Hi-Octane (with Peter Molyneux) | Reviewing Every U.S. Saturn Game | Episode 46 of 246 

Just a heads up to all: the episode numbers are off because my release date order changed mid series after Pimpeaux and I found new information.

It's a crime that your channel is so severely slept on! These are the best Saturn-focused videos on all of RU-vid, by a wide margin.

It continues to amaze me how you keep managing to 1-up your own content. Two years ago, Myst was thought to have come out in 1997. Now, this review show is pretty much a glorified bastion of Saturn research featuring brand new primary sources. It's basically become the Game-Rave of Saturn collecting. Next time someone claims that Astal came out in September, I can "Uhmm, actually" them to my heart's content. That's a special kind of power.

That microwave beep song is absolutely hilarious, I thought something was wrong with my phone when it first played during the video

I love how deep you go in to the research of more or less obscure games. Amazing stuff man

25:48 "...None of us had any partners or girlfriends..." *SHOCKED*

Excellent insight of '90s game development, Peter Molyneux's story is priceless.

You know you dont have to interview AAA game directors for every video...but it is appreciated. I like your approach too. A lot of those older reviews feel like they're finding something to hate about something not popular to begin with. Finding the good that came out of or redeeming aspects in flawed games is much more refreshing and appealing. There's a more interesting story to be told beyond whether something is good or bad. Thanks.

Still waiting for the eventual PandaMonium to review Pandemonium on Sega Saturn

Love that remark from Peter at the end. Back in the 90s they did it all...for the love of the game.

You deserve so many more subscribers considering the work you put in.

Incredible episode on a relatively obscure game. I really hope you manage to interview someone from Lobotomy when you eventually do your Exhumed/Duke Nukem/Quake episodes. Those folks created miracles.

If I hadn't seen this review and understood what was at stake with Dungeon Keeper, I don't think I could have such a sincere respect for what Hi-Octane gave us in the end. I've just found your channel in the last couple of days and it's a treasure trove of incredibly well researched and interesting deep dives. Also Craig Stadler

Not only do you make great history and review videos on these games, but you do it in an actually good presenter's voice! Always a treat.

Despite the port not being... the greatest, I think it has some charm. I especially liked how low poly the vehicles looked. I will take the PC/PS1 version any day though. This is by far one of my favourite reviews, absolutely found it interesting.

I’ve watched all your videos today because you got the Jenovi boost, and I don’t regret it. This was a good place to end for the time being. I absolutely love hearing devs talk about their old games, especially ones that went from the 8-16 bit era to today, a rare breed now. Amazing work, please keep it up.

I’m so glad you’re still making these. A lot of these games I’ve never even heard of, much less ever want to play. You’re doing the world a favor by playing them for us 👍

PandaMonium, thank you for the indepth saturn coverage. I cannot wait for your videos on some of my personal favorites: baku baku, crusader no remorse, fighters megamix, nights into dreams, sonic jam, any street fighter game

I'm continually impressed by your research. Actual first hand info like new interviews is so rare in gaming retrospectives.

I remember renting this when I was sick home from school... I loved it. I don't know why, but I always liked how Saturn 3D looked 😅

6 and half weeks for a 32 bit title and a very small team, does show the game in a different light. That is impressive.

I don't know if it's intentional, but when you go into full review mode I almost get "Gaming in the Clinton Years" vibes. I mean that in the best way possible too! It really fits with your style of presentation and really makes me FEEL like I'm a 14 yo watching a game review show from the late 90s. I really enjoy your videos and hope you keep up the good work.

Man this is fantastic stuff. I can't believe how you dug into this. As someone who appreciates actually looking at different components of a game instead of just trying to push ever-less-useful hyperbole for the sake of trashing a game, I really enjoyed your breakdown of this, and am happy to hear you pulled some entertainment out of it. Also, props for getting Molyneux and learning about the hyper-compressed dev cycle of the title - that's a great story! This was a great review.

Wow!!! I can't wait for the next ones. I love how much research you do and getting to call Peter molyneux

Okay, you're really knockin' it out of the park with those deep dives into these Saturn classics. Really love it, good work!

Hot take: I really enjoyed this game as a kid, reviews be damned. We played it for hours, especially the 2 player mode. Yeah, I was fully aware of the ugly graphics, slowdown, and minimal presentation. But we still had a lot of fun with it. Now, it makes me want to try the other games you mentioned. They looked kinda “meh” to me as well back in the day, but if they were better than this, maybe they’d be fun? It’s probably just nostalgia, but hearing the awful music again after 26 years brings back some good memories. Fight me. :)

Great review sir. I really enjoy your in depth reviews even if the game wasn't great. Thanks so much for your work and I look forward to the next 244 reviews.

Your reviews/documentaries are awesome, dude. Don't stop uploading them please. Keep up the good work!

Huge save file size is due to the game saving best lap ghost data for every track.

Thanks a lot for this series. Really. You're the man!

I've now watched four of your Saturn reviews and damn they are good. I'm going to binge them all.

Im gonna start my Monday off with this. Best in depth saturn game vids available. You and sega lord x are great.

Great video. You even get information from the core bullfrog main man. For me, ive played the pc version back in the day. Didn't think to much of it, deltree the folder and moved on to other games.

I'm surprised you didn't touch on how the Saturn version also had game breaking bugs, like the menu screen rendering half blank subsequently causing the game to freeze when trying to start any mode. This actually happened to me within the first 10 minutes of trying the game on my Saturn! Resetting the console didn't even fix the issue, the clock battery had to reset before I could get the game to work properly again. This port was hack job unfortunately, pushed out the door before it was ready or even thoroughly play tested. I believe it was more a developer/publisher issue than a Saturn hardware issue.

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU PANDAMONIUM!! I'm long time collector of the SEGA Saturn (It's STILL my favourite console, despite my name!) and your videos have brought so much new information to my attention regarding these games, that quite frankly, I'm gobsmacked! The depth of research and your infectious enthusiasm, combined with contemporary reviews AND all new interviews, makes for sublime reviews. Please keep them coming - you have a life-long subscriber here (only 200 more to go!!).

I hope you haven't stopped this series! I've been hooked for 2 days straight! Please keep em coming!!

This is a really good channel and I'm enjoying your content. Keep at it.

the work you put into your channel is absurd, incredible work

The magic carpet engine way a head of its time, with player transformable terrain on the whole map! Even supported the 90s VR headsets, red and blue Stereoscopic and autostereoscopic, like the magic eye effect.

I just binge watched a lot of your videos and I am very impressed 👍 I am looking forward to more Sega Saturn videos but it looks like you haven't uploaded in over a year. I hope you do more coming up but you are of course free to take as much time as you want 😄 Anyway fantastic job on your videos and have a nice safe 2021

I love your reviews and appreciate the research that goes in to them. Long may it continue! I played this on the PS1 very briefly back in the 90s at a friend's house and many years later saw it for sale on Saturn. I remembered enjoying it on PS1 so bought the Saturn version but it's such a terrible conversion I instantly regretted it!

Agree with you. Great review again. Keep up the good work.

It was awesome hearing Peter's insight in this episode. I have tried to revisit this game on and off over the years and the slowdown in particular made it tough to do so. I thought I remember being able to put it into first person mode though to help with the framerate? I don't recall 100%. Might have to give the PS1 version a try.

Fascinating stuff!!!!

Never played the Saturn version (lucky I guess?), but I did play the PC version. What I remember was that while it was a fun game, its engine always ran at max speed. So if you bought a new PC that was twice as fast, then the game would also run twice as fast. This was not uncommon back in the day, and PCs tended to have turbo buttons. The sole use of this button was to make your PC slower, so you could keep on using software/games that would otherwise run too fast.

Good lord, the KD-1 Speeder is the DeLorean from the second Back to the Future movie.

Dude, I played this game on PC. Fricking loved it!! I can't remember the fps being so low though...

This was one of the first PC 3d games I ever played, I liked it at the time.

Dedicated channel!

I have been reading some old Saturn magazines from here in the UK recently to see what was highly rated at the time and to see if it holds up. In two separate magazines this got 90% and I recently gave it a try to find that even at the time this would have been considered poor. I have to conclude that there was some kind of payment for good review scores as the two magazines were also from the same publisher. It's always interesting to go back and look at these old magazines and see what they said but there was probably definitely a case that certain games got higher scores in return for more ad revenue back then.

This reminded me of the Bubsy 3D story, but less cheeky.

"The British SEGA Saturn Magazine was a wonderful publication" You uh... you read their piece on Tillis from Burning Rangers?

3:51 This is a slight nitpick, but the most recent file date on the original MS-DOS version’s CD-ROM release for Europe and North America is June 10th 1995 (also confirmed by dump info listed on the website Redump), and the earliest reviews date back to around July 1995, meaning that the game could not have been out in March ‘95. The Hi-Octane page on Wikipedia does incorrectly list the European DOS release as “March 1996”, which I can understand might confuse some people.

😅 Me watching this, after owning Hi-Octane for a year now and thinking of it as one of my top 10 Saturn games... hehe

"Instead of releasing Dungeon Keeper; we're gonna make another game and you can release that". I don't think; in the history of videogames that this has ever been done before or since. Everyone knows that in any entertainment industry; to make what you want to make that you have to make crap as well. It's the nature of the beast. One of the most infamous instances of this was when Tony Garde had to make BC Racers on the MegaCD before Core design would let him make Tomb Raider. But never have I heard someone; believe in the quality of a game so much that to shut up the publisher; they shit out another game so they can keep on polishing the other one.

i love slowdown!

Great!

So that's it. I did it. I made it through all of your Sega Saturn reviews so far. I can't wait for the next one. I think the only complaint I have is when like there was some political sort of comments like on offensive content. I think you said something in Corpse Killer, but I can't quite remember. And then your topic about The Crow dark joke. I just don't want to hear about that stuff; what is offensive/shouldn't be said. I personally don't believe there's such a thing as off-limits, but I do believe in context and a time and place for everything. To me those few instances are smudges in an otherwise fantastic series of videos. I'll be checking out your other videos in the meantime like your interviews interviews and stuff.

Cyber Speedway kicks butt

Hey Pan, when will you go back to regularly scheduled programming?

In 1995 Consoles like Saturn were 10x more powerful than PC. PC had just a fast processor with zero graphic capabilities. Doom was great on PC because it is not 3D, it is a ray caster with Integer math. Port of doom would have looked much better and faster if they made it use true textured polygons instead.

Could it be they mixed up the reviews for Cyber Speedway and Hi-Octane? lmao

Cyberpunk was about to disagree

I have a question for you my friend...Do you think the Saturn was that much weaker than the PC's of the time? Here's the thing, PC's circa 1995 usually either had a single 486 or Pentium (first generation) processor in them. Yes, a 486 or Pentium by itself is by far better than one single SH2. However, is it better than having 8 processors two of which were SH2 Hitachi 32-bit CPU's...I don't know? Where the PC really wins out was in the RAM department with a standard setup running 8Mb. I'd like to think given the Saturn's unique design and kitchen sink philosophy that it could at least give the 486 machines a run for their money.

might help with discoverability to specify "with Peter Molyneux interview" in the title? the way it's written, people might think you're just trying to point out this is a game he made

Peter Molyneux: Local Guru Larry Punching Bag.

people give molyneux shit and yeah he definitely gets ahead of himself but he seems super accessible and only too happy to talk about his games the process of making them with just about anyone

I'm a fan of Hi-Octane. It's really trashy with so many flaws. But I kind of like it and play it every year again and again. A guilty pleasure I think. 😅

hurry up and do Cyberia and virtual on. those are darkhorse legendary games on the level of panzer dragoon

Is this a good time to point out that Daytona USA is better than Ridge Racer? Once again, what hurt Sega Saturn was lazy programming, sloppy coding and a piss-poor attitude towards the console. Hi-Octane is just a mess, but hardly surprising given how little effort was given to the project.

I subscribed but is this the last video that will be made? Shame if so.

Like wipeout but worse

This port should never have existed in the first place, apart from the fact that High Velocity 1 came out the same year, which is a MUCH better racing game.

This and games like quarter back attack with mike dikta is why the saturn failed

Saturn Magazine UK is indeed good, but they over rated games a lot. I have the whole series...

The videogame audience back then was in their late teens and early 20s and higher... especially here in the U.S. so just spending our hard earned money on a Sega Saturn meant we were the true silent majority that were being ignored by the Sega of America's 90s staff who apparently kept insisting that their target age group wad twelve year olds. That and Sega of America's arrogant creation of the 32X is why most people went to Sony PlayStation during 1995 and afterwards... Hi Octane was trash... and you would know it was trash if you spent the $50 dollar average cost on games... hell even if it was a $10 dollar retail game it would still be a rip off... The inflated ego dev team made the game in six weeks... smdh.. so they didn't bother to study the Sega Saturn development documents in 1995 and then bother to approach the Sega Saturn processors with custom code to reconstruct their game?... nope... just a rush job cause some other game will be better? Wtf... there is nothing positive to "appreciate" about crap like this... this type of appreciation is just like someone making appreciation videos of people who kidnapped them against their will due to Stockholm syndrome... It wasn't in the gamers will to be allowed to be abused by greedy companies, greedy subsidiary branches and greedy game devs who want to take our money, give us poo in a jewel case and then years later they blame the Sega Japanese headquarters even though while they were working at Sega of America they made sure to reject many excellent Japanese developed games for Sega MegaDrive and Sega Saturn. Six weeks to develop... yet back in 1995 some were acting like little girls whining about how difficult the Sega Saturn was to develop for... it really just means they didn't want to work but they wanted us to work and buy their bullshit and then insist that all games needed to be censored because their target audience is forever twelve year olds.

Cyber speedway was awesome, high octane sucked

Virtua Racing on the Mega Drive/Genesis runs faster than this game.

The port is bad on PS1 either ....

boy does this look bad compared to pc back in the day