Twilight of the Blue Hedgehog Part 1

A Retrospective on Sega's Final Consoles, Part 1

In last week’s poll, both the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast aesthetic topics received a significant amount of votes and a reader in the comments told me personally that they hoped I’d cover the Dreamcast. On top of that, there were also votes for my memories with The Elder Scrolls and for me to cover the Oblivion Remaster (really a remake.)

I’m going to be honest, I’m always writing on Substack, I often finish my posts days before they are due and am itching to get them out there, so I’ve decided I’m going to do all 3 topics! This post will focus on the Sega Saturn and next week will be Oblivion, followed by Part 2 of this little Sega omnibus which will feature the Dreamcast.

I really hope you enjoy reading them both.

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Part 1: The Megadrive Add-Ons and Sega Saturn Background

The first cracks at Sega began to show with the 32x and Mega CD add-ons for the Sega Megadrive/Genesis; for the sake of my sanity and yours, I’m going to refer to it as the Megadrive from now on.

Wishing to fend off the fearsome Atari Jaguar (that’s a sentence nobody’s uttered since the early 90’s) and to buy more time for their upcoming trip to Saturn, Sega extended the power and lifespan of the Megadrive with these 2 add-ons. To put it mildly, they were a bit of a disaster and contributed heavily to Sega haemorrhaging money and prestige; the blue giant went from Nintendo’s only real rival to a distant second and its Megadrive, from a beloved system to a little bit of an ageing embarrassment.

To make things worse, when the Saturn was finally revealed in the West: at the first E3 no less, Sega of America infuriated US retailers by shadow dropping the console without providing sufficient stock to meet demand and minutes later, were undercut in price by Sony’s PlayStation, revealed by a former senior Sega employee in one of the greatest moments in E3 history.

At $299 dollars, the Sony PlayStation: a device a senior figure at Sega of America was urging the Japanese higher ups to buy previously, was being released by Sony a full $100 cheaper than the Saturn. An absolutely nuclear blunder had taken place.

This is a brief glossing over of events; I’m much more interested in the experience of using hardware and of playing games than the history but I encourage you to seek out one of the many documentaries on YouTube about this period of absolute chaos in Sega’s history. I felt it important to touch on this as it’s just one of the many factors that make the Sega Saturn, in my opinion, the ultimate underdog console.

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Part 2: A Trip to Saturn

This is the Sega Saturn. White in Japan and black in the West, it has 2 versions, one with oval buttons and one with circle buttons.

Released in 1994 in Japan and 1995 in the West, this console has to be one of the strangest ever made. For starters, the Saturn had 2 CPU’s and 2 different chips for processing graphics: one mainly for 2D and one for 3D but they worked in tandem in a majority of the games. To put it into perspective, imagine building a gaming PC with an intel i7 and i5 and then with an RTX 5070 and 4070 but only using the 4070 for textures, backgrounds and skyboxes; this is a very crude but not dissimilar approximation of what the Saturn does. This incredibly strange setup made the Saturn a bit of a nightmare to program for, costly and worse, despite all this hardware bloat it was generally less capable than Sony’s PlayStation 1, famously sticking to a 20FPS standard for most games compared to the PS1’s 30 and being unable to render true transparency, turning shadows and windows and energy shields in Saturn games into ugly, dithered blobs.

Another thing that makes the Saturn unique is its controller, or should I say, its trio of controllers.

3D gaming was a new frontier at this point in history and the console manufacturers were still experimenting with both 3D and 2D control and design. Sony had the default PlayStation1 pad: one of my favourite controllers ever and released the Dualshock 1 when it became apparent that 3D gaming was to be the future. Nintendo spat out the Nintendo 64 controller, which popularised analogue movement, the Sega Saturn was almost a hybrid of these 2 approaches.

The launch Saturn gamepad was this: generally referred to as the Model 1. In a very on-brand fashion… this is a really strange controller.

Aside from Sega’s trademark six-button layout, itself alien to a lot of modern gamers, the Model 1 gamepad’s shoulder buttons feel like mouse buttons or fighting pad switches; they make a very pronounced click and take very little pressure to activate. These shoulder buttons tend to be a big love it or hate it for Saturn owners and I can see both sides. I enjoy how responsive they are but they also have a weird ridge on the front that doesn’t activate the input when pressed, it’s hard to describe.

Another sticking point for a lot of people is the Model 1 d-pad which is this big wedge of plastic with little, nipple-looking things on each direction. I’m mixed on the shoulder buttons but I want to say for the record that, even if many don’t, I really enjoy this D-pad.

It’s hard to capture in a 2D image but the shape of the controller is also non-standard; it bends outwards in the middle and has these bumps to grip behind either end of the pad, giving it a bit of a crescent shape if viewed from above or below; once again, it’s not for everyone but I like it.

This controller gets a lot of flak online but I really like it, undeniably though, the iconic Model 2 pad has left the greatest legacy.

Here it is: the Sega Saturn Model 2 gamepad and what I would argue is the greatest legacy of the entire console. Not only is the shape of the peripheral greatly improved and the buttons and D-pad made subtly more ergonomic but they did away with the divisive shoulder buttons and replaced them with some extra nice ones. The Model 2 doesn’t have an analogue stick but much of the Saturn’s library doesn’t require one and for 2D gaming? It is pure bliss.

I mentioned that I think the Model 2 is the Saturn’s most significant contribution to gaming, I say that because the Saturn was an absolute machine for 2D fighting games and ever-since the Model 2, this layout and form-factor has become the basis for fighting game gamepads ever since. If you open Google now and look up fighting pads from Hori or other peripheral manufacturers then you will find a striking resemblance. A fantastic controller.

Lastly, we come to the Sega Saturn’s 3D Controller. Fans of the Dreamcast will no doubt see that this was the basis for that console’s pad, with a few little quirks of its own like the 6-button layout.

I have to admit I’m struggling to find things to say about this pad. Most Saturn owners report that racing games are better with this pad as well as NiGHTS: Into Dreams but at £50 and with a limited amount of games that are truly built for it, I’ve never been interested enough to pull the trigger and buy one for myself.

Before we look at some of the defining titles for the Saturn I’d like to ask a question to my readers: is there a console older than this with a proper dashboard/system menu?

I’ve never owned an Atari Jaguar or some of the other older, more niche consoles so I could be wrong but to my knowledge, the Saturn was the first console to have this kind of functionality.

It’s a very humble dashboard by today’s standards but I really love this part of the Sega Saturn. The stars fly past as you navigate the menu, you can set your date and time, start up your game or just play its soundtrack like a CD player. The whole thing looks and feels very 90’s and it makes me feel very warm and fuzzy to use.

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Part 3: From Machine to Living Room

The Sega Saturn’s shortcomings and issues are plastered all over the internet by now, I don’t need to parrot the same information, so instead, I want to try and explain why this console has such a dedicated fanbase and why its library is so special, even if it flew under the radar.

Sega always had one thing over Nintendo: its arcade portfolio. Whereas Nintendo mostly had to rely on developing games for their platform from scratch or attracting third party support, Sega could make absolute bank simply by creating great ports of the popular games they already had sitting in machines all over Japan. By the time the Saturn arrived, console gaming had progressed to such a degree where 1:1, perfect arcade ports were within reach; this is one area where the Saturn beat both of its rivals.

Pick out any 2D fighting game of the era and it was better on Saturn, I love Tekken but Tekken 1 & 2 were inferior to Virtua Fighter and its sequel, the Saturn had better light gun games than the PlayStation, it had the best arcade racing games, the better version of Need For Speed. If you loved arcade games, especially 2D fighters, this was the console for you. Another factor that makes the Saturn library so special is that little dash of Sega seasoning: that hint of kooky that gave their games so much personality. Take Nights Into Dreams for example, whereas the Nintendo 64 had you playing as everyone’s favourite Italian plumber and the PS1 put us into the sporty shoes of an orange ‘bandicoot’ in Sega’s console you play as an androgynous, purple-clad nightmare creature.

I love Nights’ design but if you were scared of clowns as a kid, I have to know, could you still enjoy this game?

Today, the Sega Saturn also has a reputation as a bit of a JRPG machine, sure, the PlayStation 1 received the biggest JRPG of its day: Final Fantasy VII while the Saturn didn’t but on the basis of sheer volume and quality, I think Saturn owners probably got the better deal with the genre. I’m not even a massive fan of JRPG’s but Dragon Force has been on my radar for a while now, that game looks awesome.

For us in the West? The Saturn mainly holds renown as the best console for import gaming. You see, of the roughly 1,300 Sega Saturn games only about 250-300 of those saw the light of day outside of Japan, so the chances are, even with a complete collection, you’ve not experienced the best this console has to offer.

But as I will cover in the next section, I think only Warren Buffett is capable of having a full Saturn collection.

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Part 4: The VIP Lounge

As great as much of the Saturn library is, as cool and unique as its peripherals are and as addictive as the arcade ports can be, the overwhelming majority of Saturn owners will never get to experience even a fraction of this fun; I have owned a Sega Saturn for over a year now but own just 3 games for it and that original, Model 1 controller. Why is that?

Well, let’s search for some Sega Saturn games to buy together. I mentioned earlier that Dragon Force looked awesome, so I’ll go and try to find myself a copy.

Holy shit!

Well, that’s okay, every console has some expensive, highly sought after exclusives, let’s look at some other Saturn games; Panzer Dragoon Saga is often considered the best tile on the entire console, let’s see if I can order that instead.

There are of course, more reasonably priced, good quality Sega Saturn games but even then, they are almost always significantly more expensive than better games on the competing consoles; I could pay £30-40 for the, marginally better, Sega Saturn version of Rayman or I could just live with slightly worse sound and graphics and play it on PS1. It used to be the case that Japanese copies of these games 10% of the price or less and you could get a Japanese copy and play it with Action Replay but now the Japanese Saturn community are catching on and also raising prices, this is on top of international shipping costs.

It’s just not worth it.

The Sega Saturn is a unique, flawed, charming, expensive little machine that I just don’t have the bank account or love for to play more than a handful of games on. If you want to load the console’s entire library onto a card or emulator, install some fan translations and have a blast playing some Sega Saturn then fair play to you, I bet that’s awesome, but for me? Emulators and sticking game files on a device, that’s not retro gaming to me. I like to hold my games in my own two hands, I like to see the little scuffs and signs of age on retro games: all reminders that they have been pre-loved, I want to own boxes and manuals and discs, I want to preserve this stuff myself so that perhaps one day, when those tendon pains in my hand that seem to get worse every year and those multiplying eye floaters get too much I can pass the experience of classic gaming down to a new generation.

I cannot do that with the Saturn.

Even if I import games, there is an inauthenticity to owning Japanese video games that doesn’t appeal to me. I like to imagine players 30 years ago sitting down to the cartridge or disc that I’m currently holding but it’s hard to envision that when I’m holding a product made for people on the other side of the planet, whose language I can’t speak or understand, who experienced a place and time in their culture that looked nothing like my vision of the UK's past.

The Sega Saturn is awesome if you’re Japanese but to the rest of the world? I don’t think this black box has much to offer.

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Please join me soon for Part 2 where I will be covering the Dreamcast: one of my absolute favourite consoles, with a particular eye towards that machine’s aesthetic. I am just 9 subscribers away from the big 50 milestone now and would deeply appreciate it if you hit that button below.

I’ve been mulling over ideas for a 50 Subscriber special/milestone post but I’m not a fan of writing a big soppy thank you piece; I’d much prefer to give you something worth reading. If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments below.