A Rant About The Sega Saturn
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- Опубліковано 4 тра 2024
- Oh my god, I knew the Saturn was a bit of a mess, but the deeper I dug into the hardware of this machine, the worse everything seemed to get. I couldn't even cram all of the oddities of the Saturn's design into this video because the video has to be short.
- Ігри
I really liked the Saturn.
That chirping isn't the bird that lives in your hallway.
Sega was way ahead of their time, now everything is now multi processing, multi core and multi threading.
Actually we only model in quads today because it subdivide perfectly.
Sega Saturn is a very good example of what happens when you don't have a user friendly software development kit.
They could of had a perfect dev kit and it wouldn't have mattered. Sony was an 800 pound gorilla that could buy up developers and offer cheaper 3rd party publishing costs. Final Fantasy VII pretty much propelled them past the competition of both Nintendo and Sega.
@@Gamevet Sega could have made it out the other end like Nintendo did. From what heard they had a united front unlike Sega. The writing was on the wall when all Saturn had were the launch titles for a about year with nothing new coming out. I am in the camp that thinks Sega should have kept the 32x out until they got the Saturn sorted.
@@caribeskinner6290 The 32X was a cancer for Sega. They should have used the resources they'd spent on 32X software to support the Saturn. The Saturn could have had an arcade accurate port of Star Wars Arcade, along with a better version of Virtua Racing for the Saturn.
The Saturn should of had a legit NFL game for the Saturn, during the fall season in North America. The Sega Genesis had a lot of sports fans in North America. Sega pretty much let Sony take over that market when they showed up with the rock solid NFL Gameday. EA pretty much canned their Madden game that year.
@@Gamevet The point of the 32x was to buy time to developing Saturn while spending the minimum of resources. Sega Japan instead rushing and got nothing. Develop wasn't a problem for Sega, it was a problem for 3rd parties. Getting their buy in and support takes time. That's not something you can throw bodies to fix. I have worked in dev environments. The worst thing you can do is rush a product. It is the best way to lose support and that is what happened to the Saturn. The 32x was more about getting the 3rd parties/sdk together. Sega America could have focused on the games you talked about but there still would not be any more additional 3rd party titles at launch and the year of dead time would still be there. To anyone who writes a rebuttal to this, ask yourself what was the the problem? Try not to confuse symptoms with being the problem.
@@caribeskinner6290 You can be from that camp, but you'd be wrong. The 32X was hitting bargain bins a year after it's release. Who wanted that thing, once they saw magazine articles with screen shots of PlayStation and Saturn games? My thoughts on buying a 32X ended immediately after learning of the real consoles.
The Fall of 1995 had Sega Rally, Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua Cop. It didn't matter though, because Sony was a well know company with a track record. They could market trash like a single track Ridge Racer and Battle Arena Toshinden. Those games were ars!
Saturn was too expensive to stay competitive with PlayStation and the same thing happened to Micosoft's Xbox. It got priced out of the race.
What's cool is that these unused or rarely used functions and processes are being used today. Someone remade the entire first level of Unreal 98 in a highly modified version of Quake as a Saturn Tech Demo this or last year, and it does crazy shit like realtime reflections and dynamic lighting. There really is an absurd amount of power locked away in this console, but I can't think of any retail games that tapped into it. SEGA's biggest folly around this time was having to make last minute changes to an already conceptually iffy design (Always attempting to achieve arcade parity) when they realized that they weren't going to be able to sell a console on enhanced 2D games alone. That's what primarily lead to the fascinating, wonderful, horrifying, homonculus, that is the SEGA Saturn. If I were to take a guess at what the initial working draft of the Saturn was, I'd guess it was probably closer to the Neptune, but with a CD ROM drive, a better video display unit, and the MPEG add-on card, on the board as a feature. No huge emphasis on 3D, possibly accelerated later with an SVP chip sequel in the cart slot.
"The Saturn launched at 399 freedom dollars *CHIRP*"
@4:23 you need to replace your smoke detector battery.
Sorry buddy but you're kinda late on this one.
Because Sega Saturn truly deserves better.
The greatest system ever!!!...nothing comes close!!!...so many great games!!!
And the greatest game ever...GUARDIAN HEROES !!!
and the best controller as well
@@ajthefunkmonster4767 til this day no controller feels better...so lite and comfortable.
I've heard that the Saturn was going to be a 2D console, then Sony showed off the Playstation and Sega was like "oh shit" and had to put something together to make the Saturn 3D.
Another thing to remember is Sega had a bad standing with their customers with the Sega CD and the 32X, It didn't help that once again Sega released a product only to abandon it a short while.
It's makes me wounder how well the Dreamcast would have done against the PS2 and Gamecube.
That was only the reasonable problem imo. New tech is scary sometimes, so, they were extremely anxious . Everything else what sega did wrong is their fault. Like marketing, not supporting 3rd parties, not producing realistic games, making jp exclusives etc etc... Quite alot of great games are on saturn.
When the CD standard was created, the possibility of using the medium as a data storage wasn’t a priority. The priority was to make it reliable with the available technology, and that technology was prone to many, many problems. The laser beam had to be generated the traditional way, with coils and high voltage mercury lamps, then the laser needed to be shot through a series of lenses and mirrors so it can be bounced on the CD surface and finally read by the detectors. Because of this, the road to digital to analog conversion was a bumpy one, which would result on constant clipping and artifacting... unless the system would be able to check constantly if the reading was correct and if it wasn’t, something would tell it instantly how to repair it and deliver the right thing. Enter error correction.
Error correction would make CDs highly reliant but at the expense of efficiency. A big chunk of the usable space would be reserved for error correction and and to prevent other problems, it would also make them have slow access for data reading.
Now that the audio part was sorted out and the machines were selling like pancakes, it was time to get more from it. The first solution was the CD-i standard, an expensive, slow and quirky way to get data by using those tiny spaces left to avoid and fix reading errors, but its applications were mainly for video and audio that the user could interact with. But later came the need to store and read data more efficiently and dedicatedly, so the companies started a race to create a CD Data Storage standard.
NEC couldn’t wait for Sony and Philips to come up with something so they created their own standard on their own terms.
The CD-ROM standard would appear soon after and just like NEC did, video games would be one of its uses. But unlike the NEC non-standard, it was not suitable for them, it had no optimization, had to be reliant on error correction, had to allow CD audio playback and was slow and exclusive access, the processor had to pause what it was doing to move the laser and start the reading. Sony realized that and worked on a second standard: CD-ROM XA.
And it is CD-ROM XA which gave the PS1 the edge, not only against the Saturn but to the rest of the consoles. Sure, it threw most of the error correction out the window making it prone to reading errors, but the fast and efficient access allowed games like Crash Bandicoot that could create huge worlds by reading constantly small chunks of data as they were being needed while not stopping or slowing down the action.
The Saturn, on the other hand, had the same problem all CD-based consoles, with the exception of the PC Engine, had. In order to play anything, the RAM had to be filled with the necessary data, if the game would require more stuff, everything had to stop, music, video, action, everything until it finished loading.
You could say the PS also had that in games like Metal Slug 1, but that was just lazy programming as the sequel did the same as the other games, only loading when it was extremely necessary.
Ever wonder why Croc barely ran on the Saturn? Because it could hide constant loading after every time you enter to another section, something that the game is full of, but not Crash, or Medievil, or most of the 3-D games on the PS1.
And then there’s the games that some take as proof the Saturn could do it: Nights and Burning Rangers. But, could they? Every stage of Nights is confined to a cylinder, a cylinder that has most of the stuff loaded from the start. The game uses a special sound generation routine that saves and allows for a very brief moment to load small bits of data every time a round of the 3 in every stage is completed. A nice trick but still too limited.
And Burning Rangers? It has constant pauses disguised as game engine created cutscenes using a sound compression format known as ADX; the ADX plays while the next part of the level is being loaded, giving the illusion of playing a huge 3D game like Crash. A really clever trick but came so late that it would never be used in the console but in the rest of the ones that would follow.
The Saturn was an unsalvageable disaster no matter how you look at it.
Oh, and everybody also forget what the Saturn became in Japan soon after the N64 came out and Sega became aware they have to make a better system.
It became the waste bin where all the ecchi kusoge were thrown to. Sega allowed everything just to keep presence in the market while the DC was being developed.
If you think the Wii is the king of shovelware, you haven’t seen the Saturn library from 96 to 98.
In current year, many of the Saturn's strongest titles (arcade perfect ports) are easily available elsewhere and in better form. The Saturn did have many great exclusives, but none that touch the best offerings of it's rivals. I waited decades for Saturn emulation to be viable and now that it is, I kind of feel...disappointed. In all honesty, I think the Sega CD has a stronger library of games and I've had much more fun exploring that (primitive as it may be in comparison).
Yep. Bought a Saturn when it came out; maybe bought 5-8 games for it ever. The PS1 blew it out of the water. Bought something like 100 games for *that* during the 6(?) year run before switching over to the PS2.
Shame, since sega seemed more open to creative ideas, and the games display that a little.
Sega Saturn is the PS3 of it's generations
I'd like to do one on the PS3, but I don't know if I can summarize the weird-ness of that machine in a five minute video.
Polygons were not in they were forced on us. The Saturn was a great machine but us in the western world didn't get the good portion of thr Saturn.
4:10 I thought you were gonna say something completely different ngl
Yawn… another video about the failure of the Sega Saturn, processors quads etc! who cares what they should of could of done, it’s about playing the amazing games which the Saturn had many of!
Waste of time video with no interesting insight. Change your smoke detector battery.
All that work and the only thing that could come out of it is shitty 3D graphics that often looked worse than PS1 and kids these days will not love.
Today PS1 games look trash while Saturn games looks great considering most were not real 3d polygon