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[cartman414]

Plus, it also didn't help the Saturn itself was a confusing machine for developers. John Linneman at DF did an episode on it for DF Retro and did a deep dive. It was made more as a machine that could do 2D games really well, but it made it difficult to make 3D games for it, which is where the industry was headed once N64/ Mario 64 hit and it was clear 3D was the new thing. But the system was rushed and they weren't forward thinking enough to see how important 3D would be. So, that didn't help! Also the controller was just a bummer and nothing special.

Not sure how it was in the US, but in the UK games shops like EB, Virgin and HMV played a huge part in determining what was seen as 'cool'.

The Mega CD and 32X must have burned the shops to some extent, as they seemed to favour Sony from the start. I recall for ages at HMV they had a Saturn with Streetfighter the Movie and a PS with Tekken - with the Saturn's shitty spongey controller next to the precise PS's one.

EB had videos of gameplay on the PS of Resident Evil abd F1 for ages too - and didn't bother with Sega exclusives.

I got a PS and clearly it won out pretty quickly, but the Saturn was doomed from the start - which then in turn doomed the Dreamcast.

I hope you're both talking about the initial Western region controllers. The "real" Saturn controllers are S-Tier. And the PS controllers were mid for years.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

People from the US don't realize the huge gap there was back then, and still exists to some extent, between the average wage in the US and in Europe. If the Master System was such a huge success in Europe, it is certainly not because people thought that the console was better than the MegaDrive... We just couldn't afford such expensive consoles.

NES launched during the peak of the ZX Spectrum era.

Master System launched a little later when Spectrum was dying down and was able to gain a good retail presence via Mastertronic.

 

[Dr. Wilkinson]

I hope you're both talking about the initial Western region controllers. The "real" Saturn controllers are S-Tier. And the PS controllers were mid for years.

I had both, got the S tier later once it was basically dead. Doesn't matter anyway. There's no need to fanboy, I never have/ have never defended PS controllers.

 

[cartman414]

I had both, got the S tier later once it was basically dead. Doesn't matter anyway. There's no need to fanboy, I never have/ have never defended PS controllers.

It's the other poster that mentioned the PS controller.

And not to fanboy so much as to inquire about specifics on which Saturn controller. The first western Saturn pad wasn't so much "nothing special" as it was an unneeded regression from the Genesis 6-button pad.

 

[cireza]

wrong, both Sega Saturn and PS1 had the same budget despite data suggesting that the Sega Saturn project cost 20% more.

Some people resort to budget data, others lived through that era and witnessed what happened.

I have technical arguments but I prefer not to share, the Saturn was at its limit since 1995,

Don't share it, it is BS anyway. Again, people with eyes are able to see the boundaries that were pushed on this console between its launch and 1997. Obviously, the ceiling wasn't reached in 1995.

 

[Ozzie666]

Totally biased usual narrative. Sony tried pulling a Daniel Plainview on them first.

The Weird History Of The Super NES CD-ROM, Nintendo's Most Notorious Vaporware - Kotaku

Nintendo never released a CD-ROM gaming system. But for a while in the early 1990s, it flirted with the idea. That protracted will-they-won’t-they romance

kotaku.com

Sony might have had no Nintendo to contend with. No Switch, all we have left are super spendy console boxes, hooray.

I never said Sony didn't deserve it or wasn't the bad guy. But they way Nintendo did it was pretty savage and unprofessional. Don't worry we will get to one super spendy box soon enough

 

[Ozzie666]

Its also needs to be noted that Mortal Kombat 3 came out on playstation only shortly after launch and it was a VERY BIG DEAL in the states at the time which Sony bought as an exclusive.. released in October 1995.
Ultimate MK3 on Saturn which was a great port didn't come out until a year later.
After that a much inferior MK trilogy port later proved how little publishers cared to put any effort into Saturn ports near the end.

I can say in my area and for me personally MK3 for PS1 was a very big deal. Other than the loading issues, extremely good version. Especially compared to the 16 bit. Most my group got PS1 on launch day waiting for this one. Some of us had Saturn's but they were collecting dust. Mind you in my area we were still enjoying MK2 on 32X and a decent Virtua Fighrter port too

 

[Hawk The Slayer]

Really wish Deep Fear on the Saturn became a lot more successful and got a bunch of sequels. Wouldn't be a true rival to Resident Evil but perhaps good enough to be close. It's at least more interesting or have the potential to be a more interesting horror series than Silent Hill and Dead Space.

 

[cartman414]

I never said Sony didn't deserve it or wasn't the bad guy. But they way Nintendo did it was pretty savage and unprofessional. Don't worry we will get to one super spendy box soon enough

True, but you said Nintendo created their worst enemy. In all likelihood Sony was going to force its way in either way. That licensing backdoor? Sony would have gotten in and taken any CD-ROM game royalties. Square's games, which were already big sellers in the homeland, would have been among the first, knowing Square's keen interest in the format. And then FF7 wouldn't have been seen as the turning point, at least as far as Square jumping ship would have went.

 

[nkarafo]

NES launched during the peak of the ZX Spectrum era.

Master System launched a little later when Spectrum was dying down and was able to gain a good retail presence via Mastertronic.

In Greece we didn't have an official Nintendo distributor until mid 1991 (Sega was also late in 1989).

A bit later they would advertise all three Nintendo consoles together (NES, Game Boy, SNES). Sega did the same with their trio of consoles (Master System, Game Gear, Mega Drive).

They would push their "new" 8bit consoles as the "classics that took the world by storm" and their 16bit consoles as "high tech for the demanding players". For most Greeks, all these were new. We had absolutely no idea the NES was a decade old hardware at that point. For us, the oldest one was basically the Master System, which i remember seeing in magazines in 1989.

Pretty much all gamers then had home computers. Most had a Spectrum or Amstrad and a lucky few had an Amiga. But most had a slow, annoying, ugly 8bit computer. So it wasn't hard for Nintendo to sell the NES in 1991 here since it was still an upgrade over those machines. 8bit consoles were like a good middle ground for gamers who couldn't afford the 16bit consoles.

So for us there wasn't a 3rd and 4th generation. Both were merged into a single one as 8 and 16bit consoles co-existed until they faded away almost simultaneously, not before the N64 appeared. The NES and Master System would still be in the shops, in ads and in brochures, along with their 16bit big brothers, the whole time.

 

[Team Andromeda]

The limit of the Saturn was not reached. In the latest games we saw great improvements and features become more frequent, like proper fade-in of 3D scenery, excellent FMV quality, more stable framerates, more elaborated 3D models. The later sports game published by SEGA are super smooth, clean and have excellent gameplay to name only those. Riven has fantastic FMV quality (full screen I think ?).

There were some games that were pushing the Saturn very hard, you're right to say Tomb Raider wasn't one of them

I would say games like Daytona USA CE, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Lost Bronx, Grandia, Dark Saviour, Burning Rangers, World League Soccer 98, Fighters Megamix, and Quake were banging on the hardware.

I also think Layer Section 2 doesn't get enough credit, while the PS1 game looks better, in terms of polygons, the Saturn version is right up there
I remember back inthe day when CVG was playing the coin-up version of Raystorm they said it had some of the best 3D graphics they've ever seen coming off the PS board

Also, you're right, some even say the Saturn version of Riven is better and some of the graphics in the sports games on Saturn had fab 3D.












[h3][/h3]

 

[RetroGamingUK]

That's mostly because Sony's PR and marketing campaign for the original PS in Europe, not only UK, was massive, cynical, aggressive and striking like no other effort ever made in the history of gaming. They covered every surface they could with PS in mags, billboards, and on TV. In comparison, Sega did less than fart in the wind, and Nintendo thought that simply showing Mario would be enough to win a continent where Sega and home computers had barely registered its existence before.

Sony bought everything they could, and it's not malicious to think that they brute-forced their presence in every store they could as well.
More-or-less official PlayStation-only mags sprouted like mushrooms in the span of a year. It was impossible to not know about the PS. Sega, on their part, didn't have a plan. They had arcade ports in an age when arcade in Europe was already fading fast.

The irony is that the independent press was all about the Saturn in the beginning. Home Virtua Fighter was hailed as the second coming. I'll always remember EDGE closing their VF review with "Over to you, Sony". How the turntables…

Saturn's UK adverts all pretty much had the same theme

Basically someone Japanese taunting us that they've had the game for ages and that UK would have to catch up in order to match their skill.

They were great for showing gameplay, but highlighting the lag between Japanese and UK releases probably didn't go down too well and this style probably would have been better suited to Dreamcast with its focus on online competetive multiplayer