Panzer dragoon saga was an incredible experience when my friend and I played through it back in the day. The feel of the environment was so unique and it was such an epic and wide reaching adventure that I never knew could exist during that generation
Dude, Zwei was even better in my opinion. That game is peak worldbuilding without any exposition. So immersive and beautiful and fun. I do love Saga, it was one of the last Saturn Games, I had it preordered.
The Saturn is still my favorite retro game system.i remember buying it day one for 400$.so many fond memories playing games that are still fun to play.hopefully we'll get a Saturn mini,but I'm not going to hold my breath....
@LRon-ef7ni I remember being board of my snes,and went to the store to get an Atari jaguar. When I saw that they had a Sega Saturn in stock,I about lost it.i immediately went to the bank and got enough money to get the system with a couple games.when I got home and played Panzer Dragoon,I was blown away.there was such a big difference between 16,and 32 bit.nowadays you can hardly tell from one generation to the next...
@@juggalo4life247 right? I remember how unbelievable it was that i was playing the home version of Virtua Fighter (even if it wasn’t arcade perfect) and how gorgeous Panzer Dragoon looked and still looks. Nowadays, some PS4 games still hold it’s own vs PS5.
Last Bronx also had an excellent Win95 PC port that ran great on my Pentium 200 MMX machine of the day. Sega's real hubris with the Saturn architecture was customizing it to give their own arcade-centric Japanese development teams an immeasurable edge over the, frankly speaking, novice 3D developers who would comprise most of the 3rd party support base. It was a very "Nintendo" move to presume the console would be so successful that they could afford to give other publishers second rate access to the machine and dev support.
I like these complete series’ you’ve been putting together. At night I put on Gamesack or Sega Lord X videos to fall asleep to. With these compilations I can watch one really long video and not have to wake up to RU-vid playing random videos
Love Saturn, but Sega console had Its limitations, mainly how to apllying transparencies on some siruations when polygon is used instead sprites... Vdp2 was a Monster chip, but its use ia limited to 2d planes .The real bottleneck is the vdp1 when ia used to deal with transparency polygons. But games that use VDP2 wisely, Saturn shines beautifully.
@@maroon9273 Exumed lighting effects are more impressive than PSX version... i undestand the Hideki Sato´s decision to add a second CPU to compete against PSX, but dual "VDP" was a error.... mainly because VDP1 is underpowered and had poor an limited usage with transparencies....
Thank you for all that you do! I got my Saturn back on Christmas of '97 and I still play it to this day! Just disheartening learning about all these awesome games only to find that they're ridiculously expensive.
Will always love the Saturn. Happy memories when the big 3 (VF2, Virtua Cop and Sega Rally) all came out over Christmas '95. Always thought it had quite a unique look to its 3D games with it's VDU combos, underrated in its day but its nice that its appreciated now.
One thing I noticed that most Saturn games ran at an incredible 15-bit color depth with colors per sprites from 256 colors and 32,768 in hi-res mode. PSX had most games running in 8-bit color depth like most PC games at the time with only 24-bit mode used in splash screens and such...hence tons of dithering in most games. Having separate GPUs for specific type of rendering was risky but the results were well worth it.
The Saturn was plenty capable of translucent and transparent effects. From what I’ve read, it was just a pain in the Butt at times to make it work, so the dither pattern was substituted. You see a lot of games with transparencies AND the mesh patterns. I’ve kind of come around to not mind it as much as I did when I first started playing Saturn games, but it would’ve been nice to see them less.
There were a few aspects that made it tricky. VDP2 was able to do transparency pretty well, but it wasn't always ideal for dynamic objects. VDP1 could also do transparencies, but it normally would swallow any sprites or polygons that fall behind them. So developers had to either pull some technical trickery or just go the mesh route because most people were on composite video hooked up to CRTs, which made it so that you couldn't really tell the difference. I think most developers rightly considered it not worth it.
Video Game historians and channels, especially of Sega history, do incredibly important work. You keep Sega alive by remembering and spreading information about them. Sega's long, sad turbulent decline from the juggernaut it was to what it's become now needs to be told and remembered, it deserves that. As do the games it supported. I wish some day they could return to consoles as a vendor and have the glory and success they had during the Genesis era. But I'll settle for the great games they develop and publish for now. Keep up the good work keeping Sega history alive and the public informed.
I’m not knocking Night’s Into Dreams but why on Earth did they give that game priority over a 3D Sonic? Sonic World always made me think of what could’ve been. It’s just like they were marketing games for people that once lived on Mars or something and became so out of touch of what us Sega fans wanted.
Sonic wasn’t shit in Japan, that’s the thing. Sega’s management seemed to want to succeed in Japan even if it meant failing everywhere else. Because during the MegaDrive/Genesis era the western branches of the company exercised a lot of control because of how much better the console did in America and Europe than it did in Japan.
I loved the Saturn, but like the genesis before it, most games could be beaten on a weekend rental. That really killed it, only one friend in the group ever had a saturn or genesis, and we traded our NES/SNES with him so we could play things like warsong, sonic, phantasy star, and our friend would play zelda and then convince his mom to buy SNES. That said,
Had my Saturn hooked up to a PVM through RGB scart for years and I loved all the visual effects. Recently after the resurgence of composite and many people starting to talk about dithering, I switched to composite and I have to say I'm very happy with the results. I lost the vibrating colours that you see through RGB, but all those meshes are now just translucent and the overall picture is faithful to what I remember as a kid in the 90s. It's funny how we all had to rediscover certain obvious things 🤔
Now that I think about it, if Tekken 3/ Tag Tournament had been multiplatform and the Sega Saturn version had been available, I think it would have been the closest version to the arcade seeing how the Last Bronx port was.
I also want to add that Virtual On was one of my favorite arcade games with its cabinet and joysticks. Getting to play it on my saturn was amazing! I have all the Virtual On games and the HD releases as well love that series and think they should reboot it
Mel, my uncle and I did the exact same thing with Powerslave or Exhumed as it was called in the UK. We were blown away by those lighting effects back in the day. Great game as well to be fair.
Hard to believe the 32 bit era is as old as 30 years. 30...years. 1995 was a key moment in video games when outside hardware manufacturers started the concept of early 3D accelerated video cards. The Saturn and playstation were great experiments using native hardware to run their games and it only took a few to literally THINK outside the box and develop 3D environments by an outside source dedicated by computer hardware. This video proved that we came so far in achieving technical buoyancy. That's a like for me. 👍👍
Keio and Astal (and don't forget Cotton 2) let everyone know that 2D was not dead. If anything, 3D should have waited a generation. Nintendo 64 managed to get away with it in a few games but I would say overall that 3D from then haven't aged very well.
Funny enough, the Saturn’s 3-D games have aged a lot better than most PlayStation early 3-D. Like panzer dragoon is still totally playable and enjoyable.
When it comes to 2D games, the Sega Saturn was a major powerhouse. I mean, that was the main goal. But Sega being Sega... well, I guess you know the rest, how the story goes.
Surprised you didn't mention the quality of the FMV in Mr Bones. Also if the Saturn had lasted another 2-3 years. You would have seen games increasingly relying on the RAM expansion cart. Also, tools would become readily available to make programming on it easier.
When you look at a baby and are filled with the wonder of life, that's vdp2. When you think nothing makes sense and all hope is lost, vdp2 is there again to help glide you back down to earth.
I am still so dissapointed that there wasn't more iteration on the 3d engines for the Saturn. The jump from VF1 to 2 alone was insane! Imagine what they could have done with a few more years of work...
Just found this channel, and a brand new video! Loving the content, especially for my favorite eras of consoles, this is awesome! ^^ Very high quality and really like that you actually understand stuff about the hardware!
Sega was such a worthy rival to Nintendo during these days. If anything, they kicked serious ass when it came to pushing their hardware to the absolute limits. The Genny had some mind-blowing games on it thanks to the Motorola 68000 processor that powered it, and when done right, composers made amazing music using that Zilog Z80. To think both of these got their start in the arcade with the System-16 board is just something else. There is no denying it, Sega was one of the arcade kings.
The problem wasn't just that the hardware was complicated. Sega did next to nothing to support third party developers learning it. You can't really fault third party developers for taking the path of least resistance. They were always under a time crunch, so of course they were going to build their games with the PlayStation in mind, due to it's simpler architecture.
The irony of it is that Sony ended up doing the exactly same thing a couple of generations later, designing the PS3 with its "Cell Processor". Theoretically more powerful (compared to the 360) but complicated architecture, that mostly only the 1st and 2nd party devs were able to take advantage of. Most third party devs developed for the simpler 360 as the main platform and then ported to the PS3 (or even hired others to port), not taking any advantage of the Cell architecture, resulting in inferior versions.
@@Prizrak-hv6qk Yup. That was a wild generation. Sony over-engineered their machine, Microsoft didn't do proper QA with theirs, and Nintendo released something underpowered but so fun that everyone was buying it.
Love the saturn, so underrated...Sega should really think about releasing a mimi version or an official sega emulator and give the chance to play the great library it has.
So sad Lobotomy got shutdown. With all the work Sega hired them for, you'd think Sega would have bought them. I wonder what wonders they could have worked on the Dreamcast
Sometimes when I’m playing Streets of Rage 4 I have to look down to make sure I’m not holding a Saturn controller haha. Not really but it feels like it kinda sometimes
this video could be done for dreamcast and the incredible Hikaru & NAOMI 2 arcade boards that give a glimmer of what hardware could have looked like if Sega had the luxury of launching the console between ps2 and gamecube launch windows.
Saturn is interesting, i would have liked to see the power harnessed even more But it did have an odd look to some of the games between the dithered look and to me the vdp 1 and 2 were interesting, but sometimes the look oddly doesn't look cohesive as a whole, almost like something is off in perspective and the 2 layers aren't working together correctly.
I wish I had my Saturn with me now. I’ve been traveling Colorado, looking for a job for the past couple months. I should’ve built an emulation device. Oh well, it’ll be that much better when I get it back.
Let's start off by calming down and recognizing that I'm being facetious. I was referencing the U.S. Saturn premiere promotional video. It's something the floating head guy says towards the end, and it's a quote I often toss around in discussions about console power, graphical prowess, and such.
The Saturn was capable of pushing 500,000 untextured polygons. 200,000 textured polygons. The PS1 was capable of 360,000 untextured polygons, 180,000 textured polygons. two main issues here: quad sided polygons had wraping issues on shapes (3d is more blocky), the inefficient Saturn architecture thrown together with vdp1 and vdp2 sharing the same data bus bottlenecking data transference that hurt the speed of the system greatly.
PlayStation 3 was like the Sega Saturn of it's generation since they had complicated architecture. It's still hard to emulate PS3 games 17 years later.
@@danwarb1 but somewhat similar to the Saturn, alot of it's high water marks really separate it from it's competition. By the late gen, the X360 wasn't graphically or performatively keeping up, whereas the PS3 was still getting pretty impressive PS4 backports. Sure, it was mostly exclusive, but if I had the choice in 2011, I would have gone for a PS3; most of the stuff on the 360 by that point was multiplatform and way better on PC anyway.
We needed the gold stamp of quality (like Genesis) and maybe we could have more games that use vdp2 properly, where were these people back in the Saturn days?
I was going to buy a saturn but my friend talked my into getting a Playstation. I really wish I could have played some saturn games though. Especially the RPG games on it.
I had the other way around. And immediatly sold it and bought a psx. Not kiddin. The Saturn s.cked. especially in Europe. So many games left out here in Holland
The Saturn like the PS3 was a powerful console that had complicated programming to get the full effort out of the system. Most game developers didn't want to take the time, money, or effort to full understand what the Saturn could do. Thus we got half effort ports from a lot of third party developers who didn't understand the true power and capability of the Saturn.
Don't forget the poor development support Sega gave to third parties. Hearing how poor the support was that they were given from launch, it's no wonder they didn't bother to work on the system when the PS1 would give better results with the support Sony gave them.
i was a TG16 guy back in the day and hated sega. still can't own a genesis, but now own a saturn and dreamcast mainly for the killer shooters. so if you're a PCE/TG16 shooter maximalist, give these 2 systems a try. some killer shooters on them. :)
I never thought the Saturn poor at doing 3D games however only the best programmers could get the best out of it. We were onto a winner after the initial launch block. I jumped into the Saturn when Virtua Fighter 2, Sega Rally, Virtua Cop 2, Panzer Dragoon Zwei, and Capcom fighters like Street Fighter Alpha 2, Xmen Cota and Night Warriors were already out. I was loving having the Saturn to be honest. PS1 for inferior ports of Capcom fighters and nothing to Match Sega Rally. But in 98 that changed where Sony picked up steam and Segas output was next to nothing. Plus we had quite bad ports of Sega Arcade titles. Sega Touring Cars, House of the Dead. Then we had cancellations of Top 3rd party games like Tomb Raider 2 The PS1 was pushing it's greatest games. MGS, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil 2, Gran Turismo to name a few. However the Sega Saturn is what made me a true Sega Fan and I would always choose the Sega Saturn which is a very capable machine in the right hands. If all of the software came out at the quality of the top Sega Saturn games then there would have been nothing to complain about. But the issue is 3rd party games suffered terrible frame rates, lower resolutions, worse resolutions. We could have done without that and we really didn't need Segas first party games to suffer with all those. I don't mind mesh transparency to be honest but sometimes the Sega Saturn version was clearly worse.
Sega Lord X can you please tell me the name of the music at 1:38 when the title of the video appears? Cuz its so great I had to rewind it like million times :)
@@SoyAntonioGamingyes the Dreamcast should have been Sega 5 gen system it was on par with the N64 and PS1 but a tad more powerful and for the 6 gen they could team up with Microsoft and release the Sega Xbox but that’s a alternative timeline and a mammoth what if
If the world was made up of Sega Engineers, the Saturn would have been the best system of that generation. If I I was developing the Saturn, I don't think I would be bold enough to make that assumption though. It kind of sucks to say it but Sega really stopped looking at the changes going on in computing/gaming and didn't move with the trends. Gaming trends were pretty clearly going in the direction of what we think of as a computer today, (a central processor, and a dedicated graphics processor, and at the time a sound card). I would argue that was clear to see by 93 but it took them to 98 to adjust. The Saturn had same amount silicon in it set up the tasks to do things that only 93-94 Sega was interested in.
I prefer Saturn games in 2D as that it was originally built for. To be the souped up Neo Geo AES/MAME/2D machine but not be priced ridiculously high like that Neo Geo with $200+ games. Besides, 5th gen 3D graphics aged terribly. Astal, Tryrush Deppy, Keio Flying Squandron 2, Super Tempo, and any Capcom 2D fighter still looks great. I have the first Tempo on my modded Vita since it can emulate Sega 32X games and it runs way better than Super Tempo on an Android smartphone with Snapdragon 888 via Yaba Sanshiro 2. 32X ROMs are rather small like 3 MB or the typical size of a Genesis/Mega Drive game. Not over 400-700 MB that a typical CD-ROM game would be. I was playing my modded PSP 2001 model earlier and it still runs surprisingly well. I just got a new battery for it and it holds a charge better than the previous one. I came to realize PSP is the ultimate 90s system. PSP is more powerful than the Dreamcast that came out in late-1998 in Japan. It has over 1 more teraflops. PS2 wasn't released until 2000. So I'm basically playing a handheld more powerful than Saturn, PS1, N64, Dreamcast, or any console released in the 90s. Too bad PSP lost to DS, another of Nintendo's underpowered handheld. PSP still sold 80M. I was thinking of selling mine since I already have a modded Vita. But I decided to keep it because I do like how smaller and lighter the PSP is compared to a Vita 2K model. PSP games do look sharper on an actual PSP thanks to the native resolution of 480x272 with a 4.3" display. The d-pads on both the PSP and Vita slims are fantastic. Better than my Switch Lite and SN30 Pro. Forget Saturn, Dreamcast, whatever. PSP and Vita rox! Can take them anywhere with you. More powerful than any home console Sega has ever released. I do wish Sega did return in making hardware. Make another handheld to compete with the Steam Deck and ROG Ally. And Sega games would be exclusive to that handheld. Sega's last handheld was the Nomad in 1995. The Switch before the Switch. I love the wild ideas that came from Sega during the 1990s. Maybe this new Sega handheld can emulate Model 3 arcade games flawlessly? Scud Race still looks amazing 27 years later. It looks better than a lot of Xbox and Wii games released 5 to 10 years later.
*ShAmE sHaMe!* I know your name))): you fail to show off the UlTiMaTe of ULTIMATES, *Mr. BONES* . That is the Best Visual, SoundTrack & Gameplay. Ohh grasshopper 🦗, you know not the true power of Sega Saturn and to think you have had such power at your fingertips this whole time yet you let it lay):
