/vr/ - Retro Games

>>4759348
They could rest easy knowing that twenty years later a bunch of hipsters that worship the ground Sega walks on would do mental gymnastics to excuse all of the massive glaring design flaws in the system's design.

>>4759348
Oh this thread again? Didn't realize it was Tuesday already.

>>4759348
>>no good Sonic games
>he doesn't feel the Sunshine

>>4759348
>weak at 3D

It was good enough for the time with the exception of transparencies.

>good at 2D only with an extra cartridge

It was great at 2D and it was better with the cartridge.

>no good Sonic games

It had Sonic R but I get where you're coming from.

>overpriced

You get what you pay for. It has fantastic build quality.

>WHAT WHERE THEY THINKING

there were THINKING about the thinking man. As it is after all the thinking man's console.

It was a hasty hackjob put together by a panicked Sega of Japan and then grossly missold and overestimated.
Seriously the firmware code for this device is all tangled up like Spaghetti, all the component behaviours hastily linked up together. Programming for the Saturn was notoriously difficult. Many sloppy ports existed for it.
Sure, its got some good games, but this was a 32bit 2D console forced to be a 32bit 3D console. No fancy technical shortcuts like the PS1 had or the brute force power of the N64. (which ironically handled 3D the best out of the three but was limited by cartridge memory)
I got one. I like its exclusives. Wish it had a 32bit 2D sonic on it though. Sega I think suffered from trying too hard to be something they werent deep down.

>>4759413
Truly the strangest decision, I think, is why they did no enhanced port of Knuckles Chaotix on the Saturn with Sonic and Tails as playable characters. They clearly had the assets for those two in place and Virtua fighter ended up on both consoles.
Sega didnt do a whole lot of sensibile things in hindsight.

>>4759372
Like what design flaws? Only thing I can think of is the cartridge slot being shit.

>>4759348
the ramcard wuz bundled with kof95 ye dindu no point bitchan bout dat

>>4759428
No it wasn't.

>>4759405
>It had Sonic R

Sonic R fucking sucked.
The closest thing to a good Sonic game on the Saturn was Sonic Jam's Sonic World.

>>4759421
>Truly the strangest decision, I think, is why they did no enhanced port of Knuckles Chaotix on the Saturn

Chaotix sucked, too.

>>4759451
Well no one's saying it was the thinking man's game anon. Although playing it did require some thought.

>Sonic Jam's Sonic World.

I'm not even going to talk about that anon. (refer to reaction pic related)

>>4759451
and sanic r wuz also on pc so no bitchan about it...ah wait this a bitchan thread go on

>only with an extra cartridge
Nah, even without the extra RAM it destroyed the PS1's poor excuse for 2D.

>>4759427
The hardware design was more complex than it needed to be and that gave devs yet another reason to wait for Sony, >>4759413 already mentioned this. They knew 2D games, it made sense on some level for them to make another 2D system, but if you were alive at the time you remember the absolutely tectonic pressure towards 3D that existed, it's something that's easy to forget nowadays when pixel art has been fully reestablished as cool but the landscape was really different back then. They still haven't succeeded in making a very good 3D sanic to this day so back then I bet they had no idea wtf to do. Sonic R and the cancellation of a flagship Sonic title on the Saturn are both the result of this I think. Outside of any specific concerns about being difficult to program, the entire system was moving in the wrong direction for the market at the time, I think that constitutes "bad design".

>>4759463
Bullshit, without cartridge PSX and Saturn are literally the same at 2D

>>4759491
Why do you lie?

>>4759428
>>4759460
Stop typing like a moron

>>4759348
>falling for the 3d is real meme

>>4759491
depends some games like pocket fighter and or last blade are pretty enjoyable on psx

Saturn cant do transparency lol.

>>4759658
It can, it just needed some extra work and most devs went for good ol' dithering.
The reason many people noticed this in recent years is because most people are LCD-only peasants.

>>4759348
>WHAT WERE THEY THINKING
SEGA's motto ever since the release of the Genesis. Really though the console itself was fine aside from its complex architecture. There are many games impressive in a number of ways featured on the system. But they jumped the gun for launch, lost their bad-boy image to sony, and couldn't make hype around any of it's "killer apps" because there weren't any.

>>4759658
cool and a more transparent hadouken makes the street fighter so much better on ps or what ya telln?

>>4759658
>Saturn cant do transparency lol.

The Sega Saturn's VDP1 and VDP2 graphics chips both support transparencies, but they don't play nice with each other. Transparencies rendered on the VDP1 layers can't be visible on the VDP2 layers and reverse. It made things complicated.

>>4759348
HAHAHA LOOK MOM I POSTED IT AGAIN XD

>>4759473
>if you were alive at the time you remember the absolutely tectonic pressure towards 3D that existed
That was the case in the west but in Japan 2D was still alive and well, so the Saturn turned out to be fantastic for arcade ports at the time, often bringing them over with far fewer cuts than the Playstation. Consequences for Sega as a whole aside, I'm glad the Saturn was so different from the PSX and N64 just so we could have those sweet 2D games and arcade ports. Not to mention it's 3D wasn't that much of a slouch in capable hands either.

Sega of Japan was short-sighted and pretty much doomed the company by how they handled the west but I got to give them credit for one thing, they made the Saturn pretty damn successful in Japan after how the Mega Drive floundered over there.

>>4759764
Japan loved 3D though, VF2 was the best selling game on Saturn there.

>>4759768
Not saying they didn't, but 2D was still commercially viable. The Saturn was a great fit for the Japanese arcade community.

>>4759491
Then why did Silhouette Mirage, Resident Evil and Thunder Force V have inferior graphics on PSX compared to Saturn?

>>4759348
sonic r was good,you just had to learn to use the shoulder buttons with it.

you can play it with a modern pad on emulator now and using a 360 controller makes the game too easy,its like butter.

>>4759348
Well they certainly weren't thinking "should we worry about what some angry ignorant little shitposter is going to say about it 20 years from now".

I don’t know but it’s definitely Nintendo’s fault. Every bad decision Sega ever made was Nintendo being big meanie poopy heads and using mind control to make Sega make dumb decisions, because Nintendo is for gay babies and Sega can’t possibly do any wrong

>>4759348
>weak at 3D
better at it than literally everything else in the home market in 1994/1995 except for the Playstation
>good at 2D only with an extra cartridge
that's just flat out wrong, it just made it easier to port from the Neo Geo and CPS2, both of which were machines that let you load quickly from huge-ass ROM cartridges
>no good Sonic games
this was a real issue
>overpriced
the price got slashed plenty quick

>>4759427
there are like three I can think of off-hand from my own effort to write a Saturn game
>VDP1 is slow as hell -- on the PS1, you're really mostly CPU limited with polygons, on the Saturn, you're GPU limited; also it overdraws like a motherfucker, so there's a bit more GPU time being wasted
>no hardware transform/lighting, you had to manually light and position things in 3D on the slave CPU or on the DSP that Sega'd originally intended for that purpose (take note that writing for the DSP is absurdly hard and Sega's own manual states that something that'd take two hours to write and debug in SH-2 ASM would take a week or so for the DSP, particularly since the docs suck and there's no real debugger for it)
>Saturn has split VRAM, so even though it has more than the PS1, you can't use all of it for textures

>>4759451
Sonic R's okay. Controls are rough. Music is cool. Graphics are absolutely stunning for the hardware, as good as anything on the PS1, with proper lighting, smooth fade-ins, a solid framerate, it's nice. Uses the nice "mode-7" style infinite plane the VDP2 can do effectively.
Chaotix actually does suck, but it's at least in a largely inoffensive way (barring Amazing Arena 4 and 5), and it looks and sounds gorgeous. It's worth playing just for that.

>>4760094
even with L/R turning, you're a slippery cunt
this is fine in a straight race, less so when you veer ever so slightly past one of the medals

>>4759348
>has good games
don't give a fuck about the rest

>>4759473
Development wise the only real problem was that the VDP1 was fucking useless, and that the 2nd SH2 was tricky to utilize. The latter isn't a big problem since it's one of those things that gets solved naturally as people figure out the hardware.

But there was simply no getting around the VDP1 being fucking trash. It's feature set was a Gordian knot where anything you wanted to do came with some caveat; including interaction with the VDP2. And on top of that it was so slow that it could barely draw two screens worth of sprites.

>>4759764
Yeah. It's too bad there weren't that many good 3d games on it as PSX. Playing Panzer Dragoon Zwei for the first time in a long time today, I was impressed by how good the 3d was in that game. If only they focused more on 3d maybe they would have been more successful.

Does the Saturn have an internal save battery? Every time I turn my Saturn on it asks me to set the date.

>>4760696
No.

The Saturn saves time and date to a lithium battery. As well as game saves.

>>4760696
Open up the compartment on the back and replace the CR2032 battery, no need to open up the console or solder.

>>4759348
>>weak at 3D

>>4759348
imagine being this retarded

>>4759348
They weren't thinking. The company's console division has always been mismanaged.


You've got to understand SEGA is at heart an arcade based company.

>>4759348
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 is good though

>>4759413
For a system that was such a hack job they sure made a fuckton of releases and revisions of it. And bizarre special editions like the one that was built into a car.

>>4759348
They tried to make it a multimedia platform with access at the internet, vcd support and other crap like that.

>>4759348
It wasn't overpriced. It was just Sony making the wise choice to sell it cheaper.

>>4760706
>saves time and date to a lithium battery
Exactly how much memory does that battery have champ?

>>4760936
>It wasn't overpriced. It was just Sony making the wise choice to sell it cheaper.

Pretty sure Sega sold their console at a loss in North America just to sell units. The Saturn was not a cheap piece of hardware to manufacture. Too much silicone on the motherboard.

The Saturn wasn't as expensive as the 3DO at launch. But the price it went for, gave Sega no chance to compete with Sony.

>>4759372
>I can't have fun unless it's perfect

You sound like an asshole

>>4761101
>You sound like an asshole

The "glaring flaws" didn't affect the 3D gaming performance of the machine, and there are plenty of excellent 2D titles left in Japan. Some developers did also work around the oddness of the Saturn's 3D capabilities, and managed to make some great 3D titles as well.

The problem is that most third party publishers were not interested in investing in the Saturn as Sega shot themselves in the foot at retail in the west with an early launch that killed any momentum.

>>4760751
not him, but only games that can offload significant portions of their environment rendering to VDP2 (like fighting games) can look like that. which by its very nature means that complex 3D environment games are difficult to impossible to achieve on the saturn without compromising on framerate and resolution.

>>4761116
I should also point out that Panzer Dragoon makes excellent use of VDP2 for its spectacular for the time wave effects. I can assure you if VDP1 had to churn EVERYTHING out, it would look like this.

Just take a look at NiGHTS into Dreams. The environment is 3D, but when you take a closer look you'll find that almost every dynamic instance on screen is a 2D sprite in 3D space. Add to that the fact that the game runs at the Saturn's lowest supported resolution, and you get the reason why the framerate is as good as it is

>>4761105
Yikes. To think, Sega would have probably done much better if they took more time on their 3D engine and launched the Saturn a little after the PSX came out.

>>4760075
>Resident Evil
>inferior graphic on PSX
Because RE2 and 3 never happened right anon?

>>4760785
imagine being so butthurt

>>4761123
>Add to that the fact that the game runs at the Saturn's lowest supported resolution, and you get the reason why the framerate is as good as it is

Yeah, and NiGHT's on the Saturn is locked at 30fps with practically no slow down when playing the on-rails sections. I think when the kids run around in 3D space, the framerate fluctuates, but the on rails sections are solidly 30. Are the boss areas 60fps? I forget.

I think the PC port on Steam has 60fps though.

>>4761117
Panzer Dragoon mostly IS that ugly. Its one of those games that starts with a really good looking first level with extra effort put into details, then goes into various sand/dirt levels with various shades of brown.

>>4760751
You literally prove my point with this piece of crap.

You dare to compare this to Tekken 3, Soul Edge or Tobal 2? Kek

>>4761239
>You dare to compare this to Tekken 3, Soul Edge or Tobal 2?

As far as gameplay goes, Last Bronx is in that tier. It's a damn good fighter that runs at 60fps on the Saturn. But at the same time it is one of the worst home ports of the gam,e. There was also a Windows 95 PC port from back in the day that looks closer to the Model 2 arcade game.

>>4759348
lol yet another shit tier console from a shit tier company

Only good exclusive series was made for literal autists, but don't put a true platformer out. Less than ten good games released in the USA.

lol jaguar-tier failure

>>inb4 m-m-muh IMPORTS!

>>inb4 m-m-mu ram cart!

>weak at 3D

Bullshit. When the Saturn and PS1 were released they were better at 3D than computers of the time, unless we were talking about very high end stuff nobody was making games for because there was no market.

It took a bit of time for computers to catch up and dedicated 3D GPU became standard.

>>4761186
zwei ironically is the opposite. this is a shitty webm, but this level is spectacular

>>4761186
well, I meant in regards to the framerate

>>4761186
Panzer Dragoon still runs smooth (well, smooth-ish -- it's still 20fps, but it doesn't really dip) and has a fair bit of detail around.
the real issue is that the setting they chose is full of sand and brown because it takes place on a barely terraformed mudball where there's barely any resources, but none of that stems from technical limits

>>4761123
>almost every dynamic instance on screen is a 2D sprite in 3D space.
That's just sensible. It's faster. Loads of games from the era did that.
as for lowest supported resolution, 320x224 isn't terribly low vs the other standard resolutions

>>4761248
Sega did some decent looking PC ports of their Model 2 stuff. I played a bunch of VF2's PC version. Had options for the Model 2 models, lighting, and resolution, although the other scenery still looked like the Saturn version.

>>4761117
I'm just looking at the scenery and I refuse to believe that the Saturn was initially the lead platform for Tomb Raider. It plays to none of the machine's strengths. There's a ton of geometry on screen that just doesn't need to be there.

>>4763029
>Sega did some decent looking PC ports of their Model 2 stuff. I played a bunch of VF2's PC version. Had options for the Model 2 models, lighting, and resolution, although the other scenery still looked like the Saturn version.

Most of their mid 90's PC ports like Virtua Fighter Remix, Virtua Fighter 2, last Bronx, Virtua Cop 1 and 2, Daytona USA and Daytona USA Deluxe, Panzer Dragoon, Bug and others were just enhanced ports of the Sega Saturn game. Some of the earlier Saturn to PC ports features quad rendering with Nvidia's NV1, many of the later ports used DirectX 3D rendering for better framerates, filtering and texture correction. Some games even features arcade-like models.

Many of these ports were pretty damn good too.

>>4759348
>weak at 3D
Saturn's 3D was acceptable for the time.
>good at 2D only with an extra cartridge
Only for games with loads of frames, you can't really compare the data access from cartridges with CDs, there's reason why the Neo Geo CD had 7MB RAM and the loadings still sucked, despite being otherwise the same piece of hardware.

>>4759463
>even without the extra RAM it destroyed the PS1's poor excuse for 2D.
Not even close.

>>4763085
>Only for games with loads of frames, you can't really compare the data access from cartridges with CDs, there's reason why the Neo Geo CD had 7MB RAM and the loadings still sucked, despite being otherwise the same piece of hardware.

The 16bit Neo-Geo CD did have more memory than the Sega Saturn, PS1 and 3DO. 2D games requite a lot of storage for all of their frames of animation. The Neo-Geo CD was slow because it used a 1x CD ROM drive to copy data to roughly 7MB's of system memory. They later released a Neo-Geo CDZ with a 2x speed CD-Rom drive, which doubled the loading speed. But is still slow.

The Sega Saturn has roughly 4.5MB's of system RAM total split across many different pools , while the PS1 has roughly 3MB's of system memory split across larger pools. Both the Saturn and PS1 have 2x speed disc drives.

Generally the Saturn has much better 2D capabilities than the PS1. The pS1's built in sprite capabilities aren't particularly ht, many 2D games used flat 2D -aligned textured polygons instead of the systems sprite rendering engine to compensate.

Sega Saturn games like Dragon Force showed how many sprites the machine could render while scaling them in 3D space.

>>4763085
>Only for games with loads of frames, you can't really compare the data access from cartridges with CDs, there's reason why the Neo Geo CD had 7MB RAM and the loadings still sucked, despite being otherwise the same piece of hardware.

The 16bit Neo-Geo CD does have more memory than the Sega Saturn, PS1 and 3DO. 2D games require a lot of storage for all of their frames of animation. The Neo-Geo CD was slow because it used a 1x CD ROM drive to copy data to roughly 7MB's of system memory. They later released a Neo-Geo CDZ with a 2x speed CD-Rom drive, which doubled the loading speed. But is still slow.

The Sega Saturn has roughly 4.5MB's of system RAM total split across many different pools , while the PS1 has roughly 3MB's of system memory split across larger pools. Both the Saturn and PS1 have 2x speed disc drives.

Generally the Saturn has much better 2D capabilities than the PS1. The PS1's built in sprite capabilities aren't particularly hot, many 2D games used flat 2D -aligned textured polygons instead of the systems sprite rendering engine.

Sega Saturn games like Dragon Force showed how many sprites the machine could render while scaling them in 3D space.

>>4763303
Damn I forgot Dragon Force existed. I saw it at the used game shop and didn't pick up a Sega Saturn because I couldn't find SFA2 or Panzer Dragoon.

lol yet another failure by a shit tier company

no good exclusives, no sanic, no rpgs

>>inb4 m-m-muh imports!

>>inb4 2d powerhouse!

>>4760094
many people were put off from it because it looks like a mario kart style game but controls are wierd, i tried playing multiplayer on the gamecube version and after a couple of races we gave up

>>4761096
the idea was to start with something expensive and have it get cheaper rapidly, the problem with the genesis limited colours could have been solved easily with a bit more cram which would have been expensive in the first year but after that the added cost would have been insignificant

>>4763658
There were plenty of good exclusives, just not as many as the PS1 could pump out at the time. The N64 had the same problem.

>>4763745
>the idea was to start with something expensive and have it get cheaper rapidly

That's really not the case with the Saturn. Generally, consoles get cheaper with new revisions because the hardware manufacturers can reduce the number of chips on the motherboard by merging them together or consolidating them into one chip. But with the Saturn, I doubt they could have done much to reduce the manufacturing costs.

In order to compete with the PS1, Sega had to package more games with the system to make it a better value, as reducing the cost of the machine would have only lost them more money. Sega packaged Daytona USA, Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua Cop with the machine in many regions.

Sony had the same issue with the PS3. You never saw the PS3 drop in price because Sony couldn't really reduce the amount of chips in the machine in the same with Microsoft would. The Cell and RSX were always two separate die. Meanwhile the 360's CPU and GPU were eventually merged into one chip.

>>4763745
>the idea was to start with something expensive and have it get cheaper rapidly

That's really not the case with the Saturn. Generally, consoles get cheaper with new revisions because the hardware manufacturers can reduce the number of chips on the motherboard by merging them together or consolidating them into one chip. But with the Saturn, I doubt they could have done much to reduce the manufacturing costs.

In order to compete with the PS1, Sega had to package more games with the system to make it a better value, as reducing the cost of the machine would have only lost them more money. Sega packaged Daytona USA, Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua Cop with the machine in many regions.It was cheaper for Sega to package a few discs that cost pennies to press than it was to lower the price of the machine.

Sony had the same issue with the PS3. You never saw the PS3 drop in price because Sony couldn't really reduce the amount of chips in the machine in the same way Microsoft could. The Cell and RSX have always two separate die. Meanwhile the 360's CPU and GPU were eventually merged into one chip which did reduce overall cost and power consumption.

>>4765314
>You never saw the PS3 drop in price
What about when they cut the PS2 hardware out of it?

>>4765327
>What about when they cut the PS2 hardware out of it?

Right, good point. I forgot about that. But beyond that, the price never really dropped much. Not in the same way there was price drops with Jasper, Kronos, Trinity and other 360 revisions.

>>4759451
>Sonic R fucking sucked.
WILL THIS MEME DIE
>muh controls
get the fuck good or get the fuck out sonic r is based

>>4765782
I beat the game with almost every character, my dude.
Almost.
You see, the thing about Sonic R, is that even after you get used to the shitty controls, there's still the issue of character balance being fucked up.
Super Sonic, Metal Sonic & Metal Knuckles are just straight-up better than the rest of the cast, and once they're unlocked, you're forced to race them whenever you play as any of the metal characters in single player. The only way to win at that point is to abuse the fuck out of whatever abilities they have. Winning with the spooky scary Tails Doll is fucking impossible without vigorous abuse of it's float mechanic, and on Radiant Emerald, where there is no water to float over, you're whittled down to super-compulsive ring collecting, perfect turns, and luck. Unless you unlock and beat the game with him first, beating all tracks with Eggrobo is damned near impossible. I barely beat the other metal characters with him on Resort Island. I stopped attempting right there.

You don't have very many characters, and once a few of them are unlocked, the other ones just go in the trash bin. It makes a small roster feel even smaller than it is. Combine that with a measly five tracks and you're left with a game devoid of content. Racing games on the N64 have a shitton of tracks, and this Saturn game, with it's expansive CD storage that shadow's the N64's cartridge space, can only fit five? Fuck off. Mario Kart 64, Diddy Kong Racing, and Crash Team Racing make that track count look like a fucking joke. Including all that TJ Davis CD Audio wasn't worth the loss at all. To compare with a racing game on the exact same console, Daytona USA Championship Circuit Edition also had only five tracks, but that game doesn't have frustrating controls and fucked-up balance, so despite it's also sparse track count, it's more fun to come back to.

Sonic R fucking sucked.

>>4759473
> Yu Suzuki, who was higely important in ushering in the dominance of 3D with Virtia Fighter, told Sega staff 3D would eventually take hold.