technical VF2 is in comparison with other fighting games. Well, great, it helped ensure Sega’s devastating downfall. 
 

The idea that the Saturn’s library is getting reassessed decades later is cold comfort.

 

I don't really think that's the case at all. It's a port of the arcade game, yes it's hard and challenging but then so was Super Street Fighter 2, which is ludicrously difficult. It's not like they went out of there way to make it more difficult for the home market, its just how the game is. It's one of the best selling and highest rated games on the hardware, so it's not really a hardcore game for a niche audience either? VF2 blows away Tekken 1 on every level, it's not even close. The idea that it helped lead to Segas downfall? A port of one of the most popular arcade games of all time? No chance. Tekken 2 certainly captured the mainstream, as I already mentioned in the rest of my post below, but it's magnitudes better than the first game and by the time it came to PS in late 1996 the machine had already started to pull away by then anyway. 

 

5 hours ago, Down by Law said:

Tekken 2 was when it found it's feet and the over the top hitsparks and characters undeniably captured the mainstream moreso than the rather vanilla VF2 did. VF2 is very technical and punishing, Tekken 2 can be enjoyed by anyone and you fight a devil at the end with laser beam eyes. Both are fantastic games that I loved back in the day

 

[ianinthefuture]

Can I just post this if we're doing format wars again 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mash]

14 hours ago, megamixer said:

I had a period of collecting and playing the Capcom fighting games, specifically the VS series for the Playstation and Saturn. The Saturn was the only choice really, even though the later games (such as X-Men Vs Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes Vs Street Fighter) were expensive imports and needed RAM cartridges.

 

PS1 Marvel Superheroes and the first Darkstalkers were pretty good though - didn't see anything too terrible when playing those.

 

From what I remember, 2D being done well relied on the console's video RAM. The PS1 has 1MB of V-RAM while the Saturn had 1.5MB (I think) which could also be boosted by up to 4MB with the top-end RAM expansion cartridge.

 

It's crazy though that the PS1 also hosted ports of the very late 90's/early 2000s Vs fighters: Capcom Vs SNK + Marvel vs Capcom. These were arcade and then Dreamcast games but the PS1, even though it struggled with Saturn ports such as X-Men Vs Street Fighter, still got ports of the next-gen 2D fighters. Both games do actually work in fairness but they are badly compromised with long load times, missing animation frames, and one (or maybe both - I can't remember) had the tag feature completely missing.

The Saturn had more than just ram going for it with regards to 2d, it was designed as a 2d monster. Also, with the 4mb cart  it's ram would have been 6.5mb split between video and work ram. Who knows what could have been done with the Saturn with this configuration? This was comparable with the Neo Geo CD a system designed to bring those cart monsters to a cd based console. 

 

The PS1 X-Men Vs games had the suffix EX because they weren't really ports. Too much had been chopped out for them to be considered as such. I mean the whole point of those games was to switch between characters mid fight. I suppose they would have sufficed for the uninitiated but anyone who'd played the arcade or Saturn would have regarded them as utter shit. 

[phillv85]

Yea the Vs. Street Fighter games on the PS1 are good games in a vacuum, but compared to the Saturn or arcade games they really do suffer.

 

@SeanR PuLiRuLa is shite, very weird, but shite. 

[Oh Danny Boy]

I think history proved that Sega were right to assess that 3D tech wasn’t ready at the time to provide full gaming experiences and that sprite scaling and 2D games should be the focus. Unfortunately they completely misjudged the market in the west which was so obsessive about 3D regardless of the actual quality. Even as a child after the initial 3D wow of the 32bit era subsided I thought that most 3D games looked flimsy and very rough. Wasn’t until the N64 that we started seeing 3D worlds that looked solid imo. 
 

On paper the Saturn was in a beast not just in its 2D capabilities but 3D too, it’s no wonder they couldn’t match the PlayStation on price. The massive mistake SEGA made was not making it easy to develop for, a big error considering they just have to look back at the Megadrive and the philosophy of building it around the 68000, which made it so attractive to develop for. Sony made the PlayStation easy to develop games on and put its kits in the hands of developers. Sony made the PlayStation the defacto hardware to build multi format games around and porting those to the wildly different and complex chipset of the Saturn meant that side by side there was only one winner. 

[SMD]

Sega fucked around far too much in the 90s, the 32X should've never left the prototype stage and they should've integrated their home console and arcade teams as soon as they started working on a successor to the Mega Drive.

 

It doesn't matter how powerful the Saturn could've been in theory when it was a piece of shit to develop for. Lobotomy Software are the example I always go to of a team who did wizardry with the machine but at what cost?

 

Sega could've put out a box like Sony did but were too wrapped up in their arcade business and too dysfunctional at a corporate level to anticipate the changes in the market they themselves had started with the Mega Drive.

 

Also fuck Bernie Stolar.

[megamixer]

5 hours ago, mash said:

The Saturn had more than just ram going for it with regards to 2d, it was designed as a 2d monster. Also, with the 4mb cart  it's ram would have been 6.5mb split between video and work ram. Who knows what could have been done with the Saturn with this configuration? This was comparable with the Neo Geo CD a system designed to bring those cart monsters to a cd based console. 

 

The PS1 X-Men Vs games had the suffix EX because they weren't really ports. Too much had been chopped out for them to be considered as such. I mean the whole point of those games was to switch between characters mid fight. I suppose they would have sufficed for the uninitiated but anyone who'd played the arcade or Saturn would have regarded them as utter shit. 

Capcom Vs SNK Pro (lol) always aggrieved me since I didn't have a Dreamcast and this was the only other way to play it at home. Still to this day, it is only Arcade/DC/PS1 unless you emulate (and it's still rather good and different enough to CvSNK2 not to be written-off as superseded).

 

The problem for the Saturn imo was Sega just didn't see the Playstation 3D revolution coming. 3D had been done by multiple machines such as the 3DO and Jag CD and done badly, both in terms of how much those platforms cost consumers to buy, and the sales, so I guess Sega didn't believe that the masses genuinely wanted 3D. Unfortunately, it was just a case of the market requiring the right games, affordable hardware, and marketing that was in tune with the times (as Sony did so well).

 

It's well known that the Sega had to scramble to add another processor, at the last minute, to the Saturn so that it could "do" 3D games respectably in light of what rivals were showing off. This is what made the architecture of the Saturn so difficult to program for vs the Playstation, and why modern emulation has evolved so sluggishly vs emulation for other consoles of time (and more recent for that fact).

 

@SMD is correct in saying that the 32X should never have happened. In fact, I remember reading an article in Retro Gamer where somebody from Sega admitted that the 32X had been initially drawn up on the back of a napkin in a restaurant...

 

Between the 32X, the Mega-CD, and the work that went into the abandoned Neptune console, Sega wasted so much time and money and lost their edge.

[SMD]

I can forgive the Mega CD because the format was such a huge jump and the potential was (rightly) seen as a big business opportunity, plus almost every manufacturer was looking into either making an add on or a proper console based around CD tech. I think the problem is that Sega of America simply refused to let the Mega Drive go and Sega of Japan wasn't interested in it because they perceived it to be a bit of a failure.

 

I don't think there's any path that Sega would've feasibly taken as a company that would've resulted in their success or at least their longevity but refining the Game Gear concept and going after Nintendo in the handheld market would've at least given them a stable source of revenue to get them through the 90s and having a unified approach across subsidaries (going all in with the Mega CD/no 32X/no Neptune/bringing arcade into the fold) would've meant a more Dreamcast vision than a Saturn vision.

 

Also fuck Bernie Stolar.

[Popo]

21 hours ago, mash said:

The Saturn had more than just ram going for it with regards to 2d, it was designed as a 2d monster.

This reads like actual copy from Official Saturn Mag. 

[Protocol Penguin]

20 hours ago, SMD said:

Sega fucked around far too much in the 90s, the 32X should've never left the prototype stage and they should've integrated their home console and arcade teams as soon as they started working on a successor to the Mega Drive.

 

It doesn't matter how powerful the Saturn could've been in theory when it was a piece of shit to develop for. Lobotomy Software are the example I always go to of a team who did wizardry with the machine but at what cost?

 

Sega could've put out a box like Sony did but were too wrapped up in their arcade business and too dysfunctional at a corporate level to anticipate the changes in the market they themselves had started with the Mega Drive.

 

Also fuck Bernie Stolar.

Very true about the Saturn’s internal tech! I remember Edge at the time often had reports about how difficult the unusual processor type was to develop for. One of the big “what ifs” of games  history is how things would’ve been different had Sega gone with a MIPS processor for the Saturn like the PlayStation had, as was allegedly the plan at one stage.

[SMD]

3 hours ago, Protocol Penguin said:

Very true about the Saturn’s internal tech! I remember Edge at the time often had reports about how difficult the unusual processor type was to develop for. One of the big “what ifs” of games  history is how things would’ve been different had Sega gone with a MIPS processor for the Saturn like the PlayStation had, as was allegedly the plan at one stage.

 

i know the oral history isn't reliable but it seems like we can assume sega didn't have any kind of plans to try and make a consumer version of their arcade boards in the early 90s, between a combination of their insistence to segregate their arcade business as a matter of prestige and not really understanding the direction of travel they had a large part in triggering.

 

its why i don't think there's any version of sega that would've made a good decision and stayed in the race against sony. naomi was too little too late and they were never going to survive financially against playstation.

 

if anything it just makes it a miracle that nintendo kept going at all, let alone continually finding successes against bigger competitors who entered later.

[Ninja Doctor]

One of you!

Thanks @SeanR

[Oh Danny Boy]

My two great videogame regrets are trading in my pal Saturn collection that I had gathered from CEX and Gamestation for pocket change, some real bangers, Saturn bomberman, Burning rangers, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Nights boxed with the pad, Megaman X3, KOF 95… for a PS2. Definitely miss the 00’s where 2D games and retro wasn’t respected much so was found in bargain bins everywhere. 
 

Second was getting rid of my Jap Saturn collection to pay for uni student things around 2010. Alpha 3, Steam Hearts, Prikura Diasakusen, Sexy Parodius etc. Both collections contain games that I’d never be able to afford again. Being a big Sega fan I got back into collecting for Sega systems over lockdown and picked up an MD and DC mostly because I wanted to play the new homebrew games on them. The Megadrive I’ve been happy using a flash cart for old games and the DC has been pretty easy to collect for (although pal seems mentally priced) gathered a collection of 40 games easily and affordably and now only have a couple more that I’d want to pick up.

 

I stayed away from the Saturn as I thought it would be a silly priced market. No homebrew scene on it kept me away too. Too much booze over Xmas though led me to picking up a Japanese Saturn and 14 games to try and amend my big gaming regret. Ironically I’m not sure if buying into a Saturn at this moment is a regret in itself. Checking out the Saturn on eBay and it’s mental, the prices are insane! The range of pricing makes no sense with the same game having BINs from say £50 to £200. There’s very few auctions, it seems like a number of collectors and resellers have cornered the market on there and are exaggerating prices. I’ve noticed many games have not been selling but have just been kept on an expensive BINs until eventually someone stumps up. A shame as ten or so years ago eBay used to be great for Saturn selling and buying.

 

As a buyer I’ve decided to not purchase anything that’s inflated and to stick by my very strict value of what a game is worth to me. Will be using reasonably priced sellers like genkivideoganes rather than many on eBay. Definitely little way of finding bargains with the Saturn and purchased for it will be rare. Maybe one day the bubble will burst. 

[geldra]

I have similar regrets. Sold a switched Pal region free Saturn but had loads of Japanese bangers (and Pal stuff too, Burning Rangers, Guardian Heroes) SFA3, DDP, Souky, RSG, Metal Slug, Batsugun.  All bought for relatively cheaps.  I can’t even remember who I sold them to.

Always loved the OG Japanese grey console (and weirdly old looking box compared to the still fresh looking megadrive equivalent), so I’ve only bloody bought one. 
 

Currently eyeing up the Satiator. But I will get a few discs (cheap ones, obvs). Because they’re lovely. 
 

 

 

[Ninja Doctor]

I remember buying my first Saturn in 1998 for £15. Owned most of the big pal games at some point but always sold them on (never really been a collector, more of a play it then sell person). 
 

I do remember @dumpster giving me a lead on a copy of PDS for £15 which I later ebayed for a whopping £41. Didn’t have the slipcase so I guess it wasn’t worth a lot. I think I even gave him my switched pal console once I bought a Dreamcast (no regrets!)

[SeanR]

I traded in my first Saturn for an Xbox.

 

My second Saturn for cash to buy another 360, while I waited for one of my other 360s to be repaired.

 

still got my third and 5th Saturns

 

That 512GB memory card arrived today for no reason…

[Ninja Doctor]

Your fourth will be getting a restoration job this summer.