Part 1:Battling before its born

I don’t want to do an entire history of SEGA during these troubled times as I want to focus on games,but its necessary to give a bit of context to explain why many of the games we will talk about are exclusive to Japan.

This is a short and abridged version but SEGA of Japan and America never understood each other,back in the days of the Genesis release,SEGA of America CEO fought back the original plan of releasing the console with Altered beast,calling it “satanic”,and wanted to release it with Sonic,no one in Japan agreed with him but gave him the green light.This was the fire starter that turned the US into a console war zone,meanwhile in the island SEGA faced an horrible uphill battle,trying to release it before the PC Engine and the SNES was a catastrophic mistake,the games during the first year of release were terrible for the most part,Altered beast is a horrible game,and most games that released before sonic were also horrible too,this gave the Mega Drive a really bad time in Japan,and jealousy flared up when it was a smash hit overseas.

This combined with the fact that SEGA had a culture similar to General Electric,were everyone was competing with their peers,made SEGA enter an open war with themselves,And it showed even during the glory days were you had both SEGA’s working on a Sonic sequel at the same time.

As competition started to arise,these differences started to show in how they prepared for the future,with the land of the free desire to keep the Genesis alive for as long as possible,as for them it was a tremendous success.On the land of the rising sun the plan was removing the Mega drive from the equation a soon as possible,as a moderate failure.

Both of them were right,and if they coordinated maybe the Genesis might have received a longer lifespan while Japan worked on a 3D focused Saturn ready to duke it out with the Playstation and the N64,but that didn’t happen.The US started to work on it’s own Frankenstein monster in order to keep the good fight with not only the SNES FX-chips,but with whatever SEGA of japan and Sony were cooking,this menas that there was something else eating the sales of the Saturn.

The SEGA Neptune,more commonly known as the 32X was the second add on of the Genesis,and was the response of SEGA of America to the open problem of the uncertain future,it was an absolute failure,unlike the Saturn that has arguably one of the best libraries of exclusive games of all time(as i will try to show in this series),the 32X was a failure both commercially and in terms of cultural impact,no games in this hardware ever inspired future titles,in fact,its hard to find a good game in this thing,Knuckles Chaotix is a pretty fun game with very annoying quirks,like the special stages that are so ugly i can’t describe in words,in the image it doesn’t look that bad but when you play it its terrible.

The gameplay is also kinda iffy if you don’t play with Charmy or knuckles as exploring it’s kinda bad without them…You might be wondering why I am talking about this game in so much depth,that’s because its the only relevant game in the system besides probably the best version of Virtua racing and the exclusive Stellar assault.

This release was a death blow to the Saturn before it was born outside of Japan,as the trust between SEGA and the players was broken.

Part 2:The consequences of it all

This and the final nail in the first E3 sealed the fate of the Saturn commercially on the global stage,the early release only exacerbated a lot of problems of the system,like how hard it is to develop games on,and made distributors angry,it’s success in Japan only meant that the rest of the world was never going to see most games developed on it as only one out of four games saw worldwide releases,and SEGA of America killing it prematurely didn’t help at all either,not like it mattered to them as they wanted it to fail.

During the following years until current day the Saturn was seen as a joke,an absolute failure with no games by the wider public,a fate that not even the Dreamcast suffered as most of its best games were released worldwide,and this included SEGA and Sonic fans that joined later too,as the library of the Saturn was completely inaccessible to everyone and anyone outside of Japan.

Only recently this started to change,thanks to Ymir and the MiSTer projects we now have a very accessible and decently good way to play these games that is in active development and constantly gets better,and a less accessible but way more accurate and compatible emulation that is very close to the original hardware and has no added latency.Thanks to that,a lot of people,including me,are rediscovering this forgotten piece of gaming history as a form of videogame archaeology,that is the reason why I wanted to do this,and I hope that you decide to partake in the excavation site too by playing either the games that I will highlight or your own choices.

But why did it take so long to have decent options?Why was it so hard to develop games?

Part 3:Two persons on one body

The hardware of the Saturn is a direct portal to hell,as you can “clearly” see above,the console has two main processors,the two SH-2 CPU’s,controlled by the Saturn Control Unit(SCU),alongside other critical components like the DRAM,this all goes to the system bus,ALL OF IT,this means that the programmer has to control whats going on at a very low level(for non programmers,low level as in closer to 0 and 1’s than human language).This means that they had to control everything,and any hiccup means massive loss on performance,not only that but the documentation that SEGA offered early on was terrible,and this problem wasn’t exclusive to these system calls,because the SCU controls EVERYTHING,it means,for example,that calling the audio subsystem in an incorrect way can affect performance and cause lag even if it uses a different bus,said audio subsystem is also a whole can of worms as you can see,AND it shares the bus with the video subsystem???So if you don’t time both correctly you might cause lag and performance issues too???

If you have no idea of how this thing works even after my explanation I can’t blame you,I don’t understand it well myself,but you don’t need to be a genius to tell that this is a nightmare to work with,it was designed during a time of uncertainty were the future of videogames was between 2D and 3D.The Saturn is a compromise of both that tries to do both at an amazing level but requires technical knowledge out of this world,and most importantly,time,time that the Saturn devs didn’t have thanks to SEGA rushing in.

Part 2+2:Double or nothing

As you can see the history of the Saturn was clearly a history of twos,two consoles,two companies,two paths in the future,two CPU’s.

If you add the number on the title of this chapter you get four,like the quads the Saturn uses instead of triangles to create polygons and gives the Saturn its unique tridimensional look,were flat planes are easy and composing certain shapes becomes a fools errand.

I could go on talking about the Saturn and what makes it unique,but i feel like this is enough context to know why Saturn games look the way they look,why most games are trapped in Japan,and why they were buried in history despite of the quality.

Surely I have made at least one mistake here explaining all of this convoluted nonsense,but I hope this small explanation is enought to provide the historic context of all future reviews so that we can focus on the games.

And speaking of the games,join me next time as we duke it out in Virtua Fighter 2!

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