When I lived in England back in the early 00's I bought a Saturn with two controllers and a stack of about 10 games for the princely sum of £15 at the local weekly car boot sale. Was a helluva score. You'd be unlikely to find such low priced treasure these days.
'Retro' gaming (none of it was really retro yet though) pre-2010 was so good. My local Game always had a couple of spare Gamecubes on sale for £50 and I could get at least 2-3 games per visit to the shop; I was actually gifted an Xbox 360 in 2007 but ended up getting rid of it until Christmas '09 because the prices for my other consoles were so agreeable.
The only console, at least in the UK that's still dirt cheap now is the original Xbox. Every game, even the good ones, is £10 at the very most.
That 3D controller reminds me of the SpaceOrb I would see every time I went to Babbages as a kid. As far as I could tell, they never managed to sell any of them, which is maybe a shame - if I'd bought one I might still have it today.
As far as the Saturn itself, looking into it for me always feels like peering through a tiny window into an alternate timeline that we here in this world just don't have full access to. I never had one, never knew anyone who had one, and didn't even see one in person until much later, so I only had second or third hand rumors about, for example, the existence of a different version of Symphony of the Night. And while everyone now knows about the mess Sega had made with their product lines, I can't help but wonder if the arcade connection has almost as much to do with their disappointing results - arcades were on the decline, at least in the US, by that point, being increasingly supplanted by home consoles even if those versions often didn't have the same technical capabilities, just because it was often easier and cheaper and even more social to carry a console to someone's house than to go to the mall and blow a bunch of quarters. Similar to the NEO-GEO, which literally was a home version of arcade cabinets from the time, but was so expensive and limited otherwise that only a few people really wanted one.
What a bizarre piece of hardware. It reminds me of those fake 'Xbox 720' mock-ups you'd see back in the day, even reading explanations of this thing I just can't imagine the experience of using it. I do want my own Saturn 3D controller but as always with the Saturn, it's a lot of money for a console that only Japan liked and whose best games are mostly forgotten.
I completely agree that they put their eggs in the wrong basket. I think everyone apart from Nintendo was one foot in, one foot out on full-3D at the time but Sega went a step further and didn't even seem to embrace games as anything more than time wasters; there are so few proper, meaty video games on the Saturn, it's all arcade ports, arcade racers, etc. there are no intriguing worlds like Ocarina of Time or technical marvels like Metal Gear Solid... unless you're in Japan.
Sega was essentially making Mega Drive games on a 32bit console, Nintendo fully abandoned 2D with the N64 and the PlayStation 1 was really giving everyone what they wanted.
When I lived in England back in the early 00's I bought a Saturn with two controllers and a stack of about 10 games for the princely sum of £15 at the local weekly car boot sale. Was a helluva score. You'd be unlikely to find such low priced treasure these days.
'Retro' gaming (none of it was really retro yet though) pre-2010 was so good. My local Game always had a couple of spare Gamecubes on sale for £50 and I could get at least 2-3 games per visit to the shop; I was actually gifted an Xbox 360 in 2007 but ended up getting rid of it until Christmas '09 because the prices for my other consoles were so agreeable.
The only console, at least in the UK that's still dirt cheap now is the original Xbox. Every game, even the good ones, is £10 at the very most.
The OG Xbox was such a great console. People are sleeping on it for sure.
That 3D controller reminds me of the SpaceOrb I would see every time I went to Babbages as a kid. As far as I could tell, they never managed to sell any of them, which is maybe a shame - if I'd bought one I might still have it today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceOrb_360
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/the-best-controller-for-fps-a-spacetec-spaceorb-360-controller-working-with-windows-7-using-arduino-and-orbshield
As far as the Saturn itself, looking into it for me always feels like peering through a tiny window into an alternate timeline that we here in this world just don't have full access to. I never had one, never knew anyone who had one, and didn't even see one in person until much later, so I only had second or third hand rumors about, for example, the existence of a different version of Symphony of the Night. And while everyone now knows about the mess Sega had made with their product lines, I can't help but wonder if the arcade connection has almost as much to do with their disappointing results - arcades were on the decline, at least in the US, by that point, being increasingly supplanted by home consoles even if those versions often didn't have the same technical capabilities, just because it was often easier and cheaper and even more social to carry a console to someone's house than to go to the mall and blow a bunch of quarters. Similar to the NEO-GEO, which literally was a home version of arcade cabinets from the time, but was so expensive and limited otherwise that only a few people really wanted one.
What a bizarre piece of hardware. It reminds me of those fake 'Xbox 720' mock-ups you'd see back in the day, even reading explanations of this thing I just can't imagine the experience of using it. I do want my own Saturn 3D controller but as always with the Saturn, it's a lot of money for a console that only Japan liked and whose best games are mostly forgotten.
I completely agree that they put their eggs in the wrong basket. I think everyone apart from Nintendo was one foot in, one foot out on full-3D at the time but Sega went a step further and didn't even seem to embrace games as anything more than time wasters; there are so few proper, meaty video games on the Saturn, it's all arcade ports, arcade racers, etc. there are no intriguing worlds like Ocarina of Time or technical marvels like Metal Gear Solid... unless you're in Japan.
Sega was essentially making Mega Drive games on a 32bit console, Nintendo fully abandoned 2D with the N64 and the PlayStation 1 was really giving everyone what they wanted.