Does anyone feel sorry for Sega?

[Anonymous No.5643549]

Looking here;
https://sega.jp/history/hard/segasaturn/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sega_arcade_system_boards

Sega has a rich history of hardware and software, especially in the arcades where I would debate they were the most innovative and prolific during the 80s and 90s. They pioneered a lot of innovations like 3D graphics, online play, CD technology and many other boring technical facts only I'm interested in like 2D depth of field and isometric rotation.

But it seems like their success in the USA with the Genesis was a one hit wonder as looking at their hardware library they have more failures than successes.
>tried to break into the PC market with a computer/genesis hybrid called the Terradrive, failed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VocZ58QqqTE
>try to do a Sony and make CDs compatible with consoles, failed and forgotten.
>tried to outdo the NES twice with the SG1000 and Sega Master System, failed
>all consoles have ridiculous addons. The 32x and Sega CD are the most famous but they have an FM sound unit for the Master System, RAM expansion for the Saturn, Karoke Machine addons for the Dreamcast, VCD playback for the Saturn, a printer for the Master System etc... all failed
>created an insane amount of original IPs with only a few surviving now.

It seems like they were just throwing shit at the wall hardware and software wise to see what sticks. For every Genesis and Sonic, they have a HiSaturn, Wild Woody and House of the Dead just rotting away somewhere. Almost everything they've done hardware wise that wasn't the Mega Drive/Genesis was a complete failure and almost everything software wise that wasn't Sonic or their classic arcade games like Virtua Fighter and Outrun have been a complete failure with the exception of some modern ones like Fantasy Star Online and Yakuza.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3RuQsTdrLs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyv6ZehQyTQ

TLDR: Is there a more cursed company than Sega?

[Anonymous No.5644327]

Read Console Wars. You'll then understand that Sega of Japan deserved everything bad that happened to them.

[Anonymous No.5644370]

>>5643549
It's called the SEGA System.

[Anonymous No.5644383]

>>5644370
Look who's back! Missed you buddy!

[Anonymous No.5644419]

>>5643549
its all sega of japan's fault.
>Does anyone feel sorry for Sega?
Sorry for a company?? Come again??

[Anonymous No.5644430]

They should have had better games then maybe i'd feel bad. Sega games were all cheap knockoff tacky chink shit. Ever since the beginning you were better off playing something else.

[Anonymous No.5644438]

>>5643549
I miss the good old days of Sega but I can't say I feel sorry for the company as a whole, by which I mean the management chain. They made so many retarded decisions.

[Anonymous No.5644503]

Well, I don't know If being sorry is the word I'd say, but yes, It's a catastrophe what happened to Sega. From being one of the most powerful hardware and software houses of the 80s and 90s, to a producer and developer of Sonic and Yakuza games, and Puyo Puyo sequels. Also, no Yu Suzuki or Tetsuya Mizuguchi anymore, and the founders of Sonic Team have left the company too.

The Mega Drive Mini and Sega Ages are fine, but It's kind of sad seeing one of the most forward-looking companies of the 90s, that almost never looked back and was proud of their continuous innovations pandering so hard to nostalgia and their glory days.

[Anonymous No.5644781]

I'll say this though, there isn't a company on earth that could have beaten Sony when the PS1 was released. The hype machine was incredible and Sony had all the press on their side too. Sega may have done some things wrong but Sony did EVERYTHING right. And Sony aimed their machine right at Sega's target demographic too.

[Anonymous No.5644816]

>>5644781
The real bit that kills me with the whole Saturn vs PS1 debacle is that Sega flat out didn't show up. The machine had such a slow trickle of releases that even if you were a die-hard Sega fan, you'd be regretting even having the machine. Sega went from having a ridiculously strong market position that they could leverage from the Genesis to absolute fucking nothing with the Saturn.

I don't think Sega could have outright won against the PS1 (PS1 had nicer hardware and Saturn's VDP1 is too god damn slow if you don't want to kill texture quality, Sony had the right push and courted developers, etc), but Sega shouldn't have lost quite that badly. If Sony did everything right, it's pretty safe to say that during the 1995-1998 period, Sega (in the home market) did everything wrong. Every single thing.

[Anonymous No.5644919]

>>5643549

The cold. hard truth? SEGA was too hardcore for most people. Even during the nineties the majority of gamers were casuals who just wanted to be in the trendiest lair possible. And SEGA's competitors projected that image way better.

[Anonymous No.5644928]

>>5644816

I never regretted buying my saturn. Between 95 and 1990 it was my most loved machine. Still have it, still works, and i still play games on it.

[Anonymous No.5644930]

>>5644816

I never regretted buying my saturn. Between 95 and 1990 it was my most loved machine. Still have it, still works, and i still play games on it.

[Anonymous No.5644937]

>>5644816

I never regretted buying my saturn. Between 95 and 1999 it was my most loved machine. Still have it, still works, and i still play games on it.

[Anonymous No.5644938]

>>5644383
Shady's back.
With a Sega System.
Dreamcast came before GameGear.

[Anonymous No.5644943]

>>5644919
Unironically this.
Casuals are STILL seething over sega, 20 years and more.
I am not exaggerating.

[Anonymous No.5644990]

>>5643549
I feel bad that creative employees had shitty management. Stuff like the 32x and CD never should have been made. If they saved all that budget and went straight from Mega Drive -> Saturn, it would have been better.

[Anonymous No.5644996]

If you're asking do I feel a worry we don't live in a world where a Sega is a major player and Sega consoles are still competing, then yes I feel sorry (though considering the direction of their ips and the industry as a whole maybe it's a blessing)

If you're asking do I feel sorry for the stockholders and management of the company for bad decisions they made, of course not.

[Anonymous No.5645012]

SEGA of Japan fucked itself over by fighting with SEGA of America and SEGA of America fucked up by following the whole "No 2D" shit Sony did.

Also, i can't feel sorry for a company that continued to make successful games after it dropped out of the console market.

[Anonymous No.5645028]

>tfw Americlaps and Huehues discover that they were the only people to give a shit about Sega.

Grew up in Okinawa and had family in Nagano. Sega was always the bronze medal system over there. Sega was arcade and arcade ONLY.

[Anonymous No.5645032]

>>5644327
>Read console wars
>SoA dindu nuthin they waz good boyz
Alpha and Omega yikes my fellow gaijin.

[Anonymous No.5645038]

>>5644430
Space Harrier was pretty tight.

[Anonymous No.5645050]

>>5645032
This. Just because home office fucked with them doesn't mean they're obsolved from thier own dumbshit tactics.

[Anonymous No.5645054]

>>5645028
Sega was huge in Europe, idiot

[Anonymous No.5645060]

>>5643549
Love SOJ's stuff. SOA's stuff is generally dumpster bound. Anyway, modern Sega is doing fine software wise and the Gen/MD mini is set to be a hit.

[Anonymous No.5645121]

>>5645054
>consoles
>being big in Europe
We were the original PC gamers; no one cared about video gooks unless they were too poor/retarded to buy a computer.

[Anonymous No.5645173]

>>5645121
Sega ported a lot of their stuff to PC

[Anonymous No.5645180]

>>5644816
I'm glad I didn't get a saturn till a couple years ago, being able to make backups no problem really made it worth while

[Anonymous No.5645189]

>>5645173
Wouldn't their point still stand? Why bother buying the console if you already have the games on PC?

[Anonymous No.5645290]

>>5645189
I for one like all games to be on PC irregegardless from who.

[Anonymous No.5645305]

>>5644370
>mega cartridge
>power base converter to use in mega drive

[Anonymous No.5645402]

>>5645028
SEGA was big in Europe too

[Anonymous No.5645413]

>>5644327
Yeah, Sega of Japan should have followed Nintendo of Japan role and keep the gaijins in line.

[Anonymous No.5645432]

Sega's worst enemy has always been itself

[Anonymous No.5645561]

>>5643549
No. We are living in a time where gaming is better than ever now that the weak did not survive. Sega was always shit.

[Anonymous No.5645592]

>>5644327
>>5644419

I am well aware of SOJ idiocy. They were legitimately retarded and it was all the ego talking. SOA in the 90s were actually making smart business decisions like discounting the Genesis and bundling in Sonic.

>>5644430
I feel Sega games are very arcade-y. They only really tried to be deep and immersive in the Dreamcast era.

>>5644438
True

>>5644503
It's terrible how barely anyone who worked on anything Sega related during it's heyday aren't there anymore. Hell even the creator of Sonic works at motherfucking SquareEnix now. Sega is literally just an arcade/gambling company now they've merged with Sammy.

>>5644781
>>5644816
My two cents is Sega of Japan's ego was too high and thought they had leverage due to the Genesis being a hit. A nightmare of a console to program for with that attitude, many just flocked to the easy to program and royalty generous PlayStation.

[Anonymous No.5645598]

>>5644990
>If they saved all that budget and went straight from Mega Drive -> Saturn, it would have been better.

I dunno. Sega of Japan clearly wanted it to be a 2D powerhouse but freaked out at the last second when Sony made the PS1 3D capable.

>>5645012
I feel Sega has a much much larger presence in Japan. Very few of their franchises now get localised at all.

>>5645432
I don't know how one company can fuck up so badly.

>>5645561
:(

[Anonymous No.5645761]

>>5645592
Makoto Uchida, creator of the Golden Axe series, Altered Beast or Alien Storm still works in Sega apparently, but I believe he was transfered to Sega of China, and it's pretty much unknown if he still does anything remarkable there.

[Anonymous No.5645808]

>>5643549
>Does anyone feel sorry for Sega?

Not at all. They deserved what happened to them. I do however wish they were still making consoles but in a much smarter way. Of course that wouldn't happen though otherwise they would still be making consoles to begin with. It is their fault the Saturn and Dreamcast failed when both should have been great successes. At least I enjoyed them for what they were.

[Anonymous No.5645825]

>>5643549
not at all they are xenophobic morons.

[Anonymous No.5645885]

>>5645808
>>5645825
I dunno. I consider Sega of Japan and Sega of America to be two different companies, at least during the Genesis era. SOA single handedly made the Genesis popular and SOJ was probably butthurt and forced SOA to implement their shitty decisions due to jealousy, ego or whatever. In Japan, Sega failed at everything not arcade related.

[Anonymous No.5646123]

>>5645598
>2D powerhouse meme
Saturn was always meant to push polygons

[Anonymous No.5646134]

I don't feel bad. They're still there, they're still available. They still pop out a good game every now and then. I am glad I can find proper versions of old arcade Sega titles too without much of a hassle, even officially.

[Anonymous No.5646138]

>>5643549
Yes I feel sorry for a corporation.

[Anonymous No.5646139]

>>5645592
>I feel Sega games are very arcade-y.
IMO that was a pretty nice thing considering the alternatives. Most sports games/racing games done by sega are more focused on fun than plain simulation. People who suck at driving can still enjoy racing games from Sega and not much else. People who aren't into sports can still find stuff like Virtua Tennis really fun to play. They're not realistic, just fun.

[Anonymous No.5646150]

>>5645598
A lot of Saturn design decisions make a lot more sense when you consider that Sega was worried about the Jaguar (which was supposedly one of the reasons Sega pushed the 32X out) and the 3DO (which didn't actually have a real path to success due to its manufacturing model, but it was getting some fairly okayish software support and also used quad-based rendering, and everyone seemed to think it was going to succeed at the time).

Saturn absolutely shits on both in terms of 3D performance.
shame the PS1 shits on the Saturn to about the same degree, and has a dedicated chip for doing T&L

But yeah, Saturn's rushed schedule was to try to ensure that once demand for the old 16-bit machines had faded, they'd have a machine out with a head start to compete with the seemingly crowded market.

[Anonymous No.5646214]

>>5646150
>shame the PS1 shits on the Saturn to about the same degree, and has a dedicated chip for doing T&L

That's ridiculous. Playstation usually just looks better (relatively, Playstation is also ugly but Saturn is next level ugly with its mesh transparencies). Sometimes there's a framerate advantage on the Playstation too.

Meanwhile the Jaguar and 3DO are closer to something like the 32x in performance.

[Anonymous No.5646263]

>SEGA launches the Saturn with a 3D Sonic game
>Gets off to a stronger start
>Is able to dissuade Capcom and Eidos away from doing an exclusivity deal with Sony for RE and Tomb Raider
>Lands FF7
>Smothers Playstation in the cradle

How would games look different now?

[Anonymous No.5646274]

>>5646263
You forgot to: not launch sega cd and 32x addon. Then not to suddenly release the console during a press conference while pissing off retailers. That should get sega to ground zero in terms of rewriting history.

[Anonymous No.5646332]

>>5646214
Jaguar, yes. Although the Jag was built to do 3D, it's a really early design and doesn't really fare well with textured graphics. It's still stronger than the 32X, but that's not hard, having a graphics processor at all.
3DO? The 3DO actually does push textured polygons and has a proper graphics chip. It is well out of the power range of the 32X.

As for PS1, it can do much more lighting than Saturn, PS1 can do much better textures (the Saturn's VDP1 absolutely shits the bed vs the PS1's GPU when drawing large textures).
PS1 can push more polygons and sprites than Saturn, period.
For 2D gaming, the PS1's biggest drawback was its lack of video RAM (1MB, unified between textures and framebuffer instead of Saturn's 1.5MB, split between VDP2 background data, VDP1 texture data, and the framebuffer), which meant you didn't have the space for lots of animation.
For 3D gaming, the VDP2 background memory is a bit of a waste that could have gone to more textures, killing the memory advantage.
The GTE simplifies a fuckton of things. Many 3D Saturn games are unlit or flat-shaded, with Sonic Team's games on the machine being major exceptions. The Saturn has a DSP chip for handling this shit, but a: it's a manually pipelined fucking abomination, and b: it's not even that fast. Games generally end up doing T&L in software on one of the SH-2s.
The PS1 uses UV coordinates for textures, allowing for things like environment/reflection mapping. The Saturn directly stretches a texture across all four points, making such a technique impossible. Sonic R software renders to do it.
VDP1 overdraws like hell. You can enable the transparency flag on a 4 point quad and see just how much it overdraws by the artifacts where it reapplies transparency to the same pixel.
VDP1 transparency is both kinda slow (less bad than the VDP manual makes out) and kinda ugly.
A few Saturn games use the VDP2 floor (saving quads), where the PS1 can just shit out a big grid and not even care that much.

[Anonymous No.5646336]

>>5646263
All of this would imply that Sega wasn’t incompetent. Literally everything would be different if that weren’t the case.

[Anonymous No.5646395]

>>5646274
Sega CD could still exist, and things wouldn't be so bad. 32X pulled games in development away from Saturn.
Chaotix was supposed to be on Saturn. AMOK began life on 32X, and then got brought to Saturn when that fell through. There were a bunch of games that just completely fell through when the Saturn died.
Actually good versions of VF1 and Virtua Racing were on 32X instead of on Saturn for god knows whatever reason.

also, the early launch for the Saturn absolutely sealed Sega's grave
It was so bad. Even with the 32X dragging things down, Sega could have had some hope if it had an actual, proper launch.
The early launch literally couldn't have helped Sega in any way since they couldn't make enough Saturns to satisfy any real demand.
They already had production issues with the 32X, which was in rather high demand when that launched (remember, Sega was still on top of the world at this point), demand that died off fairly quickly by the time Sega was finally able to make enough of the machines. Same thing happened with the Saturn. Initial (tiny) stock sells out, by the time new stock comes in, no one cares. The machine doesn't have any games at this point, anyway.

God, what a shitshow.

[Anonymous No.5646397]

>>5646395
>There were a bunch of games that just completely fell through when the Saturn died.
this should say when the 32X died

[Anonymous No.5646559]

>>5645561
>gaming is better than ever now
KYS

[Anonymous No.5647205]

>>5645561
>gaming is better than ever now
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

[Anonymous No.5647220]

>>5645592
I enjoyed soa's decisions like xerox copied instruction manuals, paper boxes, $90 Phantasy Star 4, absolutely abysmal western 1st party shit and game covers by Sam the soa janitor. Even Sega realizes how shit their western games were and are mercifully using predominantly Japanese games for the Mini.

[Anonymous No.5647337]

Alot of their stuff was rushed out of the gate and it all dates back to the beginning.

>The SG-1000 should of used a custom PPU like what Nintendo did (44 pins to allow for RGBS, on top of more sprites, horizontal & vertical scrolling, sprite flipping, multi color sprites (at least 3 + transparency, 7 + transparency and up preferably) and more colors (64 of them at least, 256 preferably)).
>AV/RGB output.
>15-pin controller output to avoid placing a start/pause button on the console itself to match that of the NES, digital layout as well, just like the NES.
>Should of had 8KB of ram from day 1, Vram however was fine but could of been faster SRam.
>Should of snatch up Japan's PC gaming companies (Compile, Falcom, Enix/Chun Soft, Technosoft) the same way Nintendo got Japan's arcade companies (Capcom, Konami, Namco, Taito; as for PC devs Hal Laboratory & Square will still be with Nintendo), this is the big one.
>Should of locked their games to their own system and not sub-licence them to other companies for other systems *cough*Sunsoft*cough*Dempa*cough*.
>After all of that the system would of been at the same level as the NES world wide and lasted 7 years.
>The Game Gear would of been 100% identical to this, rather then a Master System with more colors, making it cheaper to make.
>The Master System never happened due to the SG-1000 having everything that the SMS had from the start.

And thats just the 8-Bit hardware.

[Anonymous No.5647608]

Let's do a quick recap of Sega's console history, shall we.
>SG-1000
Dead on arrival, but it's not Sega's fault that Colecovision specs were obsolete a year after its release. No way they could've won with Nintendo at that point.
>Mark III
No 3rd party support, relatively poor 1st party library, apart from a couple of great gems (Wonder Boy 3, Phantasy Star) the only redeeming quality is the amazing FM Sound Unit. Discontinued in the home market within mere months of the release of its successor.
>Mega Drive
Couldn't beat PC Engine in Japan, never successful in the home market, had a field day in the NTSC market from 1990 to 1993 when SNES started to take the lead thanks to Super FX tech. That's also when Sega started to shit the market with the add-ons, but on the other hand was very successful in the PAL regions with their 8-bit machines.
>Saturn
Good start in Japan, started losing there around mid-1996, dead on arrival in the Western markets.
>Dreamcast
Similar to the Saturn, it was much more successful in Japan than in the West. Officially licensed games appeared there up until 2007.

Sega never had a definitely successful console like Nintendo and Sony did. Even Mega Drive that's often considered a high point of the company's home endeavors wasn't that popular in Japan, and the PAL markets preferred either its predecessor or the Game Gear. It's in complete contrast to its consistently healthy presence in the arcades, where they were the cutting-edge actor from 1985 if not earlier. I think a lot of their failures were stemming from the fact that they approached the console market with an arcade mindset. They were too proud to collaborate with their competitors such as Namco or Taito. If their consoles weren't selling, well, that's worse for the console market and the consumers than them.

[Anonymous No.5649462]

>>5644937
So much overscan