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Sega’s 1996 Saturn lineup is one of the greatest of all time
- Thread starter RetroGamingUK
- Start date
cireza
Member
Of course the N64 can display textures, it I simply constrained by ROM and RAM, which is why games look so bad overall.
Replacing the infinite planes by polygons and textures isn't the same at all as Saturn can do transformations and effects on these planes that you will not be able to do this way. So, again, it will be different.
kevboard
Member
you can do some tricks with textures on the N64. just recently normal mapping was done on that thing... the N64 can do some crazy shit.
but even so, you can do a lot to substitute such effects on the N64.
look at the level floor here for example, which are wavey clouds that are also animated:
he shows it here in an emulator, but this runs perfectly on real hardware too.
RetroGamingUK
Member
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cireza
Member
I know about this video. Doesn't change the fact that you are running on a tiny ROM budget which explains why textures look so poor.
RetroGamingUK
Member
Read the thread title again
I’m talking about the output of a single publisher.
But yeah PlayStation had a fantastic 1997, I feel like that’s when PS1 started to take off.
kevboard
Member
...dude, the textures in Panzer Dragoon look far worse than what you see in this video. and this isn't even his best looking level IMO.
that animated cloud floor in that very video alone trumps basically anything ever done on the Saturn in terms of fidelity in a 3D game.
cireza
Member
Dude.
Your game still looks awful and super poor. Look at the Christmas Nights video a couple posts above...
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RetroGamingUK
Member
Panzer Dragoon Zwei is a beautiful game, more so due to art style than anything else
Though I do love the graphical tricks used for the water in Stage 4…
And here’s another chance to listen to the awesome Stage 3 boss music…
Though I do love the graphical tricks used for the water in Stage 4…
And here’s another chance to listen to the awesome Stage 3 boss music…
kevboard
Member
animated infinite flat plane on the bottom,
running on emulator at high resolution which can expose all the little flaws,
yet looks great still at high resolutions,
runs at 30fps without issue on real hardware...
you gotta be delusional to think the Saturn could even come close to this, and to think the techniques used here aren't on par with what the VDP2 can do
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Randall365
Member
The problem is that they set these up for demo right next to Playstations running Actua Soccer, Formula One, Tekken, Wipeout, Tomb Raider and Resident Evil.
Boom!
Sequels to nearly all those games would sell now. Could you imagine announcing a new Sega Rally or Panzer Dragon? Crickets.
Boom!
Sequels to nearly all those games would sell now. Could you imagine announcing a new Sega Rally or Panzer Dragon? Crickets.
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RetroGamingUK
Member
Back in 1996 though I’d argue you were better off with a Saturn than PlayStation.
After the launch lineup there was a drought in terms of good PlayStation games where as Saturn was getting excellent titles monthly.
However at the end of the year Resident Evil really stood out, and Saturn didn't really have answer to Crash Bandicoot for those wanting a 3D platformer either.
I won’t pretend that Saturn’s launch games looked good compared to PlayStation, in fact Virtua Fighter 1 and Daytona looked dreadful compared to Tekken, Ridge Racer and WipEout.
However by the end of the year the most impressive 3D game was Virtua Cop…
…and Virtua Fighter 2 just trounced anything on PlayStation. Though AM2 had to work their backsides off and pull so many tricks to get the results they did.
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cireza
Member
Where did I say this ? I am just saying that it looks poor/bad.
This is a Saturn thread by the way. Not N64.
coffinbirth
Member
I got six games on that list, and ten others, and the almighty Saturn itself a week before Christmas in 1996, when my dads co-worker came in on the last day before Christmas vacation with a plastic bin with all of that and offered it to him for $200! My dad didn't really know how amazing of a deal it was until I started pulling all of the games out, haha. It was pretty fucking amazing, like I was dreaming. That guy also later sold him a crazy expensive home theatre system for super cheap too.
Coming from Sega CD, it was pretty magical popping in Sega Rally Championship, and Nights with the 3D controller was just bliss.
A good memory to end a bad day.
Coming from Sega CD, it was pretty magical popping in Sega Rally Championship, and Nights with the 3D controller was just bliss.
A good memory to end a bad day.
nkarafo
Member
Um, no.
The N64 had more RAM than the PS1/Saturn so i don't know how that causes any issue.
Also, Banjo-Kazooie is a 12-16 MB ROM game. Have you seen the textures in this game and thought "it has bad textures because of the small ROM".
The reason why textures in many N64 games look poor is because of the small texture cache. That means, a single texture has to be smaller than one in a PS1/Saturn game, despite how much ROM or RAM space you have (also, small ROM space doesn't necessarily mean low quality assets, it could just mean fewer good quality ones).
Anyway, the small cache issue could be fixed. Instead of 1 texture devs could use 2 or 4 or more per surface and piece them together to make a single big texture. ROM had the speed to stream all these small textures from the cart.
The issue with this is that most devs didn't even bother. They just made the textures normally as they would do with a PS1/Saturn game and the result was lower/smaller textures. But the better devs did make use of that trick.
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nkarafo
Member
Well damn. I thought BOSS and RARE were the only developers who managed to squeeze all the polygons the N64 can manage but this is on a whole new level.
This is at the same level as DOOM 32X Resurrection. But the difference is the 32X only lasted, what, a year on the market? That means the N64 must be the console that took the longest to master, for better or worse.
cireza
Member
Another case of a poorly built hardware that required manipulations that nobody was willing to do to achieve results that would barely be better than competing consoles. On top of being heavily memory constrained by the ROM size.
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coffinbirth
Member
I'd agree...but I was a teenager at the time, and only had Saturn and didn't get a PS1 until late 97, early 98. I think. First console I bought with my own money.
I'd also like to point out Resident Evil was also on Saturn (though not until 97, same as Wipeout), as well as Tomb Raider, same day as PS1. I had that and Virtua Cop, and Tomb Raider seemed way more impressive to teenage me, I dunno.
And at the time, Bug! and Bug Too!, Croc, and Pandemonium! were big in my house, all I knew of Crash at that time were those goofy commercials, haha. I also had no idea I was playing inferior versions of those games until I played them on PS1 years later, but not much I could do about that even if I had known.
nkarafo
Member
You mean like transparencies on the Saturn?
True, but it's not the same as "it can't do textures".
Also, again, you overestimate the ROM size issue. Yes, early 8MB carts were too low but N64 games already had good texturing early in 1997 with 12+MB roms. 32MB became a standard after that.
You think a Saturn/PS1 CD is filled with texture data or something? Usually the vast majority of that space is taken by FMV and audio. That's if the games used the whole space, which wasn't always the case. You would be surprised at how much smaller space was given to the textures. These consoles were low res, they didn't need too much space for them.
Still, it's funny to me that a Saturn fan talks about the N64 being "poorly build hardware". Don't get me wrong, it was but it's not like the Saturn was the best designed console of all time or one that didn't give devs any trouble to take advantage of. Am i right?
Both consoles were badly designed and both consoles had different weaknesses because of that. Only the PS1 was balanced and well designed during that generation.
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nkarafo
Member
Another point i forgot to mention is that the N64 was the only console during that gen that wasn't constrained by RAM. In fact the Saturn and PS1 were, but not the N64.
That's because PS1/SAT used slow ass CDs that couldn't stream data fast enough in real time. That means for each loading session, they had to fill everything in the 2MB ram space they had (or a little more if you used a RAM cart on Saturn). The N64 had both more RAM (4MB without the expansion cart) and a very fast ROM that could stream assets directly from the cart. Factor 5 used this extensively in their games, they would normally require even more RAM if the N64 was CD based.
This was similar to the Neo-Geo AES / Neo-Geo CD situation. Because the later used CDs, they had to use a massive 7MB of RAM to compensate (with equally massive loading times to fill it), while the original Neo-Geo could just stream from the ROM in real time. Like ROMs always did.
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Pegasus Actual
Member
Saturn was so obnoxious... You bought Daytona USA and it was kind of trash? Well too bad here we are re-releasing a decent version the very next year. Want the special Virtua Fighter with texture mapping because ya saw Battle Arena Toshinden in EGM ? Well send in your registration card and wait a couple of months you piece of shit. And what the fuck even was Virtua Fighter Kids? They took releasing the same fucking game over and over to its final form before the first Last of Us Remake was a twinkle in Druck's eye.
Anyway I had the majority of those games, liked Sega Rally, Virtua Cop 2, and the Soccer game the best probably in that order.
Panzer Dragoon Zwei II (don't look at me that's what they wrote on the box) was very overrated. 3D rail shooter with d-pad, eff that. I remember getting a lot more mileage out of ThunderStrike 2.
Virtua On was highly overrated
Virtua Fighter games... ehh in the end I think the fighting game fad wasn't really for me... I liked them more than Tekken at least. All a downgrade from Street Fighter 2 and the first few Mortal Kombats though.
Anyway I had the majority of those games, liked Sega Rally, Virtua Cop 2, and the Soccer game the best probably in that order.
Panzer Dragoon Zwei II (don't look at me that's what they wrote on the box) was very overrated. 3D rail shooter with d-pad, eff that. I remember getting a lot more mileage out of ThunderStrike 2.
Virtua On was highly overrated
Virtua Fighter games... ehh in the end I think the fighting game fad wasn't really for me... I liked them more than Tekken at least. All a downgrade from Street Fighter 2 and the first few Mortal Kombats though.
cireza
Member
Did I say Saturn was perfect ?
You clearly did not get this, but I was being facetious. Of course it can display textures, they are just ugly 99% of the time.
No ? You are making assumptions. Still you can't exactly replicate a Saturn game making the full use of the 700 MB on a 32 MB cartridge.
No shit.
No shit.
Pointless discussion. Everything you say I already know (and you know it). Saturn topic, gets into technical stuff about N64 which nobody cares about. What-ifs and efforts made on the console years later that close to nobody used during its commercial use. Despite all you say, N64 look like poop for the most part. Everything is heavily compressed.
At least Saturn went to be used properly, so it must have been better built.
nkarafo
Member
I disagree. I think Saturn games look worse in 3D games. Every game looks like it's barely holding it together, as if the polygons are ready to fall apart. All the wobbling, the seams, the weird distortion when viewing angles change, the textures popping out of existence a bit too early, before they get out of camera's view, the meshes... They look like a (very sharp) grainy mess that blends together. At least the N64 had stable 3D worlds that don't bend and distort.
So yeah, opinions and all.
I agree but personally speaking, the posts i make are always reaction posts to someone trashing the N64 in a Saturn topic. So i don't start this.
MrCunningham
Member
As someone who owned a Saturn in 1996 (living in Canada), the third to fourth quarter of the year really felt like it was the beginning of the end for the Sega Saturn in the North American market. I remember playing NiGHTS into Dreams and Tomb Raider 1 on the Saturn in late 1996. I thought both were really great titles.
But the PS1 was in 'beast mode' by Christmas 1996 and crushing it with Crash and a generally regarded superior version of Tomb Raider 1. The N64 launched in September 1996 with Mario 64 and Pilot Wings 64 and that was it.
The N64 has a pretty slow roll-out for games with maybe 1-2 titles per months. Wave Race was the third game released, with stuff like Crusin' USA, Wayne Gretzky 3D Hockey, and Shadows of the Empire released in the following months.
Sega Saturn games were honestly really hard to find stocked anywhere, where I lived in Canada. Making it really painful to own the machine. Meanwhile the PS1, and N64 were stocked just about everywhere and easy to come by. By 1997, the Saturn was basically dead in my region. I had to buy my games from the back of gaming magazine shops like Chips and Bits.
It really felt like the starting point of the 3D trend for the fifth generation of consoles. But also, the Sega Saturn was hurting really badly by 1997, as it really lost out during that important 1996 holiday season. Retailers lost a lot of faith (as if they had any to begin with) with Sega as a whole; and the Sega Saturn. They were more interested in backing the Sony PSX and N64 consoles. Also Pokemon was starting to get really big in 1997 and it gave the GameBoy a shot in the arm.
1996 and 1997 were Crazy times for gaming.
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Geometric-Crusher
"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
30fps low res
tkscz
Member
I warned you man, don't get into this.
MetalFreak
Member
Panzer Zwei deserves a remaster!
Geometric-Crusher
"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
so why did you say there isn't a fighting game on the N64 that beats VF2, Doa ? I also never saw anything on the N64 like Radiant Silvergun, decathlete, unreal or Grandia, not even an fps with large external environments at 30ps like Gundam or Gungriffon 2, why ?
RoboFu
One of the green rats
Yeah people don't realize the Saturn has really bad distribution in NA from the start and just continued throughout its life. There were games that were never in stores around me.
Also something younger people don't realize is at the time of the PlayStation and Saturn launch arcade games were the big tickets. Both consoles were just full of arcade ports. Ridge racer and tekken were the big PlayStation games. VF and Dayton were the Saturns.
Both consoles started out with simple limited shading in games if at all. Sega had no sdk at all at that point.
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s_mirage
Member
IMO this list demonstrates one of the big problems with a lot of Sega's high profile Saturn titles: look at all those arcade ports! More specifically, look at all those bare bones arcade ports with little done to increase their longevity and value for the average consumer.
They were excellent ports of excellent arcade games, but were meagre in terms of what they offered. Sega were really late to the party when it came to the idea that arcade ports needed to offer something extra in order to offer more value to expensive home releases. Take VF2 vs Tekken 2, for example. VF2 had 11 characters, no story, no endings, no unlockables. Tekken 2 had 10 characters to begin with, an additional 15 unlockable, endings for every character, etc.
If I'm spending £40 of 1996 money, which game offers me the most content for my money?
They were excellent ports of excellent arcade games, but were meagre in terms of what they offered. Sega were really late to the party when it came to the idea that arcade ports needed to offer something extra in order to offer more value to expensive home releases. Take VF2 vs Tekken 2, for example. VF2 had 11 characters, no story, no endings, no unlockables. Tekken 2 had 10 characters to begin with, an additional 15 unlockable, endings for every character, etc.
If I'm spending £40 of 1996 money, which game offers me the most content for my money?
MrCunningham
Member
I had a real love/ hate relation with the Saturn console back in the day. I ended up getting one for Christmas in 1995, and it was the unit that was bundled with Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA. Honestly a really killer selection of games, despite the questionable port of Daytona USA.
I still use to play the shit out of Daytona USA for the Saturn, as I would play the game all the time in the arcades a lot. Virtua Cop was a fantastic port, but again, due to poor distribution, I would never find a Saturn light gun anywhere. I live in Canada, which made the distribution extra shitty. I had maybe less than a half of a dozen games for the system.
But at least there were rental shops where I could get my hands on a lot of games. But it was also frustrating knowing how many games were left behind in Japan, and the high import costs made me not want to purchase them.
I was like fifteen in 1996. I did not have a lot of disposable income to work with, so I would purchase a lot of game second hand. But I would also borrow my older sisters PS1 a lot too, and I found that system to have a much more robust library overall. Even though I did love the Sega arcade games.
I remember loaning out my Saturn to a friend in like 1999-2000-ish and the next thing I knew he fled off to Alberta with my Saturn and I never saw it again.
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Geometric-Crusher
"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
Sega devs were idiots, what made the arcade interesting were the stylized cabinets and the competitiveness, at home what we had were downgraded ports with no extra modes, without much possibility of finding good players to versus. Other games had no plot, which discourages playing against the AI in single player, others only had 2 stages, 2 stages in my opinion is theft, you pay $45 to get bored with the game on the same day, this company didn't go bankrupt for no reason. Fortunately, Sega corrected its mistakes after 20 years in industry purgatory. Now where is the new console? Are we going to talk about these old consoles until we die of old age? we need new blood, a new failure or a new success.
Little Chicken
Banned
Could you imagine what a blurry, foggy mess PDZ would look like on N64
Not to mention the midi OST...
RoboFu
One of the green rats
Modern gaming sucks, over bloated filler, no real creative projects from anyone besides Nintendo.
I would 100% game on a Saturn / PlayStation / n64 forever if the major players started making games for those again.
cireza
Member
This is the kind of reasoning that brought us to the current situation of bloated, tedious, boring games.
Tekken 2 characters are copy-pasted all over the place, the videos are utterly ridiculous, gameplay is weaker than Virtua Fighter.
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RetroGamingUK
Member
Interesting one, if it’s content you’re after then Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Tekken 2 or F1 97.
However in terms of gameplay I’d rank Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally over all of those.
It’s not clear cut, but we shouldn’t assume content = longevity
My most played games of that gen are…
ISS Pro Evolution (PS1)
Tekken 3 (PS1)
Sega Rally (Saturn)
Virtua Fighter 2 (Saturn)
Mario 64 (N64)
NiGHTS (Saturn)
…and I still regularly return to them. However those lengthy adventure games from that generation have not aged well at all and I rarely return to them (hence the remakes).
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nkarafo
Member
I said the Saturn has better looking fighting games already. Mace does more technically but doesn't really look better because of janky animations and worse frame rate.
I never seen a 3D platform like Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, Conker on Saturn. Or a racing game like Stunt Racer 64 and World Driver Championship. Or a large 3D environment adventure like Majora's Mask or Shadowman. Why?
Also, Battle for Naboo is far more advanced than Gungriffon 2 or any other "large external environments" 3D shooter Saturn has. Like, it's not even remotely close.
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RetroGamingUK
Member
Most of that post was nonsense, but 3D platformers were Saturn’s weakness.
Outside of Burning Rangers and Croc there was very little to shout about.
nkarafo
Member
Is it though.
cireza
Member
Because these were released during the Dreamcast days maybe ? Have you checked on Dreamcast ? Because this is where developments were happening in 1998 and after.
Geometric-Crusher
"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
so we can conclude that the Saturn and N64 have different games and different styles of games, in fact I can't show you games like Banjo, nor late games like wdc because the Sega Saturn failed before, but don't think that the N64 is superior , it has its qualities and limitations like any console.
Although the Sega Saturn has less 3D processing power than the PS1 and N64, it has its own qualities such as the effects of VDP-2 which are difficult to replicate even on the N64.
Hawk The Slayer
Member
Only one I know from them is Deep Fear, basically found that out almost a decade back and it looked like a great resident evil clone with some of the best soundtracks.
Kokoloko85
Member
That was my pick up. VF2, Daytona USA, Virtua Cop 2 with the light gun. And the sega saturn demos. Great times
diffusionx
Gold Member
Resident Evil came out in like, March of that year. And by the end of the year we got Tekken 2. So if the Saturn had a better lineup than the PSX, it wasn't for very long.
By the end of 1996 we also got Tekkken 2 and Soul Edge which were both incredible games and technical standouts. Even AM2 had to dial back some of the tricks they did for VF2 when they did later fighting games, although DOA was comparable technically.
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nkarafo
Member
Mario 64 was released in 1996.
Banjo-Kazooie was released in 1998.
WDC was released in 1999.
Shadowman was released in 1999.
Saturn was discontinued in 2000 in Japan. There are plenty of games released in 1998-99. In 1998 there were many more games released on Saturn than the N64. Don't forget, the Saturn library is three times as big as N64's.
The Saturn even had more than a full year head start. By the time the N64 was released the Saturn was already in it's second wave of games made by more advanced tools, like VF2, Virtua Cop and Sega Rally. The whole "it didn't have as much time as the N64 to mature" argument is bollocks, unless you only count the US market were the console was a failure. In reality, the N64 only has a less than a year bigger lifespan than the Saturn.
We could also compare the homebrew/modern demos/games scene. See how all the accumulated knowledge and more modern tools can squeeze these consoles. But that would reveal an even bigger gap in capabilities...
Fair enough. That's a sensible reply.
cireza
Member
No developer was investing in large scale, ambitious developments on Saturn past 1997 and you know it.
Shadowman was released in 1999 ? Amazing. So was Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast. That was 2 years before Conker. SEGA had shifted development on Dreamcast in 1998, so there is zero reason for the Saturn to get ambitious full 3D platformers/exploration games when they all started to really kick-off around Mario 64 / Tomb Raider, so 1997.
Again, you know all of this.
No because we don't care and it is not the topic you have started inside this topic anyway. No moving the goal posts.
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RetroGamingUK
Member
VDP2 was great for 3D games comprising mostly of flat floors (the Mode 7 style), but for other games like Tomb Raider it couldn’t really be used.
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