I agree with your sentiment for sure. It seems to shock people when I talk about and actually capture footage from playing the games I own.
As for the Saturn, I have a newfound love for mine as well. Guardian Heroes is excellent and I also highly recommend Fighters Megamix. It's an absolute fever dream of a game with an insanely hilarious and fun roster.
It always makes me die inside a bit seeing these games stretched within an inch of their life on a widescreen LCD/OLED too and even the £300+ RetroTink loses so much of the vibrant colour that a CRT has... I don't get the appeal. A £60, 14" Panasonic will give you the perfect picture.
Oh yeah I need Megamix, in fact, I wish I got that over VF2 because of the amount of just insane stuff in there; wacky modes and single-player content really carry pre-online, post-arcade fighting games.
I'm bad at fighting games, so I appreciated that Janet from Virtua Cop is unlockable and she just literally has a gun that can 2-3 shot every character 😅🤣
I just played through and unlocked everyone last week! And the JP version is great, almost completely in English + way cheaper
Speaking of Virtua Cop, the first one is weirdly annoying to find over here, is it the same in the US?
Is Megamix expensive over there? Actually one of the cheaper Saturn games here in the UK: Nights, VF2, Megamix, Sega Rally and a few others I own are all less than £40
I just always default to JP for Saturn if it's a game I can reasonably play without much reading or if it has English so I'm not sure lol
I do want to play stuff like Shining Wisdom one day. I've literally considered setting up Google Translate on my phone with a tripod and reading dialogue that way 😅
I can see why, I think Dragon Force is another one that's insanely expensive here but cheap from Japan but there are other hoops to jump through obviously. In terms of import games Assault Suit Leynos 2 is pretty high on my list and Astal never came out in PAL for some reason so I need to grab myself a US copy.
I've been thinking that with Grandia lol as far as I know to play these fan-translations on original hardware you're looking at multi-hundred pound enthusiast devices to make it happen.
Before I even saw your proposals, I was going to say that Virtua Cop 1-2 were, in practice, among my most beloved Saturn games back in the day (owned by a close friend), alongside Panzer Dragoon 1-2, Virtua Fighter 1-2, and of course, Guardian Heroes. Though as you say: Virtua Fighter was fun because I had friends to play against. The same could be said of Guardian Heroes. It supported 4-player action, and my friend later got a 4-player hookup. We had just as much fun with the competitive fighting mode (4 player free-for-alls! A predecessor to Smash Bros!) as the main cooperative story mode.
Others had great experiences with Time Crisis on PS1, but I didn't play that until 1999-2000 or so. For me, Virtua Cop was the first home light gun game I played and felt I could legitimately say was really, really good. Of course, my friend only had one gun so the other had to play with a gamepad, but we still had a blast.
I would say the Virtua Cop games have aged pretty well. I play them now on Batocera with my Sinden light gun, and for that I still use the Saturn versions. I'll play them 2-player with my son, and he enjoys them as well. The only thing I notice is that a 6-shooter feels a little too limited for this kind of game, to my tastes. IIRC Time Crisis 1 also gave you a 6-shooter, but starting at Time Crisis 2 you got 9 rounds, and to me that 50% increase makes a world of difference for QoL. Then at some point most light gun games dispensed with limited magazines entirely.
Dragon Force and Panzer Dragoon Saga are games that others swear by, and they both SEEM like something I would really enjoy: a unique mix of various things that I already enjoy. Yet I've only played them in emulation and neither of them grabbed my interest initially. Still, they're both games I mean to return to when I have more time.
I think this speaks to the core of what made the Saturn and its library so different from its competitors. To me, the PlayStation was a console for single-player games first and foremost with a few decent CO-OP ones and the N64's multiplayer line-up was very much child-focused like Mario Party and Kart; nothing wrong with any of that, it was just different. With the Saturn on the other hand these were staunch arcade experiences: the types of games only Sega could make.
"6 Shots: more than enough to kill anything that moves." Sorry, anyway, that sounds like a pain for that type of shooter, I'll have to find out for myself.
I've heard Dragon Force can be quite overwhelming at first and hard to work out in regards to the management layer and I don't blame you for emulating Saga lol it's a pie-in-the-sky type of game for me: if I somehow find myself in a position where I can get it cheap or where that spend is no issue then I will but as of now? I'm not really into JRPG's anyway so I doubt I could appreciate it in the same way a more deserving owner would.
Well, what I'd say about this generation in particular is that the N64 was a showcase for Nintendo 1st-party games (with a 4-player emphasis), and the Saturn was a showcase for Sega 1st-party games (with an arcade emphasis). Meanwhile the PS1 had just an incredible profusion of 3rd-party games of every type under the sun.
But, here's the thing about the PS1: for me, it was kind of swimming in the same lane as PC gaming, which I was increasingly getting into. For example, it had a lot of inferior and borderline unplayable ports of PC games that were big at the time, like SimCity 2000, Command & Conquer series, Warcraft 2, Civilization 2, Wing Commander 3-4, etc.
The 4-player focus of the N64, and the arcade focus of the Saturn, overlapped much less with PC gaming. So I have fonder experiences of both those consoles.
However, studying the PS1's library is fascinating nowadays, because it's just very deep and has a lot more to discover, including so many games I never knew existed. Meanwhile with the Saturn, I was aware of all these games at the time, because notable Saturn exclusives were so few and far between, and in those days I read the gaming mags cover-to-cover. I was even aware of Dragon Force, which got great reviews, even though nobody played it.
Friction is a good word you use for the Saturn. I agree that there is a lot to love about it (or I wouldn't have had one for years growing up), yet that enjoyment doesn't come easily, especially when Sega themselves were a lot of the cause behind that. It has led me to think back on my gaming history as the Saturn leaving me the most conflicted I've felt, and I want to write about that one day - it might contrast well with this post, but my perspective will be from the actual time it was active.
A lot of your games you either own or wish to own are what I would agree are the best (good luck with PD Saga though!) Someone else suggested Fighters Megamix which I would agree with, and if fighting games are your thing I heard the Capcom 2D fighting games like X-Men Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes are the superior versions to their PS1 counterparts.
It's a console where I'm always torn between being shocked it failed and then playing certain games and knowing exactly why the console didn't do well. I think it really needed its own cutting-edge, 3D narrative titles but it just never got them. Apparently, Peter Moore, who was at the top of Sega Of America for the Dreamcast and then Xbox for the 360 said a lot of Sega's key personnel developing Sega's games were quite stuck in their ways and in-denial about where games were going.
Definitely more fo a fantasy for me that one haha, truth be told if I had the kind of money to buy Saga I'd probably buy Deep Fear instead, or a Sega Mega CD with some of the games on there.
I loved my Saturn to death. I was a card-carrying Sega kid, and begged my Dad to get me one for Christmas '95 (or was it 96?). Such was the sentiment against the machine that Dad called me from the store to double check because whatever sales geek was on that day told him what I really wanted was the PlayStation. No fucking thank you!
I had a lot of Sega's arcade games too and loved them for the same reason you did: they were just *fun*. Dad even got me the steering wheel accessory to go along with Sega Rally, which kicked ass!
And to this day, I still get residually angry when I think about when the news broke that Sony were paying for the Tomb Raider sequel to be Playstation exclusive. Thirty years on and I have still not forgiven them; I played the shit out of the Saturn version of the OG.
No way! They were in-league with the enemy haha, I had an experience like this buying Killzone 3 instead of the latest CoD for my PS3 once.
Especially now, when most indie games are the same thing and a lot of triple-A stuff is bland, hand-holdy narrative-driven stuff I appreciate these Sega arcade games so much more. I'm going into greater detail when the article drops at the weekend but essentially, Nights Into Dreams won me over because it feels so good to play; it took me a long time to appreciate it and some elements are irritating yet I always felt the urge to play more.
Saturn Tomb Raider is super cheap now and a lot of Saturn owners argue it has better graphics, time has proven your love for it to be wise.
My only experience with Nights was a demo CD that I cannot remember for the life of me where it came fron, which also had a demo of Sega Worldwide Soccer on it. I always wanted it but never saw it for sale with the 3D pad here in Australia, which I was assured by local gaming magazines was the best way to play it.
I didn't *own* many of my Saturn games. I definitely had Sega Rally, Virtua Fighter 2, Tomb Raider, Virtual On, and Daytona. The video shop near my house had a lot of them for rental, though - including Virtua Cop with the light guns! - and my Mum was pretty generous with that, so my memories get mixed up about which ones were permanently in the collection.
Since you've got a CRT you should *definitely* get Virtua Cop if you can find it! The demise of light gun games in general is a tragedy. Modern gyro solutions just don't hit the same.
The standalone version is much more rare and expensive for sure: I think my jewel case Nights was something like £35-45 whereas the tall case version is £65-75. The 3D pad is supposedly 'mandatory' but I don't own that controller and I've never felt hamstrung playing it: I have the highest rank on 2-3 stages even.
Definitely will! They were both popular games so it's pretty easy to find them now and not too expensive either. I do the majoirty of my retro buying from a second-hand electronics chain called CEX which is big in Europe and Mexico and they do Virtua Cop 2 gun included for £50 which is pretty fair; Ebay will have it cheaper but if I'm buying the bundle I don't want a tatty old box that's been in a garage for 30 years.
I can't agree with the hate on collectors. 99% of old games are still cheaper than they were at retail. For the vast majority of games and consoles, the only things that are actually in short supply are original components in pristine condition. And if you care about that stuff, you probably have a little bit of collector in you anyway. Most people who truly only care about the games just emulate or use an ODE on consoles like Saturn.
The upside of collectors who don't play their games is that when they sell or die, the market will get access to something that's been sitting behind a glass case for years. It will probably be in better condition than those consoles and games that were actually played. Even if it's annoying they keep consoles off the market for a time, they cannot do it forever. When they finally sell the buyer will be happy there is a good condition console available on the market after all those years.
Hate? I don't think it's hateful to point out blatant selfishness and I'm not saying collectors shouldn't exist, I'm saying they should do more to give back to the gaming communities that have sprung up around these old consoles; no, I care about that stuff because when you take out a console's disc drive it's not really a games console anymore. Third part components can be well made without sacrificing the heart of the console mechanically.
This is just silly thing to say. I'm not sure how to respond to the rest. I'm going to not take it into account in the same way that you're commenting on the first small section of my article and probably didn't read one sentence of the rest.
I agree with your sentiment for sure. It seems to shock people when I talk about and actually capture footage from playing the games I own.
As for the Saturn, I have a newfound love for mine as well. Guardian Heroes is excellent and I also highly recommend Fighters Megamix. It's an absolute fever dream of a game with an insanely hilarious and fun roster.
It always makes me die inside a bit seeing these games stretched within an inch of their life on a widescreen LCD/OLED too and even the £300+ RetroTink loses so much of the vibrant colour that a CRT has... I don't get the appeal. A £60, 14" Panasonic will give you the perfect picture.
Oh yeah I need Megamix, in fact, I wish I got that over VF2 because of the amount of just insane stuff in there; wacky modes and single-player content really carry pre-online, post-arcade fighting games.
I'm bad at fighting games, so I appreciated that Janet from Virtua Cop is unlockable and she just literally has a gun that can 2-3 shot every character 😅🤣
I just played through and unlocked everyone last week! And the JP version is great, almost completely in English + way cheaper
Speaking of Virtua Cop, the first one is weirdly annoying to find over here, is it the same in the US?
Is Megamix expensive over there? Actually one of the cheaper Saturn games here in the UK: Nights, VF2, Megamix, Sega Rally and a few others I own are all less than £40
I just always default to JP for Saturn if it's a game I can reasonably play without much reading or if it has English so I'm not sure lol
I do want to play stuff like Shining Wisdom one day. I've literally considered setting up Google Translate on my phone with a tripod and reading dialogue that way 😅
I can see why, I think Dragon Force is another one that's insanely expensive here but cheap from Japan but there are other hoops to jump through obviously. In terms of import games Assault Suit Leynos 2 is pretty high on my list and Astal never came out in PAL for some reason so I need to grab myself a US copy.
I've been thinking that with Grandia lol as far as I know to play these fan-translations on original hardware you're looking at multi-hundred pound enthusiast devices to make it happen.
Yeah I looked into it to try out Shining Force 3, but I'm not interested in missing my console and all that. Maybe one day.
Before I even saw your proposals, I was going to say that Virtua Cop 1-2 were, in practice, among my most beloved Saturn games back in the day (owned by a close friend), alongside Panzer Dragoon 1-2, Virtua Fighter 1-2, and of course, Guardian Heroes. Though as you say: Virtua Fighter was fun because I had friends to play against. The same could be said of Guardian Heroes. It supported 4-player action, and my friend later got a 4-player hookup. We had just as much fun with the competitive fighting mode (4 player free-for-alls! A predecessor to Smash Bros!) as the main cooperative story mode.
Others had great experiences with Time Crisis on PS1, but I didn't play that until 1999-2000 or so. For me, Virtua Cop was the first home light gun game I played and felt I could legitimately say was really, really good. Of course, my friend only had one gun so the other had to play with a gamepad, but we still had a blast.
I would say the Virtua Cop games have aged pretty well. I play them now on Batocera with my Sinden light gun, and for that I still use the Saturn versions. I'll play them 2-player with my son, and he enjoys them as well. The only thing I notice is that a 6-shooter feels a little too limited for this kind of game, to my tastes. IIRC Time Crisis 1 also gave you a 6-shooter, but starting at Time Crisis 2 you got 9 rounds, and to me that 50% increase makes a world of difference for QoL. Then at some point most light gun games dispensed with limited magazines entirely.
Dragon Force and Panzer Dragoon Saga are games that others swear by, and they both SEEM like something I would really enjoy: a unique mix of various things that I already enjoy. Yet I've only played them in emulation and neither of them grabbed my interest initially. Still, they're both games I mean to return to when I have more time.
I think this speaks to the core of what made the Saturn and its library so different from its competitors. To me, the PlayStation was a console for single-player games first and foremost with a few decent CO-OP ones and the N64's multiplayer line-up was very much child-focused like Mario Party and Kart; nothing wrong with any of that, it was just different. With the Saturn on the other hand these were staunch arcade experiences: the types of games only Sega could make.
"6 Shots: more than enough to kill anything that moves." Sorry, anyway, that sounds like a pain for that type of shooter, I'll have to find out for myself.
I've heard Dragon Force can be quite overwhelming at first and hard to work out in regards to the management layer and I don't blame you for emulating Saga lol it's a pie-in-the-sky type of game for me: if I somehow find myself in a position where I can get it cheap or where that spend is no issue then I will but as of now? I'm not really into JRPG's anyway so I doubt I could appreciate it in the same way a more deserving owner would.
Well, what I'd say about this generation in particular is that the N64 was a showcase for Nintendo 1st-party games (with a 4-player emphasis), and the Saturn was a showcase for Sega 1st-party games (with an arcade emphasis). Meanwhile the PS1 had just an incredible profusion of 3rd-party games of every type under the sun.
But, here's the thing about the PS1: for me, it was kind of swimming in the same lane as PC gaming, which I was increasingly getting into. For example, it had a lot of inferior and borderline unplayable ports of PC games that were big at the time, like SimCity 2000, Command & Conquer series, Warcraft 2, Civilization 2, Wing Commander 3-4, etc.
The 4-player focus of the N64, and the arcade focus of the Saturn, overlapped much less with PC gaming. So I have fonder experiences of both those consoles.
However, studying the PS1's library is fascinating nowadays, because it's just very deep and has a lot more to discover, including so many games I never knew existed. Meanwhile with the Saturn, I was aware of all these games at the time, because notable Saturn exclusives were so few and far between, and in those days I read the gaming mags cover-to-cover. I was even aware of Dragon Force, which got great reviews, even though nobody played it.
Friction is a good word you use for the Saturn. I agree that there is a lot to love about it (or I wouldn't have had one for years growing up), yet that enjoyment doesn't come easily, especially when Sega themselves were a lot of the cause behind that. It has led me to think back on my gaming history as the Saturn leaving me the most conflicted I've felt, and I want to write about that one day - it might contrast well with this post, but my perspective will be from the actual time it was active.
A lot of your games you either own or wish to own are what I would agree are the best (good luck with PD Saga though!) Someone else suggested Fighters Megamix which I would agree with, and if fighting games are your thing I heard the Capcom 2D fighting games like X-Men Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes are the superior versions to their PS1 counterparts.
It's a console where I'm always torn between being shocked it failed and then playing certain games and knowing exactly why the console didn't do well. I think it really needed its own cutting-edge, 3D narrative titles but it just never got them. Apparently, Peter Moore, who was at the top of Sega Of America for the Dreamcast and then Xbox for the 360 said a lot of Sega's key personnel developing Sega's games were quite stuck in their ways and in-denial about where games were going.
Definitely more fo a fantasy for me that one haha, truth be told if I had the kind of money to buy Saga I'd probably buy Deep Fear instead, or a Sega Mega CD with some of the games on there.
I loved my Saturn to death. I was a card-carrying Sega kid, and begged my Dad to get me one for Christmas '95 (or was it 96?). Such was the sentiment against the machine that Dad called me from the store to double check because whatever sales geek was on that day told him what I really wanted was the PlayStation. No fucking thank you!
I had a lot of Sega's arcade games too and loved them for the same reason you did: they were just *fun*. Dad even got me the steering wheel accessory to go along with Sega Rally, which kicked ass!
And to this day, I still get residually angry when I think about when the news broke that Sony were paying for the Tomb Raider sequel to be Playstation exclusive. Thirty years on and I have still not forgiven them; I played the shit out of the Saturn version of the OG.
No way! They were in-league with the enemy haha, I had an experience like this buying Killzone 3 instead of the latest CoD for my PS3 once.
Especially now, when most indie games are the same thing and a lot of triple-A stuff is bland, hand-holdy narrative-driven stuff I appreciate these Sega arcade games so much more. I'm going into greater detail when the article drops at the weekend but essentially, Nights Into Dreams won me over because it feels so good to play; it took me a long time to appreciate it and some elements are irritating yet I always felt the urge to play more.
Saturn Tomb Raider is super cheap now and a lot of Saturn owners argue it has better graphics, time has proven your love for it to be wise.
My only experience with Nights was a demo CD that I cannot remember for the life of me where it came fron, which also had a demo of Sega Worldwide Soccer on it. I always wanted it but never saw it for sale with the 3D pad here in Australia, which I was assured by local gaming magazines was the best way to play it.
I didn't *own* many of my Saturn games. I definitely had Sega Rally, Virtua Fighter 2, Tomb Raider, Virtual On, and Daytona. The video shop near my house had a lot of them for rental, though - including Virtua Cop with the light guns! - and my Mum was pretty generous with that, so my memories get mixed up about which ones were permanently in the collection.
Since you've got a CRT you should *definitely* get Virtua Cop if you can find it! The demise of light gun games in general is a tragedy. Modern gyro solutions just don't hit the same.
The standalone version is much more rare and expensive for sure: I think my jewel case Nights was something like £35-45 whereas the tall case version is £65-75. The 3D pad is supposedly 'mandatory' but I don't own that controller and I've never felt hamstrung playing it: I have the highest rank on 2-3 stages even.
Definitely will! They were both popular games so it's pretty easy to find them now and not too expensive either. I do the majoirty of my retro buying from a second-hand electronics chain called CEX which is big in Europe and Mexico and they do Virtua Cop 2 gun included for £50 which is pretty fair; Ebay will have it cheaper but if I'm buying the bundle I don't want a tatty old box that's been in a garage for 30 years.
I can't agree with the hate on collectors. 99% of old games are still cheaper than they were at retail. For the vast majority of games and consoles, the only things that are actually in short supply are original components in pristine condition. And if you care about that stuff, you probably have a little bit of collector in you anyway. Most people who truly only care about the games just emulate or use an ODE on consoles like Saturn.
The upside of collectors who don't play their games is that when they sell or die, the market will get access to something that's been sitting behind a glass case for years. It will probably be in better condition than those consoles and games that were actually played. Even if it's annoying they keep consoles off the market for a time, they cannot do it forever. When they finally sell the buyer will be happy there is a good condition console available on the market after all those years.
Hate? I don't think it's hateful to point out blatant selfishness and I'm not saying collectors shouldn't exist, I'm saying they should do more to give back to the gaming communities that have sprung up around these old consoles; no, I care about that stuff because when you take out a console's disc drive it's not really a games console anymore. Third part components can be well made without sacrificing the heart of the console mechanically.
This is just silly thing to say. I'm not sure how to respond to the rest. I'm going to not take it into account in the same way that you're commenting on the first small section of my article and probably didn't read one sentence of the rest.