The Sega Neptune

[Black_Tiger]

Much of what I was going to say has already been said. The 32X 'doesn't even compare' to the Saturn. It's basically like a generational difference in released game quality. Whether or not the 32X was a good idea or could've done well under different circumstances, I'm still glad that it exists and appreciate it for what it is.

The Saturn's 3D is just fine for the time. Even in the hands of poor developers, there wasn't that much difference between it and the average PSX game (I won't get into the N64). The difference is smaller than that between the Genesis and SNES. Sure Sega should've helped third parties more, but the end result overall turned out good enough and there are plenty of Saturn games with amazing 3D for the time.

I've noticed that discussions about the Saturn and/or Sega failing are always based around Sega. No one seems to give Sony any credit for the PSX or entertain the idea that no matter what Sega did, they might have still died out in the console market. Even Nintendo has been beat until recently. Which makes it kinda crazy that many people say that the Saturn should've been more like the N64.

[Baloo]

I'm surprised there are ANY 32X supporters. That system had NO good games. Yeah, there are a few DECENT ones, but decent is all they are. The Sega CD, on the other hand, has a very rich, albeit small, library and several classic titles.

I like the 32x myself for a couple of games, Star Wars Arcade and Knuckles Chaotix in particular. Both haven't been re-released and you can't play them anywhere else...so yeah. And I LOVE me some Knuckles Chaotix. One of my favorite Sonic games ever, it's so underrated IMO. There's also Fred Couples Golf, Mortal Kombat II, and Shadow Squadron. A couple of US exclusives for the 32x really suck though. T-mek, Cosmic Carnage, ugh... I also love NBA Jam T.E. on 32x, no load times and much better graphics than on Genesis.

[Baloo]

I've noticed that discussions about the Saturn and/or Sega failing are always based around Sega. No one seems to give Sony any credit for the PSX or entertain the idea that no matter what Sega did, they might have still died out in the console market. Even Nintendo has been beat until recently. Which makes it kinda crazy that many people say that the Saturn should've been more like the N64.

The failure is put on Sega because Sony wanted to team up with Sega in the beginning, but Sega pushed them away. They also had the chance to get Silicon Graphics for the Saturn, but again, Sega snubbed out SoA like the assholes they were. So they could've gotten both their competitors early on, but they were too stupid. Not to mention Bernie Stolar killing the US Saturn library with his "3D is the future, no 2D games" policy, since the Japanese Saturn library could've saved the Saturn due to how many good games it had. But it wasn't all his fault, the blame should be put more on SoJ.

So yeah, it really is all Sega's fault.

[Black_Tiger]

The failure is put on Sega because Sony wanted to team up with Sega in the beginning, but Sega pushed them away. They also had the chance to get Silicon Graphics for the Saturn, but again, Sega snubbed out SoA like the assholes they were. So they could've gotten both their competitors early on, but they were too stupid. Not to mention Bernie Stolar killing the US Saturn library with his "3D is the future, no 2D games" policy, since the Japanese Saturn library could've saved the Saturn due to how many good games it had. But it wasn't all his fault, the blame should be put more on SoJ.

So yeah, it really is all Sega's fault.

Sega snubbing Sony is still about Sony and Sega having the chance to have had N64-like graphics is still about the N64, which still failed against the PSX.

Hypotheticals are still just that. Sure if Sega had merged with Sony and Nintendo and there was no competition they would've come out on top. But even if they did most things right (like they did with the Dreamcast), they still could've done just as bad/less-good or worse.

If NEC had included SuperGrafx hardware in the Duo systems, would they have automatically beat the Super Famicom? The SMS was a beast compared to the NES. Nintendo may have used business style to win the 8-bit generation, but so did Sony later on.

I'm not saying that Sony would've won in any scenario, but Sega wouldn't have automatically won if they'd done a few things different either. Plus, if they had, they wouldn't have been the Sega that everyone loves.

[tomaitheous]

The failure is put on Sega because Sony wanted to team up with Sega in the beginning, but Sega pushed them away. They also had the chance to get Silicon Graphics for the Saturn, but again, Sega snubbed out SoA like the assholes they were. So they could've gotten both their competitors early on, but they were too stupid. Not to mention Bernie Stolar killing the US Saturn library with his "3D is the future, no 2D games" policy, since the Japanese Saturn library could've saved the Saturn due to how many good games it had. But it wasn't all his fault, the blame should be put more on SoJ.

So yeah, it really is all Sega's fault.

I don't buy the fact that lack of 2D support in the US had any real impact. 2D was a dieing genre, 3D was the next hottest/greatest thing according to gamers. It was in demand. The 2D titles on the PSX didn't have much to do with its success. And it's still a wide ratio at that on the PSX. If Symphony of the Night never came out to the US on PSX, it would have still been just as popular of a system.

Same with specs. Saturn looked fine compared to the PSX. There wasn't a huge difference and as history's showed - many "inferrior" systems had beaten out the competition in their day.

Also, Sega had a HUGE existing fan base compared to Sony starting from scratch, going into the 32bit generation.

[Baloo]

I don't buy the fact that lack of 2D support in the US had any real impact. 2D was a dieing genre, 3D was the next hottest/greatest thing according to gamers. It was in demand. The 2D titles on the PSX didn't have much to do with its success. And it's still a wide ratio at that on the PSX. If Symphony of the Night never came out to the US on PSX, it would have still been just as popular of a system.

Same with specs. Saturn looked fine compared to the PSX. There wasn't a huge difference and as history's showed - many "inferrior" systems had beaten out the competition in their day.

Also, Sega had a HUGE existing fan base compared to Sony starting from scratch, going into the 32bit generation.

It isn't the fact that there were no 2D games, it was the fact that early 3D games and the Playsation/Saturn SUCKED ASS, and all the 2D games on Saturn from Japan were fucking gold. Radiant Silvergun? X-men Vs. Street Fighter? Street Fighter Alpha 3? Guardian Heroes? THIS IS WHY SATURN DID WELL IN JAPAN!

If Saturn got good 3D games like Nintendo 64 did, it's quite possible that it could've survived. But all we got was NiGHTS...there's not a single other memorable game in the US Saturn library except for my personal favorite Sonic R.

[Melf]

If Saturn got good 3D games like Nintendo 64 did, it's quite possible that it could've survived. But all we got was NiGHTS...there's not a single other memorable game in the US Saturn library except for my personal favorite Sonic R.

Panzer Dragoon trilogy says wsup.

[Baloo]

Panzer Dragoon trilogy says wsup.

Panzer Dragoon Saga says Only 30,000 copies of me exist, so I cost $300.

Now tell me that's not a factor of aging.

[Melf]

But that has nothing to do with them being good 3D games. Whether they cost $5 or $500, all three are quality 3D titles. the Saturn has quite a few of them, but you just have to know where to look.

[Baloo]

But that has nothing to do with them being good 3D games. Whether they cost $5 or $500, all three are quality 3D titles. the Saturn has quite a few of them, but you just have to know where to look.

Does it involve me looking through the Japanese library? Because the US library doesn't have shit for memorable games just about.

[Black_Tiger]

If Saturn got good 3D games like Nintendo 64 did, it's quite possible that it could've survived. But all we got was NiGHTS...there's not a single other memorable game in the US Saturn library except for my personal favorite Sonic R.

The Saturn did survive, it just wasn't number one. It's no big deal. What's important is that we got so many great games from it.

Since NiGHTs is a 2D game, I guess that by "3D" you mean simply games that use some 3D graphics? Here are some that were released in North America-

Virtua Fighter 2
Shining Force
Daytona's
Sega Rally's
Virtual On's
Virtua Cop's
House of the Dead
Duke Nukem 3D
Powerslave
Quake
Shining the Holy Ark
Panzer Dragoon's
Fighting Vipers
Fighters Megamix
Die Hard Arcade
Iron Storm

I'd rather have a Saturn for the Shining Force III games alone. I'd also take the Saturn's 3D games over the N64's. But my tastes aren't popular (I like pre-current gen games for one thing).

Do you think that the Dreamcast's has "good" 3D games? The Saturn has a similar library.

[Sonicwolf]

Do you think that the Dreamcast's has "good" 3D games? The Saturn has a similar library.

Both the Dreamcast and the Saturn had great games but here is the difference. The Saturn was released too soon and it wasnt developer friendly or as visually impressive as the PlayStation games were post-launch. By the mid 1990s, I believe north americans expected more bang for their buck and they saw the flow of titles and the visual elegance heading towards Sony so they bought along those lines. By the time the Saturn dropped low in price and got some really excellent titles, it was already considered the misfit third and buried here. The Dreamcast was released at a time of stagnancy in the gaming market. The PlayStation was whooping butt with the N64 chugging along far behind and it seems people wanted to look towards a new, more impressive console to get into and it was the Dreamcast. Unfortunately Sony did what Sega didnt and added DVD playback which was really a shot in the arm for them. The Dreamcast had an amazing library, like the Saturn, but it could not stand against the sheer power of the PlayStation fanbase.

All in all. Saturn and Dreamcast got their poor, nondeserving asses kicked by Sony. I think the gaming market will always have a vast empty hole that Sega left in 2001 that wont heal. Cheap, in depth, amazing quality games for everyone. Not like now. You either have super-violent FPS/horror, RPG games or a big box of waggleing shovelware.

[Greg2600]

I don't know the reason, perhaps it was the developer unfriendliness, but the Saturn really suffered from the lack of 3rd party support. The Playstation was huge with the games which were cross-platform with PC's. Plus, SEGA never was able to move Sonic into the next platform level, as Nintendo did with Mario. However, IMO, the Saturn suffered most from the two strikes SEGA put on itself with the failures of the SegaCD and 32X. You could argue the drop of Genesis support was a later strike, but the release of a Neptune would have been a huge third strike. The legacy of that era was that by the time the Dreamcast came around, the 3rd party publishers had no faith in SEGA whatsoever.

[Baloo]

I don't know the reason, perhaps it was the developer unfriendliness, but the Saturn really suffered from the lack of 3rd party support. The Playstation was huge with the games which were cross-platform with PC's. Plus, SEGA never was able to move Sonic into the next platform level, as Nintendo did with Mario. However, IMO, the Saturn suffered most from the two strikes SEGA put on itself with the failures of the SegaCD and 32X. You could argue the drop of Genesis support was a later strike, but the release of a Neptune would have been a huge third strike. The legacy of that era was that by the time the Dreamcast came around, the 3rd party publishers had no faith in SEGA whatsoever.

Why do people keep saying Sega CD was a failure? It sold 6 FUCKING MILLION units as an add-on for a system that sold 29 million units total, with a launch price of like $300. That means about 1 in every 5 genesis owners owned a Sega CD. That's no failure that's a success, especially for an add-on at such a high price. Get it right people, the Sega CD was NOT a failure, regulardless of what people on the internet rank it as on their worst system list, or whatever the fuck AVGN says. It did well.

The 32x was a failure sure, but that was bad marketing on Sega's part. Again referring to my past post, if Sega had kept going with the Genesis and 32x and released the Saturn, it could've been the cheap counterpart to the Saturn, gotten a bunch more games released on it, and could've been very successful. But of course SoJ had to be idiots and cancel EVERYTHING in favor of the Saturn, which was released far too early to try to one-up Sony, and ended up kicking themselves for it.

The reason the Saturn died was because the US library sucked ass overall and had no killer-app exclusives, and the list Black_Tiger posted was so small, it just wasn't worth the high Saturn price tag. The 1st party Saturn games weren't really worth purchasing the system over, no 3D Sonic platforming game except for re-releasing Sonic 3D Blast, No killer-apps, and it wasn't that much better than the Playstation graphically. Just about every 3rd party game on Saturn was pretty much already on Playstation. And the only games making up the Sega 1st party exclusives were mainly RPGs, which obviously weren't going to attract everyone. There was no killer-app for the Saturn, no Sonic game to attract people to buy it, no Triple-A first party titles like Nintendo 64 had. It's why the Saturn ultimately failed miserably in the states.

Dreamcast died for a number of reasons. 1 was that you could burn CD-Rs of games and play them on your Dreamcast no problem, so all the 3rd party companies got scared of Pirates, so they all jumped ship. Then the Playstation 2 came out with a DVD player, which the Dreamcast didn't have, another nail in the coffin. Dreamcast has some AWESOME games, and it still died.

The Saturn did survive, it just wasn't number one. It's no big deal. What's important is that we got so many great games from it.

Since NiGHTs is a 2D game, I guess that by "3D" you mean simply games that use some 3D graphics? Here are some that were released in North America-

Virtua Fighter 2
Shining Force
Daytona's
Sega Rally's
Virtual On's
Virtua Cop's
House of the Dead
Duke Nukem 3D
Powerslave
Quake
Shining the Holy Ark
Panzer Dragoon's
Fighting Vipers
Fighters Megamix
Die Hard Arcade
Iron Storm

I'd rather have a Saturn for the Shining Force III games alone. I'd also take the Saturn's 3D games over the N64's. But my tastes aren't popular (I like pre-current gen games for one thing).

Do you think that the Dreamcast's has "good" 3D games? The Saturn has a similar library.

Do you really think the Dreamcast has as good a 3D library as the Saturn did? No fucking way. The Dreamcast has:

Sonic Adventure
Sonic Adventure 2
Crazy Taxi, Silent Scope, House of the Dead, and numerous other arcade ports
Shenmue
Resident Evil

Not to mention the countless 2D games that the Dreamcast had, something Saturn didn't have because of Bernie Stolar:

Marvel Vs. Capcom
Marvel Vs. Capcom 2
Street Fighter III: Double Impact
Street FIghter III: 3rd Strike
Street Fighter Alpha 3
Bangai-O
Guilty Gear X


Those games alone kill the Saturn's 3D-only library.

[Greg2600]

Perhaps failure is too harsh, but SegaCD was not a success. 6 million is less than the totals attributed to the Atari 7800, which is not considered a hit system. It was absurdly expensive for the time, and contained a library of games that were either barely better than their Genesis versions or poorly done FMV games. The system itself was well done, but as would be the first in a line of instances where SEGA's support of a system was pitiful.

As I said, they should have stayed with the CD system, focusing on bringing more games that made use of the medium properly, while still releasing Genesis games. They used the SegaCD as a test system, and essentially screwed the people who spent $300 on it with a woeful game library.

I personally looked into buying one recently, but after reviewing the list of games, I came to the same conclusion as the 32X, not worth it. There just aren't many good games. If I bought it back then, I would have been furious, as many people were. Again, I remember the word on the street when the Saturn came out. We all figured Sega would give up on it after a couple years, and like the SegaCD and 32X, they did. Why? Because when you give up or barely support your own system, that sounds like failure to me.

[Baloo]

You've got to remember that this is an add-on we're talking about here, not a system that can stand on it's own. The Atari 7800 was a system by itself, the Sega CD was an add-on to a system that you already had to pay money for. So when people shell out about $150 for a Genesis back in 1989 and then pay $300 for a Sega CD in 1992-1993, it shows how successful it is considering. Would you pay $450 all at once?

[Melf]

Does it involve me looking through the Japanese library? Because the US library doesn't have shit for memorable games just about.

All 3 Panzer games are U.S. too, as are:

- Shining the Holy Ark
- Shining Force III
- Burning Rangers
- Enemy Zero
- Dark Savior
- Dragon Force
- Sega Rally
- Sega fighters like VF 2, Fighter's MegaMix, Fighting Vipers


... and many others. There's some good multi-platform stuff too, like:

- Powerslave
- Quake
- Duke Nukem 3D

The library isn't huge, but then again, the overall domestic Saturn library isn't all that large. Even so, you can't just say that there aren't any good 3D games on the Saturn when there are. There just aren't as many as on the Playstation.

[Black_Tiger]

The reason the Saturn died was because the US library sucked ass overall and had no killer-app exclusives, and the list Black_Tiger posted was so small, it just wasn't worth the high Saturn price tag. The 1st party Saturn games weren't really worth purchasing the system over...

Do you really think the Dreamcast has as good a 3D library as the Saturn did? No fucking way. The Dreamcast has:

Sonic Adventure
Sonic Adventure 2
Crazy Taxi, Silent Scope, House of the Dead, and numerous other arcade ports
Shenmue
Resident Evil

Your list of good 3D DC games is shorter than my "so small" list of good 3D Saturn games. I'm not going to try to convince you of what's good, since you seem to have already made up your mind that the Saturn is bad no matter what. Regardless of whether or not people had a reason to buy a Saturn over another console, it doesn't change the fact that the Saturn has lots of great games for any region. Your opinion of the Saturn's library is in the minority for "classic gamers".

Not to mention the countless 2D games that the Dreamcast had, something Saturn didn't have because of Bernie Stolar:

Marvel Vs. Capcom
Marvel Vs. Capcom 2
Street Fighter III: Double Impact
Street FIghter III: 3rd Strike
Street Fighter Alpha 3
Bangai-O
Guilty Gear X

I'd still rather have the Saturn's North American 2D lineup (questy/RPG's & all) and it's 2D pad to actually play the games.

During the Saturn days stores like EB carried japanese games and import carts. So even the non-hardcore players were able to play japanese games. Even in my small town we had import games ever since the NES days. So the japanese Saturn library wasn't inaccessible to the rest of the world.

[ReaXan]

The 32x design is mainly designed for flat shaded polygon 3D. The 32x couldn't even do what the SNES could do graphically. It can't even match the Genesis' own VDP (video processor) output! That's quite far from the Saturn capabilities.

So the 32X is not only worse than the SNES graphically, its worse than the Genesis? Smoking some good shit are we
Explain why Doom looks worse on the SNES, would Virtual Fighter look better on the SNES? Really now man

The only thing N64 proved with sticking with cart format was Nintendo's failure to adopt the current and future trend

They didn't need to. Early Playstations had overheating issues and the disks they used were easily scratched.The Cart format was viable up
until the end of the PSONe vs N64 era because it could do every game except long winded RPG's like FF7. Final Fintasy 7 released in 1997 was when for the first time that the CD format showed a clear advantage in a better game experience if you dont count Sewer Shark

NEC proved back in '88 with the release of the PC-Engine CD that CD format was the way of the future for game development.

It took a good 10 years for the CD format to be viable. How many CD based systems failed? lets see AmigaCD32,CDI,3DO,PC-FX
Jaguar CD, Apple Pippen, the list goes on.

the Genesis and by extension the 32x had no software resource to compete with. I think people really fail to understand this.

You take the 32x hardware, modify it close to what the Saturn was, make it a cartridge based system, call it the Genesis 2 or
Mega Drive II, rinse and repeat. It would have been competitive, I dont care what you say friend.

The Saturn had a cart slot. It's a perfectly viable cart slot to boot game from too. No one was going to develop carts for the Saturn when CDs could be made for pennies on the dollar.

well Duh, who would make cartridge games for a CD based system even if it could boot. Simple economics to use something cheaper if the option is already there.
All I am saying is that a Genesis II cartridge based sytem released in 94 would have been successful if they wouldnt have confused
the consumer with the 32x and Saturn. The Genesis II would have been Sega's version of how the SNES carried on the legacy of the NES.

[Frankie_Says_Relax]

... (199 to 249 max, compared to the 400 dollars Playstation and the CD format) ...

The Playstation launched in North America in 1995 with an MSRP of $299.99, not $400.