And hows the comparison thus far?
Well I'm only really doing a control comparison -
the camera setup I had to record my hands on the gamepads wasn't exactly ideal so I couldn't just record everything.
There is a very clear, obvious difference in controls. I spent some time flying very slow loops around the starting area of Spring Valley and in the XBLA version those "loops" end up looking pretty square.
It is also much easier to do Acrobat Time in the XBLA version - on the Saturn, I struggle to max out at 7 tricks, but on the XBLA version I generally hit 9-10 pretty regularly (this is something carried over from the PS2 version).
I also recorded footage of fighting Puffy, but upon comparison that's not as different as I thought it was. The way the camera works when you're holding on to her is a little different in the XBLA version, where you aren't given quite as much time to see what's ahead of you when the camera spins around, but I don't know if that's significant enough to show without it looking petty.
The cage in Stick Canyon works completely differently in the XBLA version. In the Saturn version, you can hold up, down, left, or right to point the cage in that direction, but in the XBLA version, you can only move left and right to rotate the cage.
Thinking about it now I actually forgot to record some stuff; there were a couple things in Soft Museum I wanted to record (there's a missing sound cue). I can probably forgo the picture-in-a-picture stuff for that - setting the camera up again would be a pretty big pain.