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[//DEVIL//]

Fanboys:

is that Phill in the middle ? lol

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

Dreamcast 2 is just around the corner.

[

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

You couldn't make 2D games anymore because Sony and Nintendo were putting all their money and marketing in 3D games, because both their hardware choices were targeted at 3D only, making them awful consoles for 2D. So of course it was going to be "3D is great 2D sucks", and since they were investing a ton to push this narrative, 2D was pretty much set to die. Saturn has a complicated hardware because SEGA made the choice to properly support both 2D and 3D in hardware.

That's not true. In Japan 2D games still had a big market; even in America and Europe there was still a respectable market for 2D games into 1997 depending on genre.

As for SEGA "properly" supporting both 2D and 3D...well the idea was there. The execution was not. The Saturn always supported some rudimentary 3D from the onset, but it was going to be something between 32X and Model 1: polygonal generation a bit closer to Model 1 but support for texture-mapping, and accelerating the 3D (technically deformed sprites) with hardware vs. 32X's software-accelerated approach.

The issue is SEGA overcomplicated the Saturn hardware late in development and didn't have the time to provide a good SDK while sticking to the late 1994 launch in Japan. Great hardware means nothing if you make it incredibly difficult to use it; SEGA made that mistake with Saturn. Too much to learn and too little time to learn it, and certain things (like MPEG decoding) just wasted system resources because Saturn lacked dedicated hardware for it.

I'm not sure about it, but I guess they never had something like Sony America's "2D is shit and we don't want it on our new console" diktat. They didn't need to make a Mario 64-like full open world type of game.

They had something worst when Bernie Stolar took over: the Five Star Policy. Which among other things, meant SOA refusing to localize many Japanese games, and also ruined their relationship with Working Designs.

Difference is MS has the largest install base of combined with windows PC’s and subscriptions and digital sales. New Xbox’ is IS MS giving gamers choices and options.

Uh, it doesn't work like that. A good number of gaming PCs get a cheap Windows license and from there those people do all their game shopping on Steam. So in theory, that customer is way less valuable to MS than someone who buys an Xbox.

MS is in the business to make profit, not outsell 500 plastic boxes.

They were struggling to do that before buying two of the biggest 3P publishers on the market :/

My 4090 is screaming for Gears 6

You mean Gears E-Day? So will the PS5 and PS5 Pro

Silent Hill 2, Wukong say otherwise

Square has not given any official numbers on Rebirth, it’s certainly over 2 Million. But if they think Xbox is going to dramatically change their sales they are delusional

The one other platform that'd give a major boost in FF sales would be Switch 2. Question is how well can SE scale down Rebirth for Switch 2 hardware? Remake itself, should be able to run easily on Switch 2 since that game has a PS4 version.

After that would be Steam; I'm curious to see what XVI's sales are on Steam ATM. I assume they're pretty decent, but not groundbreaking. Either way I do think Part 3 will aim for PS5/PS6 & PC (Steam, EGS) Day 1 at this point, and SE will focus on smaller FF efforts to bring Day 1 to Switch 2 alongside PS and PC.

Don't see Xbox factoring too massively in any expanded multiplatform focus with the IP, unless the next gen of Xbox systems do very well and/or Game Pass sees big enough growth that MS can leverage for an Xbox version.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

Congratulations to Atlus/Sega for the positive result. We must admit that Sega (Atlus is Sega) left behind its old stigmas where only Sonic surpassed 1 million in sales. Sonic Frontiers is the best-selling 3D Sonic in the main series, new Alien Isolation being produced, this game sells well.
The company is on the rise but if Sega really wants to keep up with the big guys, I think they need to buy two mid-range IPs with market penetration,
establishing IPs from the ground up is very complex, I feel like they need a shooter and a cinematic adventure game. Ryse from Crytek, Max Payne, Medal of Honor or DeusEx.

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

 

[Saturn Dragon]

I was lucky enough to have a Game Gear as a kid, it seemed like a Porsche compared to the Game Boy, and at that time GG games had a good amount of shelf space, so my perception was that Sega was really fighting Nintendo and actually doing something, such a blissfully naive time.

You were super lucky.
Having a handheld in the 90s was really something. I even remember some friends trading their Megadrive or Snes for a Gameboy. Portability was not common at all.
Anyway, I was all crazy about the Game Boy, even though I was (and still am) a Sega fan, it was stated constantly all over the magazines at the time that the Game Gears battery duration sucked and it was the main Game Boy advantage, besides catalogue and full third party support sure. And IIRC even during the late 90s when GB color was released, most games were still compatible with the original GB.
Nintendo fucking ruled with their handhelds.

The Game Gear? A portable Master System with some extra exclusive games. Color and backlit screen made it feel as you said as a premium system (which it really was!) but if you didn't have enough money for battery replacements... Might as well buy a Master System and play at home

 

[Saturn Dragon]

I love NiGHTS, as much for the art style, vibe and music, but people rejected it, it wasn’t even one of the top 10 best selling Saturn games was it?

Most people didn’t get it.

It's a simple but also complex game.
Perhaps the art style, which I think it's incredible, wasn't that much attractive for the general public, as they were expecting a Sonic-like classic mascot game and not some androgynous clown angel flying around a strange dream bizarrio world.

That said, gameplay takes a bit of trial and error. And there isn't any tutorial of any kind, such a weird "time attack racing" concept wasn't for everyone I guess.. Getting the hang of the loop circuits and secrets and stuff only then you get hooked and replay the heck out of it.

Still, imho, there is nothing like Nights into Dreams, nothing. If you get it, you get it and you'll end up truly, deeply, madly and forever in love with the game.

Ps: Nights music is out of this world.

 

[Little Chicken]

You know Sony isn't doing very well when the Freegunners keep making dumb threads and bumping others

 

[Saturn Dragon]

Regarding the Sonic X-treme and Yuji Naka incident...

There's a bunch of Yuji Naka/Sonic Team interviews from back then. Basically said they were fed up with so much Sonic games and wanted to work on something new.

My guess is that they were full going for the japanese public with both Nights and Burning Rangers. As the Megadrive sold like crap on Japan, they just wanted to innovate and kinda forget about Sonic for some time, if that makes sense. Making the Saturn some sort of blank slate for Sega dev teams. New gen, new ips, new weird hardware, new concepts.

In a way it worked. Saturn gained some very hardcore turbo-nerd cult following in Japan.

Ps: I also read somewhere that Sega of Japan were a bit jealous of the western success of the Megadrive (Genesis) and also kinda envious of Sega of America, or something like that. Don't remember where I read this, but it sounds credible.

Ps2: Both Sonic World and Sonic R engines could have been great for a 3d adventure game. Too bad they didn't go for it and waited for the Dreamcast to make it happen.

 

[Ozzie666]

Sega would have died a generation earlier if not for a massive donation or was it a wiping of debt from one of the founders. They were not a well run company and never ever had the deep pockets for sustained success. Even all the mega drive success was paid forward, only to have them crushed by returns and consoles sitting on shelves in warehouses. It was all smoke and mirrors and an illusion. It might have worked and created momentum, but they needed Saturn to be a home run, and it wasn't

I don't see the comparisson honestly, almost unlimited money vs small potatoes.

 

[Alan Wake]

I see far more differences between the two. Yes, mismanagement was the primary reason for their demise but apart from that very broad explanation there are so many differences that separate them. 32X, Mega-CD, the terrible Saturn announcement, Sega shot themselves in the foot again and again. And most importantly, Sega were running out of money and were forced to pull the plug on the Dreamcast. Microsoft have been taking losses on hardware for generations now and they can afford it. Now they are all about Microsoft Gaming, and when they finally exit the hardware business and go all games and cloud they are already the biggest gaming publisher in the world making tons of money doing it.

 

[cireza]

In Japan

Except that we are talking about Sonic and Sonic has always been irrelevant in Japan.

The issue is SEGA overcomplicated

This is, again, false. Both VDPs were always going to be included from the very beginning.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

Except that we are talking about Sonic and Sonic has always been irrelevant in Japan.


This is, again, false. Both VDPs were always going to be included from the very beginning.

Regardless of whether or not VDP2 was planned from the beginning, developers had a nightmare with it, especially multiplayer developers.

Sega had to rely on AM2 for dev software (Sega Graphics Library) and that wasn’t finished until late 1995, third parties had to wait until 1996 to get translations. Third parties had already given up development by 1996, resulting in the threadbare 1997 lineup.

Meanwhile Psygnosis had completed and released Psy-Q in 1993 allowing developers to code in C instead of assembly.

 

[ChoosableOne]

...the general consensus is that Sega's software is the best it has been in a long time

 

[cireza]

Regardless of whether or not VDP2 was planned from the beginning, developers had a nightmare with it, especially multiplayer developers.

You are clearly mixing things with the second SH2. Which you could simply totally ignore and call it a day.

VDP1 and 2 were of course planned from the very beginning, as rendering is spread across both. I never heard of particular difficulties with VDP2 either. If anything, it is probably the easiest and most straightforward of both, as it is not the one generating the 3D visuals.

I don't think that either were particularly challenging (having read the official dev documentation). I definitely agree that the main issue was a lack of tools to speed up the process of pushing visuals, and this arrived too late. Even if you get the gist of how both VDPs render the visuals reading the doc, you still have to build a lot of functions to make your development faster, and this is where the libraries were lacking at the beginning.

More than a "badly" designed hardware, it was the lack of tools for sure. Personally I consider that the second SH2 with a shared memory bus is an absolute abomination of an idea for such a console, this is the only thing I would put in the "badly designed" category. Which is a shame because until the Saturn, I would say that SEGA had a great track record of well balanced and thought-out hardware.

Rendering being spread on both VDPs made a ton of sense. It comes with limitations, for sure, but it wasn't a bad idea in any way as this is the solution that allowed proper 2D and 3D hardware support.

 

[BlackTron]

You were super lucky.
Having a handheld in the 90s was really something. I even remember some friends trading their Megadrive or Snes for a Gameboy. Portability was not common at all.

Yeah I lucked out, one day my dad just came home with a loose one. I think someone he met in his store tried to sell it, he probably noticed Sonic and started haggling. This is also how I got my childhood dog lol. No he didn't run a pawn shop, I just got lucky. I think it would have been really hard to convince him to buy a new one lol. I already had a GB even though my mom mostly used it to play Tetris (of course).

Anyway, I was all crazy about the Game Boy, even though I was (and still am) a Sega fan, it was stated constantly all over the magazines at the time that the Game Gears battery duration sucked and it was the main Game Boy advantage, besides catalogue and full third party support sure. And IIRC even during the late 90s when GB color was released, most games were still compatible with the original GB.
Nintendo fucking ruled with their handhelds.

The Game Gear? A portable Master System with some extra exclusive games. Color and backlit screen made it feel as you said as a premium system (which it really was!) but if you didn't have enough money for battery replacements... Might as well buy a Master System and play at home

The battery situation was completely untenable, but in 1991 there was only one TV in the house so having a small color screen to play a Sonic platform game on, even if tethered to the wall, was a fucking godsend. TBH when I got this system, my only Game Boy games were Tetris and Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, which was not even a proper scrolling platform game. Of course despite being totally floored by the upgrade when I got it, it's completely apparent why Game Boy is the more successful product, and I was suffering through playing them with bolted-on accessories like worm lights until SP finally happened.

 

[DragonNCM]

The trajectory of both Xbox and Sega consoles and their decline has a lot of striking similarities the more I think about it.

While Microsoft as a whole aren’t deep in the red as per Sega in 2000/2001 parallels between the Xbox division and Sega that are worth discussing, especially when it comes to their generation transitions and market trajectory.

Xbox = Master System
Debut console releases way after the established market leader (PS2/NES), is much more advanced graphically but ultimately only manages to gain success in a single market (America for Xbox, Europe for Master System).

Xbox 360 = MegaDrive
Second console launches well ahead of competition (PS3/SNES) with success being more global compared to a single territory. This is the golden age in terms of sales, brand mass awareness and overall positivity. Eventually the established competitor’s console sales overtake it, but they’re more than in the race having stolen marketshare. However towards the end of the generation there’s a focus on hardware add-ons (Kinect, MegaCD, 32X) which begins to annoy the fanbase and results in a lack of focus.

Xbox One = Saturn
A series of boneheaded decisions and lack of understanding of the consumer base culminate in a disasterous E3 reveal. The console launches at a way higher price than the competition (PS4/PS1) with multiplatform games running much worse resulting in a lot of marketshare being lost. To compensate, there’s a shift towards releasing the biggest games on PC. Only manages to do well in a single market (America for XBO, Japan for Saturn)

Xbox Series = Dreamcast
Much smarter decisions are made in the development of the console meaning that graphically the machine competes well with the rival (PS5/PS2). However their competitor is doing well and most people see no need to switch, especially when backwards compatibility is being offered. There’s also a HUGE focus on online that doesn’t pan out as well as expected (GamePass = SegaNet). Eventually, games start to be released on competitor’s consoles.

Halo = Sonic
The first 3 or 4 games are a huge critical and commercial success becoming the face of the entire brand. Following this the franchise is handed to another developer (343 Industries and Traveller’s Tales) who manage to make some decent games but are nowhere near in terms of critical acclaim and success of the first 4 games.

yeah...NO

You forgot that MS have infinite money pull

 

[DeltaPolarBear]

yeah...NO

You forgot that MS have infinite money pull

All that the money bought, was life support for Xbox for one more generation. We have the Xbox Series flailing about and not making a difference, while if they didn't have funding they would have stopped after Xbox One. The end result didn't change.

 

[BlackTron]

Regarding the Sonic X-treme and Yuji Naka incident...

There's a bunch of Yuji Naka/Sonic Team interviews from back then. Basically said they were fed up with so much Sonic games and wanted to work on something new.

My guess is that they were full going for the japanese public with both Nights and Burning Rangers. As the Megadrive sold like crap on Japan, they just wanted to innovate and kinda forget about Sonic for some time, if that makes sense. Making the Saturn some sort of blank slate for Sega dev teams. New gen, new ips, new weird hardware, new concepts.

It doesn't make any sense at all. Sonic was envisioned from the ground-up as a Mario competitor. This is just hubris as soon as having the upper hand. Sonic was the company mascot.

In a way it worked. Saturn gained some very hardcore turbo-nerd cult following in Japan.

Ps: I also read somewhere that Sega of Japan were a bit jealous of the western success of the Megadrive (Genesis) and also kinda envious of Sega of America, or something like that. Don't remember where I read this, but it sounds credible.

This. If Sega Japan wanted to court Japan, they didn't need to cancel America's project. Sega's Japanese leaders had a complex about not allowing their American subordinates to have more successful ideas than they did. This is the same reason Sonic Mania is not getting a sequel. No one should be able to "show Sonic Team how it's done" and beat them at their own game.

Imagine Miyamoto saying he will leave Nintendo if another team doesn't stop using tech he created. This is why Nintendo is a successful and Sega squandered their 15 minutes of fame on petty emotional mudslinging.

 

[HAYA8U5A]

SEGA went out in a blaze of glory with a console that deserved a much better fate. Comparing Microsoft losing the plot and the Series S/X to the Dreamcast is just insulting.

 

[SportsFan581]

Sega did everything they could do keep their console business going and failed. MS seems to have a "don't care" attitude over the last couple years, thus the circumstances are quite different.

The fact that we never heard about that new controller is telling given the details of that leak.

 

[twilo99]

Lol no, I see people is desperate to see Xbox disappear.

There is a large number of people on this board who despise Xbox hardware, they seem to be okay with Xbox as a publisher, but having hardware that can potentially compete against the almighty PlayStation console is a hard no.

They have similar feels towards PC gaming hardware but that is somewhat masked because they know there is not chance of that disappearing, so the strategy there is to say it’s too expensive and you can’t be on the couch, so it doesn’t matter if PC hardware is better than a PlayStation. Oh, and yeah.. “exclusives”

You can have a lot of fun with that group because they are easily aroused if you tickle them a little bit… like this very thread for example, you can have field day in here if you had the time lol

 

[lordrand11]

Silent Hill 2, Wukong say otherwise

Square has not given any official numbers on Rebirth, it’s certainly over 2 Million. But if they think Xbox is going to dramatically change their sales they are delusional

If you think multiplatform specifically means Xbox you're delusional

Exclusivity and even timed exclusivity is a joke nowadays.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

This is, again, false. Both VDPs were always going to be included from the very beginning.

That's not the overcomplication I'm talking about. The Saturn was going to have one CPU, but then SEGA panicked and needed more polygon ability (remember the CPU has to provide the draw calls or display lists as they were called back in this era), so they threw in the 2nd SH2.

Unfortunately, they never redesigned the system bus to accommodate a dual-CPU approach, meaning now two CPUs had to share a bus that was only really designed for one. So it was extremely hard to get both CPUs running optimally in parallel.

Not to mention, they also had the DSP which was very complicated in itself, required for the system's more advanced 3D games, but couldn't access most of the system's RAM and had to wait on one of the CPUs to feed it instructions. IIRC it could only utilize its internal cache of memory.

 

[cireza]

That's not the overcomplication I'm talking about.

Edit : Nevermind, I mixed both your answers.

Nobody disagrees with what you are saying for the SH2, and I have been saying the exact same thing if you read the thread.

 

[Ebele]

i disagree

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Edit : Nevermind, I mixed both your answers.

Nobody disagrees with what you are saying for the SH2, and I have been saying the exact same thing if you read the thread.

The way I've been looking up quoted messages made me skip a few that I then have to go back up to read, so apologies on that note.

So if we agree about the SH2 situation, what do you think of the DSP and its role in Saturn development? Again, I think analyzing the Saturn is a bit more complicated than just looking at the SH2s or the VDPs. It's more about how the whole system approached 3D and that SEGA didn't provide enough easily-usable tools to do that when compared to competition, for the first couple years of Saturn's life.

Like the way it handled polygons as distorted sprites due to use of quads in theory made sense, that was just SEGA taking their super scaler tech & concepts to a logical next step. But few devs at the time were making faux-3D 2D games like that. Fewer still were used to dual-CPU setups, either at home or in the arcade. SEGA's efforts with the SDK early on should've focused on making those type of things as easy as possible to learn, as quickly as possible. They should've also had a decent C language compiler from the get-go.

I know SGL 1.0 and 2.0 eventually resolved many of the dev-side issues but those didn't come until late '95/early '96.

 

[Segaswirl]

Interesting thread.

Third parties ran away from the Dreamcast before they stopped production though. I don't really see that happening with the Xbox so far.

It misses out on some Japanese games from time to time but that's how it's always been.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

Interesting thread.

Third parties ran away from the Dreamcast before they stopped production though. I don't really see that happening with the Xbox so far.

It misses out on some Japanese games from time to time but that's how it's always been.

Silent Hill, Indiana Jones ?

 

[Segaswirl]

Silent Hill, Indiana Jones ?

Silent Hill is a timed exclusive that Sony paid Konami for. MGS3 remake is also Konami and was shown off by Xbox at TGS just recently.

Indiana Jones is 1st party.

 

[cireza]

what do you think of the DSP and its role in Saturn development?

I understand that you are not talking about the audio DSP.

This is an optional tool efficient at doing 3D calculations and matrix operations, from my understanding. But these things could be done directly on the SH2, of course. So you would resort to setting up the DSP if you were encountering CPU limitations I guess, which I expect is the very reason it exists and was put in the console by SEGA. Pretty sure that this is what was done by the guy who made Sonic R, and was presented in one of his videos.

Found it :


I think that the PS1 had a dedicated component to do 3D maths as well. The setup was maybe/probably better in the PS1, I don't know about that. In any case, they had less components overall, so they were bound to having more efficient ones. And maybe tailor made by Sony, unlike SEGA which did not have the money for this so everything was stock components provided by other manufacturers.

 

[snapdragon]

failed premature launch of the Dreamcast in Japan, Bernie Stolar killing a still profitable Saturn leading to a 60% decline in consumer hardware revenue and a Sony monopolization of the market for 2 years, and then deciding to launch the Dreamcast at 200$ giving Sega no room for price drops and ensuring that the console would be sold at a considerable loss

by 1998 it was already over

 

[Edmund]

October is supposed to be Horror Month but it only seems to be horror month for the Xbox shills especially Jez Corden.

 

[snapdragon]

No, not really.

Sega never had a clearcut plan beyond the unexpected western success of the Genesis. The Japanese branch hated the American branch for being successful. They didn't understand what sparked that success, and couldn't replicate it. They never really had the pulse of the market. When the edge of the early 90s started fading into something else, they didn't know how to keep their audience.
MS always had plans, and always understood the importance of gamers' tastes and feedback.

Sega was an arcade game maker. They were behind the times with most of their lineup for the Dreamcast because of their desire to finally bring that exact arcade experience at home, and incredibly ahead of the times with a couple of games (PSO and Shenmue) that had limited appeal for the audience at large. They squandered tons of money trying to make people buy their hardware and accept their out-of-touch vision of the market.
MS may not have had the hottest game for a while, but they were never out of touch and course corrected many times. Sega sailed straight and willingly into the falls at the end of the earth.

OG Xbox isn't comparable to the Master System. It was, more accurately, the PC-Engine/Turbografx of its generation. Way ahead of the competition in hardware, with a much clearer vision of the future of the market than its competitors, and with tons of great games, but facing an uphill battle with a behemot way beyond its efforts, and with disastrous marketing decisions outside of its homeland.

Your Series/Dreamcast comparison is so flawed, we don't need to go through every sentence. Completely different situations. Let's just say that Dreamcast fell off a cliff so quickly in every respect, they pulled the plug after barely 3 years on the market in Japan and 2 years in the west. Also, comparing Sega Net to GamePass? Really?

The mascot comparison has some truth in it. It's interesting that both companies understood that they should leave their mascots aside for a while at one point. Sega pretty much completely dropped Sonic in the Saturn era - but they thought it could be replaced by fucking Nights, that's how much the cult of personality ruined Sega. MS expanded their portfolio way beyond Halo when they had enough support and had more space in the market. The difference is that Halo was a revolution in console gaming at launch, and it mostly stayed solid in time. Sonic was always just barely competent beyond its graphics and speed, and it quickly ran out of things to say, turning into gaming's favorite meme and source of cheesy music.

nah nights is fire and unlike Sonic was actually popular in Japan

the Saturn didn't need Sonic to succeed, the early launch is what killed it

 

[Unknown?]

What a dumb thread....
xbox one and the xbox series consoles did so much better in every way and last much longer than their "mirrored" sega counterparts. End of thread. Goodbye.

Not if they didn't have Microsoft backing. If they were independent, they'd have died on their first try, unlike Sega.

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

nah nights is fire and unlike Sonic was actually popular in Japan

the Saturn didn't need Sonic to succeed, the early launch is what killed it

Sounds accurate, seeing that the Saturn was actually moderately successful in Japan.

They still needed Sonic to succeed in the west, as it was pretty much THE reason they had any success there at all.
Nights may be fire and all, but it never caught on for the same reasons Balan Wonderworld and its eldritch horror of a main character didn't, and wouldn't have even if the game was excellent. You go from a blue, faster-than-sound hedgehog with a perennial "I piss in your breakfast cereal and I'm not sorry" face to... Nights. Come on.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

Dreamcast was on the right track, the ps1 sold almost 40 million from 98 to 2002. Sega needed to remove the 56kbps modem and use the same 2D controller as the Sega Saturn, launch those games ( crazy taxi, nfl2k, Sonic) but in hypocrisy convert many Saturn games to Dreamcast in 2000 on an industrial level, similar to the Wii U and Switch. this saves the Dreamcast, but they never assumed the PS1 would continue to sell after people saw the graphics of the Dreamcast and PS2. their mistake.