/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.10799828]

Explain to me why the Saturn needed a mascot when the PSX did fine without anything official.

[Anonymous No.10799839]

The Saturn needed games people wanted to buy consoles for at the time, instead of a bunch of (admittedly cool) niche things like arcade ports, and 2D sidescollers.
Everyone wanted the big 3D game at the time. The game where you could explore a world, or the game that had cutting edge cinematics.
Playstation had FF7 and MGS
N64 had Mario, Zelda, all of the Rare games
PC had the whole FPS renaissance, and CRPGs
Saturn had Virtual Hydlide

[Anonymous No.10799895]

>>10799828
Saturn didn't have a mascot and flopped so i guess we are 50/50 on the mascot debate

[Anonymous No.10799946]

>>10799828
>Explain to me why the Saturn needed a mascot
huh?

[Anonymous No.10799987]

The Saturn was a fine console. A really good one, even. It just had the bad luck of having to compete with a console by a multonational mega corporation that owned CD pressing factories and didn't hesitate to burn money on advertising and selling hardware at a huge loss.

[Anonymous No.10800005]

>>10799987
also the PS1 had games and the Saturn didn't but I don't know if that influenced things

[Anonymous No.10800010]

>>10800005
The Saturn had games, but the PS1 had a lot more and had something for literally everybody

[Anonymous No.10800015]

>>10800005
The Saturn had games though

[Anonymous No.10800028]

>why did the saturn need (ESL) a mascot when the PSX had a mascot

what kind of point are you trying to make here?

[Anonymous No.10800030]

>>10800028
Jumping Flash was abandoned very early by Sony, not sure why.
Also ESL>EOP

[Anonymous No.10800034]

>>10799828
the difference wasn't the mascot, it was that Playstations were actually sold in stores in large amounts.

[Anonymous No.10800052]

Videogames were sold for kids at the time, I know some of you love to forget this fact, and Mario's association with the NES was a huge success with kids.
Thanks to that, attaching a cutesy figure to a console's market campaign was the norm in the 90s.
But by the 5th gen the main public for consoles (gen Y) started to enter their teens, and having a mascot was seen as childish to them.
Sony caught up to it, and marketed itself as a console with more mature games, like Resident Evil and Twisted Metal.
But even then magazines still forced Crash as "unofficial mascot".

[Anonymous No.10800053]

>>10800030
>Jumping Flash was abandoned very early by Sony,
I doubt Sony was going to make the mecharabbit their mascot

[Anonymous No.10800057]

>>10799987
Saturn is very far from fine. It doesn't even have transparency.

[Anonymous No.10800070]

>>10800057
Why? Hardware-wise it's better than the PS1. Better 2D, 3D is about the same, and has way less failure rate, also shorter loading times. Better controller too.
Library-wise the Saturn is fine too, it just died too early but for the years it was in the market it got a number of great games.

[Anonymous No.10800073]

>>10800052
Mascots aren't exclusively for kids. Sports teams also have them.
It's just a recognizable character.

[Anonymous No.10800085]

>>10800073
Brands don't need mascots, it is for kids.
Also Master Chief as a mascot shows the change in demographics of console buyers, at that state of the industry marketers at Microsoft knew a cutesy character wouldn't sell to, now teenagers, gamers.
You can see the progression clearly, Sega had Alex Kidd, but ditched it for Sonic, because he was edgier than Mario and kids in the 90s loved edgy characters.

[Anonymous No.10800087]

>>10800073
who's the nigger?

[Anonymous No.10800097]

>>10800085
Even adult magazines have mascots. Or used to have.
Modern society is largely devoid of mascots and colorful things in general. Everything became more cold and dry.

[Anonymous No.10800109]

Why do we keep rehashing this forever? Sega gave up on the saturn. Its really just that simple.

[Anonymous No.10800114]

>>10800097
I believe it's a reflex of the demographic shift in age, there are more people in their 50s than 10 year olds in america knowadays
Fertility rates in the US is around 1.7. Marketing campaigns simply don't need tp cater to children as much anymore, because millennials don't breed.

[Anonymous No.10800118]

>>10800114
What was the point of having a mascot for an adult magazine then?
Nah, it's not a demographic thing, it's a mentality/zeitgeist thing. The world became darker after 9/11.

[Anonymous No.10800123]

>>10800114
>>10800118
Mascots and cartoon-like marketing still exists, though it's in a very sad, corporate state. It does feel cold and dry.

[Anonymous No.10800137]

>>10800118
>What was the point of having a mascot for an adult magazine then?
Because it was a practice at the time, they learned that it was needed to do it to captivate a younger audience and keep their fidelity to the brand through their whole life in marketing schools, and simply replicated the behavior in adult stuff, it not that complicated.
But be my guest, give it another reason why mascots aren't a thing anymore, other than children not being the major videogame buyers anymore.

>>10800123
I think, in that particular case, it's more related to fact that the millennials working there are what you call "basedboys" than anything else.
Thats what they learn in calarts, and they are adults that watch cartoons and play videogames in their 30s and 40s and see no problem with that.

[Anonymous No.10800173]

>>10800114
No, it's because the post modernists despite art and beauty. They can't stop writing about it.

All the architecture and art students go to art school where their hopes and dreams are crushed by post modern faculty. They make depressing 'unoffensive' corpo slop

[Anonymous No.10800206]

>>10800137
You think people playing vidya in their 30s is an issue

[Anonymous No.10800234]

>>10799828
because the saturn had no good games

[Anonymous No.10800243]

>>10800087
I'm gonna guess a Grand Theft Auto character, it was one of the biggest selling PS2 games.

[Anonymous No.10800250]

>>10800070
saturn having worse 3d was the ass end joke of every magazine in the mid 90s, even Saturn exclusive magazines acknowledged that multiplatforms all looked way better on the PSX, and they treated actual real transparencies as some kind of OMG WOWZERS moment whenever it happened.

>way less failure rate
having higher failure rate is how you sell more consoles. PS1 had a hardware fault that killed the CD drive (people used to run the console upside down so it reads cds better), PS2 had class action lawsuits over hardware faults and early units couldn't read some very late dual layer dvd games, 360 was the best selling xbox ever, etc.

[Anonymous No.10800353]

>>10800173
Get new bait, this is expired.

[Anonymous No.10800370]

>>10799828
Maybe because SEGA already had one and they randomly decided to throw it out the window for no reason. This is more like if Nintendo randomly decided to get rid of Mario and try a "new" mascot for the N64

[Anonymous No.10800372]

>>10800057
Saturn is very far from fine. It doesn't even have transparency.

[Anonymous No.10800385]

>>10799828
The problem with Saturn wasn't just no Sonic. There was no new Streets of Rage, no new Golden Axe (barring 'that' fighting game), no new OutRun, no new Vectorman, etc. Only Shining Force, Oasis, a lackluster Hang-On game (albeit somewhat mitigated by the existence of Manx TT), and a JP-only Columns crossover/spin-off.

Not only did it have no mascot (aside from maybe NiGHTS who got a single game on it), they did not even attempt to carry over the Genesis' momentum using existing IP's. It was almost exclusively arcade ports, and in many cases not even new/exclusive versions of those arcade games. And, if NiGHTS was intended to be Saturn's mascot, it should have been a slam dunk and better than Sonic in every way, not just a fun score attack minigame with an extra Christmas demo as a consolation prize.

[Anonymous No.10800503]

>>10800353
Prove him wrong

[Anonymous No.10800618]

Because Sony were newcomers and had room to experiment.
A lot of arcade autists are gonna get mad to hear this, but Sonic was the only Sega IP anyone in america cared about.

[Anonymous No.10800693]

>>10799828
>Explain to me
No.
Do your own shitty video essay homework.

[Anonymous No.10801436]

>>10800250
>having higher failure rate is how you sell more consoles. PS1 had a hardware fault that killed the CD drive (people used to run the console upside down so it reads cds better), PS2 had class action lawsuits over hardware faults and early units couldn't read some very late dual layer dvd games, 360 was the best selling xbox ever, etc.
Can you delete this?

[Anonymous No.10801603]

>>10799828
>Explain to me why the Saturn needed a mascot when the PSX did fine without anything official.

Crash was about as official of a Mascot as Sony could get away with. But for some reason, the game was owned by Universal Interactive, who was later purchased by Vivindi. The guy in the Crash costume was basically synonymous with the Playstation 1 era. Crash was really just the mascot for the PS1 console. Never one for Sony Computer Entertainment.

https://youtu.be/bLdQczq3NMM?t=2

[Anonymous No.10801628]

>>10800070
>3D is about the same
The Saturn can't even do hardware transparency between objects drawn by VDP1 (sprites/polygons). I don't hate the console but the fact is 3D was extremely popular at the time and the PS1 better at it. Shit like some 2D fighting game having more frames of animation wasn't gonna save the console when people wanted to play games like Gran Turismo, Crash and Spyro
https://mattgreer.dev/articles/sega-saturn-and-transparency/

[Anonymous No.10801683]

>>10799828
The PlayStation had good games. Sharturn did not. You don’t need a mascot if you have a vast library of the best games on the planet.

[Anonymous No.10801686]

>>10799839
Sega shoulda backed Willy Wombat.

[Anonymous No.10801697]

Do you guys think Segata could have worked as a mascot outside Japan? I feel like commercials and ads with a hyper aggressive karate man breaking down the door to some families house, picking up their television (and ps1/nintendo) and throwing them through a wall then forcing the family to go through some intense physical and spiritual training regiment montage(complete with Japanese to English subtitles) to get them prepared for <insert scenes of upcoming Saturn exclusive here> only for him to shake his head dissapointingly and claim "you are not ready", then leaves into the sunset out of the open doorway he smashed down, would have been more effective and memorable then some bald dude in silver spray paint.

[Anonymous No.10801708]

>>10801697
Totally, it'd have probably sold a shit ton of saturns in the US. As a kid I would've loved it, saying it to my friends and shit. Pretending to be him. Sega fucked up hard in so many areas for the Saturn it's baffling. 100% Shinto black magic from Nintendo.

[Anonymous No.10801709]

Toro.
The official Playstation's mascot since the begining.

[Anonymous No.10801717]

>>10801709
Didn't he debut as the mascot for the PocketStation? Or was he used before that?

[Anonymous No.10801728]

a naked lady mascot couldnt have saved the sadturd. no one was getting scammed on shit tier sega hardware again, regardless if the console was actually good or not. their mindshare was ruined

[Anonymous No.10801730]

>>10800028
Nothing was wrong with his English, you're just outing yourself as the ESL who calls everyone else ESL in an attempt to show how not ESL he is.

[Anonymous No.10801739]

>>10801628
>people wanted to play games like Gran Turismo
It’s sort of a miracle that even PS1 got Gran Turismo.
>When asked how difficult it was to create Gran Turismo, Yamauchi remarked: "It took five years. In those five years, we could not see the end. I would wake up at work, and go to sleep at work. It was getting cold, so I knew it must be winter. I estimate I was home only four days a year".[9] While the team used standard PlayStation libraries in part, to get the game to run at optimal speed they had to use assembly code, and even then, they found the limitations of the PlayStation's CPU would not allow them to meet their initial goal of having 12 cars in each race.
But it’s true that Sony had a better software strategy for their first-party console development than Sega did then.

[Anonymous No.10803087]

>>10799828
Saturn didn't need a mascot... it needed Sonic. It was part of SEGA's established appeal in the west at the time, Saturn lost to PlayStation in most of the direct comparisons of hardware, price and, of course, software, having something people know and love would've helped quite a lot back then...

[Anonymous No.10804219]

>>10800052
>But even then magazines still forced Crash as "unofficial mascot".
Sony of America forced it. They were constantly trying to make a mascot happen in marketing (Polygon Man, Sofia from Battle Arena Toshinden), but Sony of Japan kept shooting the idea down because they figured the name of the brand was a big enough draw to market without a personality attached to it.

[Anonymous No.10805814]

>>10799828
Blasto was meant to have an entire franchise built around him, but then the VA's ex-wife killed him for dope money before the first game in their cancelled series was even finished.

[Anonymous No.10805931]

>>10800137
>they are adults that watch cartoons and play videogames in their 30s and 40s and see no problem with that.
What are you even doing here?

[Chud Anon No.10805935]

>>10799828
Saturn had the tranny clown

[Chud Anon No.10805937]

>>10800052
>Gen Y

[Anonymous No.10806179]

>>10799946
This entire board is dildos and bots

[Anonymous No.10807508]

>>10800114
Thanks doc.