/vr/ - Retro Games

Don't blame anyone; humans are inherently imperfect and human institutions even more so. Just be glad they're not NEC.

Except fuck Bernie Stolar

Obligatory:
http://www.sega-16.com/2005/02/tom-kalinske-american-samurai/

>>1464001

The thing is that if you asked all the kids that owned and loved Genesises back in the early 90s, the vast majority would have thought the idea of bolt-on extra hardware for their beloved console was a great idea and please please please Sega can I have one.

Alas that's not really how computer technology, or businesses, really works.

>>146001
The Sega CD would have been more successful if they had put more effort into its selection of FMV and non-FMV games. We COULD HAVE HAD GHOSTBUSTERS CD OR MOONWALKER CD instead of crappy Night Trap. Or even some Sexy sultry Adult games on the Mega CD.

>>1464078
>>1464078
BUMP BUMP

Lets say its 1991 and this thing is new. What would you rather have: this or an SNES? Which has system selling titles? The Sega CD has NO must have titles.

I mean, I like the thing, and when I saw those big ass Sega CD games at the video rental place, I thought it looked badass (it DID give off that more mature Sega vibe), but I never felt that I needed one. Now that I have one, I know that there are many GOOD games for it, but its still even worse than the N64 in that category.

>>1464126
BUMP

Sega CD wasn't that bad of an idea. Keep in mind that when it was in development, the SNES wasn't even out, and Sega's main competition was Hudson/NEC who had released their (very popular in Japan) CD-ROM2 all the way back in 1988. It was important to have a CD expansion to not look lame next to the PC-Engine in Japan. It only became apparent that the Sega CD was a bad idea later, when they realized that America was their most important market for that generation and Americans weren't buying the Sega CD (and most hadn't even heard of the TurboGrafx or its CD expansion).

The bigger questions are, why the fuck did they make the 32X, why was the Saturn's hardware such a clusterfuck, why the fuck didn't they get their arcade hardware engineers to design it, and why the fuck did it have no real Sonic game?

>>1464245
>>1464319
What are you doing? /vr/ is a slow board, your thread isn't going to die if you leave it unbumped for a few hours.

Remember that Nintendo was full speed ahead with their CD Rom add-on back then too. I was just looking at my EGM VG Buyer's Guide for 1992 and it's fascinating how much press it got. Kalinske was kicking Nintendo's shit in back then, it was only consumer loyalty that let the SNES even stand a chance from the beginning. If SOJ hadn't made terrible, terrible decisions Sega would quite possibly be on top right now and it would have been Nintendo becoming a third party developer. The 32x should have NEVER been a thing, Genesis support shouldn't have been pulled and Saturn should have had full backward compatibility even if it required a "Power Base Converter 2" or whatever.

If everyone had made all the right decisions I think today's video game scene would be a lot better, still with the two-camp system. In one corner, Sega Xbox vs Nintendo Playstation

>>1464257
>Lets say its 1991 and this thing is new.
It is important to remember that 1991 was only the Japanese release year. North America was 1992, and the rest of the world was 1993.
>What would you rather have: this or an SNES? Which has system selling titles? The Sega CD has NO must have titles.
This is an unfair comparison. Early adopters I think would buy a new console based on the promise of must-have games in the future, as well as to experience "next-gen technology," not so much for great games, because older technology will always have more great games than brand-new technology.
>Now that I have one, I know that there are many GOOD games for it
And a few great ones, like Sonic CD, Snatcher, and both Lunar RPG's.
>but its still even worse than the N64 in that category.
You're comparing an add-on to a full-fledged system. Of course it is not going to have as many games.

>>1464257
>The Sega CD has NO must have titles.
Sonic CD, Monkey Island, Snatcher, Shining Force, After Burner III, Final Fight (which for some reason ended up looking better than the SNES port), and Mickey Mania

Confirmed for underage who only watched the AVGN review.

>>1464382
The PCE-CD had more games than the PCE or N64.

>>1464382
>no mention of popful mail

>>1464335
>no sonic game
It had the very best Sonic game, actually.

>>1464257
>whynotboth.png
I had both. Most gamer friends I had back then also had both. Didn't you?

>>1464389
None of those are must haves at all, faggot. Sonic CD (which I have on PC) is the worst Sanic game, Monkey Island is a PC game, Snatcher isn't really much of a game at all, Shining Force is a port of the Game Gear games, Afterburner 3 isn't even an afterburner game, Final Fight isn't worth buying a console for, there's tons of beat em ups on the Genesis already.

>>1464001
Sega CD was not a bad add on. Actually it was one of the best add-ons ever. It did not realize its full potential, especially in technical aspect, but It is an underrated system. FUCK anyone that claims otherwise. People that think Sega CD does not have anything except crappy FMV games are clueless:
Snatcher
Rise of the Dragon
Monkey Island
Wing Commander
Panic!
Lunar: Eternal Blue and Lunar: Silver Star
Vay
Eye of the Beholder
Dungeon Explorer
Popful Mail
Sonic CD
Ninja Warriors
Silpheed
Robo Aleste
Keio Flying Squadron
Lords of Thunder(this is a sloppy port, but still a good game)
Sengoku(huge difference in presentation and much better then the SFC port, it uses the power of the system and is very close to the arcade game)
Final Fight(one of the best home ports, better then on the SNES)

Also, best versions of Mickey Mania, Earthworm Jim, Road Rash, Ecco the Dolphin, Flink, Puggsy

>>1464396
>>no sonic game
>It had the very best Sonic game, actually.
I was talking about the Sega Saturn there, not the Sega CD.
Unless you think Sonic Jam's 3D menu screen was the greatest Sonic game of all time or something.

>>1464376
>Genesis support shouldn't have been pulled and Saturn should have had full backward compatibility even if it required a "Power Base Converter 2" or whatever.
That wasn't the problem with Saturn, the problem was it wasn't designed well for 3D. Sure, it could run Panzer Dragoon and Virtua Fighter II nicely, but the different way the image was rendered needed exclusive developers, and since nobody bought in, the multiplats were limited to 2D-focused games like Mega Man 8 and Castlevania: SOTN.

>>1464398
>Snatcher isn't really much of a game at all
Someone didn't have the Justifier. I bet you played Lethal Enforcers with the gamepad.

>Afterburner 3 isn't even an afterburner game
>Sonic CD is the worst Sanic game
>None of those are must haves at all, faggot.
Take your shit taste to >>>/v/, then. They love shitting on Sega.

>>1464404
Even if Sonic CD is the best of the 2D Sonics, it's pretty clear Sonic Xtreme would've been amazing.

>>1464404
Oh. Yeah. Well, it had Sonic 3D Blast, which sucked. The leaked Sonic Xtreme actually looked pretty neat-o, though. Shame it was never a thing. I liked quite a number of SS games, however. Shame the system failed so hard cuz Sega's so dumb.

>>1464415
A lot of it was Sega of Japan's fault, but I read somewhere about how Edge was paid off to shit on Sega Rally while praising the gimped PSX port of Ridge Racer so the owner could get SCEE's license to make an official magazine for the European market.

>>1464376
>Saturn should have had full backward compatibility
That would have just driven up the cost of an already expensive console.
What they really should have done was get their arcade hardware guys that were pushing the limits of 3D hardware to design the Saturn hardware, and go for a greatly simplified design.

The Playstation was a thing of beauty compared to the Saturn: a MIPS CPU with integrated SIMD-esque vector math coprocessor and JPEG decoder, a graphics processor that was basically nothing more than a triangle rasterizer, a sound DSP and a little microcontroller to control it, and that was pretty much it. Very cheap but very capable and easy to develop for.

>>1464415
>>1464412
We both mentioned Sonic Xtreme. Wanna fuck?

>>1464417
I thought it was SoA's refusal to support non-macho games.
Remember all the tv spots? They showed Golden Ax and Altered Beast and that stuff and, let's be honest, those games sucked hard.

>>1464412
>>1464415
>>1464424
Yeah, Sonic Xtreme looked cool, I was saying, why the fuck didn't they finish it? NiGHTS is cool, but Sonic really should have been the top priority.

>>1464412
The Saturn did 3D just fine. Look at Tomb Raider. It wasn't extremely focused on it like N64 was but if it had blitzed its way into every American household on the power of the Genesis's installed user base, multiplied by all those people who had dragged their feet about buying a Sega CD for $300, would have almost certainly bought a Saturn that played their entire existing cartridge library, the Sega CD games they'd been wanting to play for years and the promise of kick ass next gen games to come. This is the kind of holy trinity that could have made a console ubiquitous - but the Japanese attitude fucking blew it.

>>1464424
>They showed Golden Ax and Altered Beast and that stuff and, let's be honest, those games sucked hard.
0/10, we need a little more subtlety than that.

>>1464435
Nakayama and his band of retards saw it and shat all over it, probably because it was STI developing it and not Sonic Team.

>>1464435
Trufax. Dreamcast SA and SA2 were terrible. I really rather liked Mario 64 and imagine that SX was very similar, none of the [bad] story-driven bullshit no one ever cared about. I don't want an unnaturally coloured crackhead rodent trying to wax philosophical and get deep. I liked Sonic better when each game was just another example of Go Right: The Legend Continues.
Also the reason I prefer Mario 64 over Galaxy.

>>1464445
>>The Saturn did 3D just fine
It didn't unless the developer was intimately familiar in ways even Sega programmers had trouble reaching. Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA and even their later updated versions are perfect examples of this.

>>1464441
I'm not trolling. I honestly though GA and AB were terrible games. You can beat them in 40 minutes each then you're stuck with a lump of plastic that's more entertaining to wing at someone's head than it is to play through a second time.
It wouldn't be so bad if the graphics or music or anything was interesting to pay attention to... but it wasn't. Sonic games were, even though they can also be beaten in under an hour.

>>1464435
It's because Naka got so butthurt when he found out it was running on the NiGHTS engine that he demanded it be cancelled. Fucking retarded.

>>1464335
Actually Europe was their most important market. Sega was always more popular then Nintendo there.

>>1464456
No one really likes to talk about this, but Sega was a fucking household name in Europe, South America and Oceania ever since the Master System days. Nintendo was barely a presence there.

>>1464450
Are you saying CORE was more intimately familiar with the Saturn hardware than Sega? Because Tomb Raider runs just fine.

>>1464425
Oh, something I just dug up while reading Wikipedia: Much as the N64 was the result of Nintendo's collaboration with SGI, Sega's Sega Model 1, 2, and 3 arcade boards were developed in collaboration with Lockheed Martin. So our question is, why didn't they collaborate with them for the Saturn?

>>1464445
To start, quadrilateral-based rendering:
1. Made the hardware more expensive and probably reduced potential performance, because quad rasterizers have to deal with edge cases like degenerate and "bowtie" quads that simply don't appear in triangle rasterizers.
2. Made ports to the Saturn suffer, because your meshes already used triangles that would have to be converted to degenerate quads (ones with two vertices at the same location), thus wasting vertex memory and creating pointless work for vertex transformation and the rasterizer.
3. Didn't harm ports from the Saturn at all, because you can always turn a quad into two triangles.

As for how powerful that 3D hardware was? The most impressive Saturn games like Burning Rangers used software rendering to overcome its limitations, and even simple games like the unreleased port of Micro Machines V3 needed it just to achieve acceptable framerates:
http://www.sega-saturn.net/nr/micromachinesv3.php
>We did some tricks like using the sound CPU (68000) to render the 3d cars into sprites because the saturn 3d hardware was so... quirky. We even tried to hack into the SH-1 that controlled the disk to get that do rendering as well.
>We did a fair bit of work in rendering the vehicles with our own triangle software rasterizer onto sprites, and using the h-blank trick to get the hardware to do a 3D world surface. It was a challenge to get the whole 3D world to render.

And the dual CPU design was both ahead of its time (developers still struggle with making use of multicore today) and a poor bid to trade unit cost for extra processing power.

>>1464452
>You can beat them in 40 minutes each then you're stuck with a lump of plastic that's more entertaining to wing at someone's head than it is to play through a second time.
Well no shit, Sherlock. You can beat either of the first two Sonics in under 30 minutes. You can beat any of the Marios in less than 25 minutes. Launch titles, especially those that are ports of arcade games, aren't exactly the places to look for long games.

>It wouldn't be so bad if the graphics or music or anything was interesting to pay attention to... but it wasn't.
Okay, now this is just trolling. The Genesis music for Golden Axe doesn't sound as good as the arcade, but it's really nice music.

>>1464001
>What is the deal with Sega under utilizing their hardware?

I don't know what exactly you mean, the Sega CD was pushed near its limits. It had maybe 1 more year in it at best, since by the end developers figured out how to use the sprite scaler to do 4-point transformations, making it capable of drawing polygons freely. But it couldn't do enough of them to be of any real use beyond a few simple effects. Perhaps, if the 32x isn't stillborn, it could've been around for a little more time - especially if they can release a combined unit, like the Neptune.

The Mega CD was just seriously hampered because the Megadrive was not built to be extensible in the first place. The Mega CD was an almost completely self-sufficient system of its own, it talked with the Megadrive through a data-only connector. Said talk consisted of setting up the MCD to write crap to the word ram at fixed intervals and then reading it back with the Megadrive while the MCD wasn't doing any writing (since only one side could access it at the same time).

It was all horribly cumbersome, and the only thing it achieved was Sega being able to say "yeah we have a CD accessory like NEC and Nintendo too !!1!". (and then Nintendo canned their own cd accessory)

Plus the model 1s broke down left and right due to poor build quality.

About the only good thing the MCD ever did was paving the road for doing a much better CD controller hardware on the Saturn. That, and Keio Flying Squadron.

>>1464460
Only because Nintendo outsourced the release of their console to these markets to third party toy companies and it was priced too high. In Italy, where I'm from, it was Giochi Preziosi, IIRC. I remember the price when it was released back then in 1988: ₤300.000. That's about $200 USD which, when adjusted for inflation, equals about $410 today. Too. Fucking. Expensive.

>>1464486
I can't remember a single tune from it, tbh. My brother played the piss out of both GA and AB. All I remember is RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE which sounded more like a series of barks. Not memorable or catchy at all and neither were pretty to look at, either.
I still hum Mickey Mousecapade music to myself to this day when I haven't even touched that game in over 20 years.

>>1464487
>It was all horribly cumbersome, and the only thing it achieved was Sega being able to say "yeah we have a CD accessory like NEC and Nintendo too !!1!". (and then Nintendo canned their own cd accessory)
Well, it was at least as functional as NEC's. The early CD systems were just about loading data from a CD into some RAM that the main system could execute from. That alone was the big draw (cheap game media).

>>1464376
>Saturn should have had full backward compatibility
Well, what if Saturn was just a combo of the hardware of Sega CD, Genesis, and 32x?

>>1464483
>So our question is, why didn't they collaborate with them for the Saturn?
Lockheed wasn't interested in it. The 3D simulators were Martin-Marietta's business, and were downsized during the merger.
Sega of America tried to collaborate with SGI, actually. Sega Japan canned the project and SGI went on to license the nearly-complete 3D game system to Nintendo.

>>1464497
Using the CD + 32X is a nightmare. The main 68000 is useless because the Genesis bus is tied up constantly shuttling data between the CD Word RAM and the SH-2 RAM. The 32x design hinged on being able to sit between the cartridge and the Genesis bus, so that the 68000 could continue processing in main RAM while the 32X was accessing the cartridge. With the "cartridge" tied directly to the Genesis bus, as when loading from CD, the 32x is totally crippled.

>>1464483
1. the quad based rendering actually made sense in the context of the Saturn being based on god-tier arcade sprite-pushing Sega hardware (namely, the System 32). Remember, that was the first thing it was meant to do. And it was actually pretty good at it. If they paired it up with faster memory, and gave it a texture cache, it could've been as fast as the Playstation was.

2. models and textures, I'm pretty sure they had converters for those. Vertex memory did not suffer much because the rasterizer already took 16-byte inputs only, so it made zero difference if you uploaded a two-point line or a 4-point quad-collapsed-to-triangle.

As for how powerful the 3d hardware was, it was as fast as you could get your affine transformation code running, and how much of the graphics you could off load to the VDP2 to be used as a giant rotating background.

Burning Rangers did not use software rendering. What it did was calculate certain polygons on-the-fly as background maps, and then it used the background engine to display them. The advantage of this was:
- no geometry warping
- poly-on-poly transparency
- no VDP1 fillrate wasted at all
It was also, to my knowledge, the only game to do this.

And I have to seriously doubt the stuff the Micro Machines crew mentioned. Using a 12mhz 68k to do software rendering would've been ridiculously slow compared to the 2xSH2 + VDP1 combination, and hacking into the SH1 had to be, at best, a wild idea they brainstormed upon (because it is impossible).

>>1464504
>Lockheed wasn't interested in it. The 3D simulators were Martin-Marietta's business, and were downsized during the merger.
I said Lockheed Martin there, but the merger didn't happen after the Saturn was released, and they continued collaborating for a while even after the merger, so there's no reason they couldn't have collaborated on the Saturn.

>Sega of America tried to collaborate with SGI, actually. Sega Japan canned the project and SGI went on to license the nearly-complete 3D game system to Nintendo.
Oh shit, I just read about this the other day, actually.
I'll try to dig up my source, but IIRC after SoJ canned it, SGI was like "well shit, what do we do now?" and the president or someone else high up in SoA literally said "Nintedo of American has an office here, go try them."
If SoJ wasn't so retarded, the Saturn might have a slightly less powerful Nintendo 64 with a CD drive.

>>1464532
Sega also tried collaborating with Sony, building a console together, and then sharing the profits. It would've made a ton of sense since Sony had a distribution infrastructure, goods manufacturing capability, and lots of dough. Sega meanwhile could focus on games and marketing, what they did the best in the early 90s.

SoJ shot the idea down, basically stating "Why would we team up with them? They know nothing about videogames! Screw them!".

If SoJ wasn't being so petty, we could have had something like a CD based N64 made by Sega, going up against the Nintendo CDI. They could've completely dominated the industry.

>>1464531
>the quad based rendering actually made sense in the context of the Saturn being based on god-tier arcade sprite-pushing Sega hardware (namely, the System 32). Remember, that was the first thing it was meant to do.
Maybe, but
1. As much as I love 2D games, 3D games were waaay more important at the time and it made no sense to prioritize 2D over 3D.
2. You can still do 2D games just fine with triangles. The Playstation's triangle rasterizer has special functionality for inputting arbitrary quads and the axis aligned ones used for 2D games, which it then rendered as triangles with no errors. Even without those functions, the triangle splitting easily have been done in software without incurring much of a performance hit.

>models and textures, I'm pretty sure they had converters for those.
Oh, undoubtedly there was no tri-to-quad conversion going on at run time. If you consider the common case of a cross platform game that uses many degenerate quads where there are supposed to be triangles, however, the hardware would perform less well than it could if it were triangle based from the start, because silicon is wasted on computing unneeded results for the duplicate vertex.
>Vertex memory did not suffer much because the rasterizer already took 16-byte inputs only
You still need to either store the mesh in main memory as either a pure quad mesh (and thus with every 3rd vertex duplicated for tris) or "decompress" (duplicate the 3rd vertex) triangles just before handing them off to the rasterizer, which wastes CPU time.

(continued)

(continued)

>>1464531
>As for how powerful the 3d hardware was, it was as fast as you could get your affine transformation code running, and how much of the graphics you could off load to the VDP2 to be used as a giant rotating background.
That's the thing, though. The Playstation has a special coprocessor on the same die as the CPU called "Geometry Transformation Engine" which multiplies matrices, transforms vectors/vertices, and performs simple lighting calculations whose result can be directly fed into the triangle rasterizer. It does most of the compute-intensive work of making a 3D game of that vintage. The Saturn had nothing of the sort, and had to use software math routines, when a similar coprocessor on the same die as its main CPU die would have probably given a greater performance benefit than the entire second SH-2, at a fraction of the cost.

I'll need to look more into how Burning Rangers worked, I'm a bit rusty.

>>1464448
Butthurt 2d imperialist detected.

>>1464001

what do you want to know?

>nintendo wanted to go cd and hooked up with sony
>segagameface.jpg
>nintendo wanted to control the market and sony wanted a piece of that pie as well
>sega jumps ahead and makes sega CD
>nintendo backs out, sega CD all alone
>sega CD goes emo and dies

>>1464562
>>1464581
>1. As much as I love 2D games, 3D games were waaay more important at the time and it made no sense to prioritize 2D over 3D.

They weren't at the time (the time being late 92 to mid 93, when it was most likely designed). Using a sprite plotter to draw affine mapped 3d was actually pretty smart and shaved off serious r&d time in an area where Sega had practically zero in-house expertise at.

Besides, the Playstation was the same damn thing, with the only difference being that it was drawing triangles and had a specialized hardware to do affine mapping. In theory the Saturn was fast enough to do that in software - the SCU DSP was likely meant to be analogous to the GTE in the Playstation, but it ended up being almost never used. I don't know if that was because they never figured out how to use it (documentation was incomplete from what I've been told), or because the chip itself was broken (I've also heard that it is missing some stuff that would've been necessary for doing transforms effectively enough).

Doing software affine mapping caused way bigger performance hit than needing to process degenerate quads.

I still maintain that the biggest problem with the Saturn was that it wasn't long enough on the market to be pushed to its limits. It couldn't match the Playstation in polygon pushing only, due to the low VDP1 fillrate, but games taking advantage of the VDP2 could do crazy effects which the Playstation 1 could not hope to ever match (Radiant Silvergun, Sonic R).

>>1464584
>Mario 64 is 2D

>>1464598
>I still maintain that the biggest problem with the Saturn was that it wasn't long enough on the market to be pushed to its limits
I think that it's more a combination of both sides, really. While you're absolutely right about the potential of the Saturn, I think the bigger problem was that it came out in the middle of a paradigm shift in gaming, especially as regards graphics, and while both it and the PSX straddled the line, the Saturn leaned backwards, while the PSX leaned forwards, so to speak. It may sound odd, but I think the Saturn's problem was one of psychology and zeitgeist. Though in a sense, that probably is what you meant.

I do agree with you in disagreeing with the post you quoted though, 3D was NOT the thing when the Saturn was being developed, and its 2D library stands up WAY better today than a lot of the PSX's early 3D techdemo-shovelware. Not that that helped it any at the time, but I still think that it does at least deserve recognition for a lot of its library standing the test of time.

>>1464616
I don't have problem with story in a Sonic game.

>>1464625
>3D was NOT the thing when the Saturn was being developed
And that was the wrong idea. Who cares if the games hold up nowadays, the Playstation's 3D strength sold consoles and that's what we are (or at least, I am) interested in here: How Sega could have been a viable competitor outside of Japan in that generation.
I think the Saturn's strong 2D library is more a function of its popularity in Japan (the main market for 2D games at the time) than a function of the hardware design. It's not hard to make 2D PlayStation games in the way that it's hard to make 3D Saturn games. So designing for 2D graphics was a bad and strangely short-sighted decision, when other arms of the company were working on 3D-first hardware for the arcades that would have worked just fine for 2D.

From my perspective, who cares if the Saturn had untapped potential? Every computer ever made does. What's important is that he PlayStation was both powerful and easy to develop 3D games for, which matters more in a platform war than making the most powerful machine.

>>1464683
Then they should have pushed 2d graphics instead of being Sony's bitch. Starcraft and Diablo 2 on PC sure as hell didn't have 3d graphics.

>>1464683
The Saturn was made as a machine that could finally one-up Nintendo (it had a lot of hardware choices eerily similar to the SNES, and Sega was famous for its nonstop knee-jerk reactions) - something that Sega of Japan could never do and were incredibly petty about it, as Sega of America managed to do it.

And THEN Virtua Fighter 1-2 came and conquered the arcades, unleashing the 3d paradigm shift. I'm fairly sure that higher ups at Sega just decided to chance the Saturns main processors to something more powerful so it could do better 3d calculations, as the sprite processor was already strong enough to do pseudo-3d by affine mapping.

The Playstation meanwhile was built from the ground up to be able to do Virtua Fighter-like graphics (the design team flat out stated in an interview it that that was their goal).

>>1464724
"finally one-up Nintendo"?
Sega Master System -- More colors than the NES, otherwise about as powerful
Sega Mega Drive -- More powerful than the NES, better CPU than the SNES although inferior in other ways
also Sega had the 32x and Mega CD obviously more powerful than the SNES
Unless you meant one-up Nintendo in terms of popularity, which Sega had already done with the Genesis although the Super Nintendo went on to sell more units in total.

Sega was always inferior to Nintendo. Don't get pissed at Sony for Sega's incompetence as a hardware company.

>>1464489
That's exactly what happened to the Master System over in America, bro. Sega gave the distribution rights over to Tonka, who were a fucking toy truck manufacturer and had no idea how to market a video game console.

You don't really need to look any further than their patented cover design for evidence of their utter incompetency. Someone at Tonka really had a hard-on for graph paper, I guess.

>>1464745
>Sega Master System
Failed miserably worldwide, except for a few countries where Nintendo didn't have significant presence (Brazil, parts of Europe)

>Sega Mega Drive
Did superb in America but failed horribly in Japan, which was a gigantic blow to Sega of Japans pride.

Having stronger hardware doesn't help if it sells like shit. The only machine Sega ever made that performed good in Japan was the Saturn. And it did that at the expense of losing the market everywhere else worldwide.

>>1464542
From what I heard Tom Kalinske thought the Saturn was a mess, so he contacted Silicon Graphics Inc. and asked them if they wanted to make SEGA's next Console. SoJ shot it down. Tom then turned to SONY about making thier Console and SoJ shot THAT down again. Fed up with SoJ's nonsense, Tom left SEGA.

>>1464829
iirc the Sony and SGI deals were just something that came up around the time with no connection to the Saturn.

>>1464793
>Failed miserably
>failed horribly
Neither case represents a horrible failure, even though it is obvious they were not as popular as their competitors.
>Having stronger hardware doesn't help if it sells like shit.
But neither the Genesis nor the Master System sold like shit. They both made quite a bit of money for Sega, especially the Genesis.
>The only machine Sega ever made that performed good in Japan was the Saturn.
Not really. It sold 6 million. The Playstation sold 21 million and the N64 sold approximately 6 million. The Genesis sold 4.3 million.
>And it did that at the expense of losing the market everywhere else worldwide.
??? Was Saturn Day responsible for the "success" of the Saturn in Japan? Was the lack of a Sonic game what made the Saturn "popular"?

>>1464857
In Japan, both the SMS and MD were horrible failures that couldn't even begin to hope for breaking Nintendos iron grip established with the Famicom and Super Famicom. The Sega CEO even straight up said in a meeting "why can't you be as successful as our guys in America?".

>Not really. It sold 6 million.

It broke records by hitting 1 million sold units in a month or two, it had Virtua Fighter (which was GIGANTIC in Japan), Sakura Taisen (also huge), a shit load of RPGs, shmups, and 2d fighters, and got the best home ports of many arcade hits (shmups and fighters). Plus it had Segata Sanshiro beating up people in Karaoke clubs for not playing Saturn games (ironically enough Sega even had a karaoke machine that could play Saturn games).

Between 1995-1998, even if the Saturn was not the best selling console in Japan, it was so by a far smaller margin than their previous consoles. Yes, the PS outsold it, but the PS was supported up until 2006 (new PS games were made in japan way into the 00s because they could rely on the PS2 backwards compatibility).

>???

All the RPGs and shmups and 2d fighters were not brought over because of Segas policy of "mature games for mature gamers" at the time, so the Saturn had a small library, and completely dropped out of the USA and EU markets by 1997. In Japan it was strong for two more years.

Yeah, this can be attributed to company politics being wrong, but the reason for this was that SoJ was horribly envious of SoA's success and they did everything to collar them. The "Saturnday" was forced by SoJ - Kalinske told them it was a suicide move because they didn't have enough games, but SoJ told him to shut up and do it. They did it, and as predicted, backfired spectacularly.

You can blame Bernie Stolar all you want for the Saturn failing in the USA, but the only thing he was guilty of was being a yes-man to Sega of Japan.

>>1464798
>>1464489
Nintendo did that in the US as well to some extent, Mattel (of Hot Wheel's fame) handled the sales of the NES at some point.
Actually Nintendo first came to Atari to market their console in America.
Can you imagine, The Atari Entertainment System? too bad they had dropped the wood grain look by then and gone for a wedge design. And of course if they had control of the NES, the 7800 never would have happened. Which means they would probably use it's design for the nintendo, which also means that the trend of facing the cartridge label away from you would have continued. Plus the video game market would be almost single handedly controlled by Warner Brothers, the CEO of which is still convinced to this day that video games are a fad.

Maybe its for the best that didn't happen.

>>1464913
>In Japan, both the SMS
I was responding to a quote that said that it "failed miserably worldwide". It didn't. It sold 10-14 million units worldwide. That's not nearly as many as the NES's 62 million units, but that does not mean that it was not a successful product.
>and MD were horrible failures . . . Famicom and Super Famicom.
As I said, the Mega Drive sold 4.3 million(compared to the Super Famicom's 17 million). Is that a horrible failure? It's not so different than the Saturn.
>It broke records by hitting 1 million sold units in a month or two, it had Virtua Fighter (which was GIGANTIC in Japan), Sakura Taisen (also huge), a shit load of RPGs, shmups, and 2d fighters, and got the best home ports of many arcade hits (shmups and fighters). Plus it had Segata Sanshiro beating up people in Karaoke clubs for not playing Saturn games (ironically enough Sega even had a karaoke machine that could play Saturn games).
Anecdotes and irrelevant information.
>Between 1995-1998, even if the Saturn was not the best selling console in Japan, it was so by a far smaller margin than their previous consoles. Yes, the PS outsold it, but the PS was supported up until 2006 (new PS games were made in japan way into the 00s because they could rely on the PS2 backwards compatibility).
The Saturn was discontinued in 2000 in Japan. The Playstation had sold 17.4 million in Japan by the beginning of 2000 and by the end of 2000 it sold 18.22 million. The Super Famicom sold about 17 million. The difference is not that great.
By the way, the Sega Mega Drive in Japan lasted from 1988-1997. How long did the SFC last in Japan? 1990-2003. Nine years versus 13 years. So that's one advantage that the Super Famicom had over the Mega Drive that the Playstation didn't have over the Saturn in the comparison made above.
>All the RPGs and . . . for two more years.
And here it was not too Japanese, but just unsupported in other regions, and I agree.

>>1464412
I still don't get why people thought Sonic Xtreme looked like a good idea. It's representation of environments amounted to a senseless clusterfucks of platforms, and running forward (rather than side to side) looked like a gimmick at best and boring at worst.

>>1464019
>fuck Bernie Stolar

>>1464913
>>1465014
sega saturn.
best system ever.
fuck you both.
play.
until your fingers break.

>>1464641
>Nonya
I spent age 9-16 in Singapore!

>>1465019
I disagree.

Sega always had a problem with trying to have the coolest toys on the block. Also another issue with Sega is that it was a many armed company and you ran into issues like the Saturn was made to be the ultimate 2-D machine because the arcade division didn't want to cannibalize their arcade sales. Since Sega in the arcade during the 90's was all about 3D graphics. So you play your 2D games at home and when you needed you 3D fix you would go to the arcade that was dying out.

>>1465773
Sega Saturn would have had it better had they cancelled the 32X.

>>1464401
Don't forget Terminator, gameplay was 4/5 but soundtrack is just godly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPhlHV7vfSw&list=PL1DC1B93D7DC7FEB5&index=4

>>1464562
>As much as I love 2D games, 3D games were waaay more important at the time and it made no sense to prioritize 2D over 3D
Bullshit, they weren't important, during early to mid 90's using 3D was a big sell mark and would create tonns of hype, because at the moment people completely lost their minds because
>muh realism
>muh 3D
>muh virtual reality

>>1465965
2D extremist detected. Go learn those polygons!!

>>1465965
A lot of 3D games from the early/mid90s were barely more than shovel ware. Most of them sucked. Some were very, very good, though.


>all this SCD game talk
>no mention of Dark Wizard
It's a great game.

I want a Sega CD for my model one DSO bad.

>>1466045
>>1466045
>>1466045
BUMP BUMP BUMP