The Sega Saturn.
That lovable, awkward, brilliant, catastrophe of a console, devastatingly mismanaged by its creator. It lacked the affordability of the Master System, the boldness of the Game Gear, the popularity of the Mega Drive/Genesis, and the focus of the Dreamcast. The design was flawed and expensive, development was a nightmare and the launch was a debacle.
It's best selling title was
a paltry number of NFL units, which lasted until the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 graced the Saturn's market in the same way that
M Bison graces villages on Tuesdays.
Despite all of these limitations, the Sega Saturn was the BEST CONSOLE EVER in particular measures. We're going to celebrate these small, arbitrary, selective victories here today, in a way that Sega never has.
The Sega Saturn was the BEST CONSOLE EVER for… multitap multiplayer
If you had the controllers and the multitaps, the Sega Saturn offered something that – to this day – is unheard of.
Ten player simultaneous gaming on a single console, in one room, on one TV.
Saturn Bomberman is the best incarnation of the franchise. It is supported by a range of modes, characters and arenas. (The single player story-mode, driven by lunatic anime cut scenes, is also an absolute winner). Ten player explosive fun on old-fashioned wired controllers.
Guardian Heroes offered six-player 2D battles with a range of combatants. Activating debug mode enabled all 50-something NPCs as selectable characters, ranging from peasants to Gods. As the single-player game had multiple narrative pathways with multiple possible final boss encounters, the multiplayer allows all six final bosses (and more) to fight it out in a chaotic battle of magical explosions and laser spells.
Death Tank Zwei is a deceptive-looking game. Beneath its simple, functional graphics lies one of the greatest party games of all time. It's Worms in real time, with an economy, multiple options for movement, and surprise mode changes (Blitz Mode!). Rounds can last seconds, and games are played with dozens of rounds in sequence. Seven players, one screen, explosions and jump-jets, nukes and hover-coils, shields and homing-missiles – the game is frantic but the players are offered an enormous choice of tactics.
For console local multiplayer for over four players, these three games are an uncontested triad, and are only together in one place.
The Sega Saturn was the BEST CONSOLE EVER for… demo discs
The Saturn didn't have many demo discs. But some were extraordinarily notable.
This was the best Demo Disk Ever – the complete first disk of Panzer Dragoon Saga. I got twenty hours of fantastic gameplay from this disc, it had so much more content than most gamers anticipated.
Christmas NiGHTS. A special edition of Sonic Team's amazing NiGHTS into Dreams containing an enormous environment that transformed depending on the Sega Saturn's internal calendar. Load the game at Christmas, Winter, New Year, April Fools Day, and in other seasons to have a different experience, in which the title-screen, music, character models, graphics and weather effects all varied.
This was supported by an unlockables system which introduced new features upon completion, including Sonic into Dreams:
A
free 3D Sonic game played out in the NiGHTS engine including its own Doctor Robotnik boss (complete with a lovely Sonic CD Final Fever remix).
The Sega Saturn was the BEST CONSOLE EVER for… violent shouting violent advertising
In the west, the Saturn's adverts were unremarkable. In Japan however, something wonderful happened:
Segata Sanshiro, superhuman martial artist, was the Saturn's ambassador. He threw his enemies so hard they exploded, and he shouted at children commanding them to play the Sega Saturn. Violence and shouting and more violence, juxtaposed very occasionally with bits of footage from the games.
Segata could not exist beyond the life of the Sega Saturn. In the run-up to the Dreamcast's launch, a commercial was commissioned that would be the end of the Sanshiro legend. As a fiendish competitor launched a missile towards Sega HQ, Sega Sanshiro threw himself in its path, guiding the missile into orbit. A safe distance from the planet,
the missile exploded, killing the Saturn's hero, and allowing its successor to live. All of our amazing experiences with the Dreamcast, were paid for in Sanshiro's blood.
The Sega Saturn was the BEST CONSOLE EVER for… playing Quake and Duke Nukem 3D on 32-bit (shame about DOOM though)
No one ever managed to port Quake to the PlayStation. It was a killer app, but no one was able to do it.
Lobotomy Software, the gods of Saturn FPS development, were able to get the game running incredibly well on the inferior 3D hardware, even adding in features missing from the PC release such as real-time coloured lighting. Some of the Saturn-exclusive levels were also impressive, including an ambitious arena mode, in which the QuakeGuy could summon enemies to fight each other in a best-of-three sequence.
Duke Nukem 3D was a masterpiece on the Saturn, not only bettering the PlayStation release in stability – but also bettering the efforts of the mighty Nintendo 64. The release was completely uncensored, and thanks to Lobotomy's skills with the hardware, also contained the updated real-time coloured lighting update.
DOOM unfortunately was a disaster, ported by the wrong team who had been forbidden from using the Saturn's architecture properly by iD – a decision they
now regret in hindsight.
The Sega Saturn was the BEST CONSOLE EVER for… 5th Generation 2D and isometric
When the fifth generation happened, the world went crazy for 3D. 2D was not cool, and did not sell. While the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 were made for the 3D world, the Sega Saturn was not – and while some developers did 3D wonders with the Saturn's limited architecture, it was 2D where the real magic happened. The genres and styles of the Mega Drive/Genesis continued to evolve on the Saturn, and they were often weird and wonderful:
The Saturn had a powerhouse of 2D and isometric games in an era that shunned them: Fighters, platformers, strategy, RPG, action adventure, puzzle, sports, point-and-click, and more. An extraordinary library.
The Sega Saturn was the BEST CONSOLE EVER for… the best official magazine
The Official Sega Saturn Magazine was the best video game magazine ever.
There were a few reasons. It was really well written. It was often very funny. It did unique features ("Street Fighter vs. X-Men, what would REALLY happen" – "Zangief is just pissing in the wind [against Juggernaut]").
But what was really cool, were their constant subversions of what you would expect from an official product. They constantly alluded to importing, to modifying the Saturn to play 60hz, and made much reference to titles that would never make it to the west. As the situation became increasingly bleak for the Saturn userbase, Sega Saturn Magazine did all it could to keep spirits up, from giving the readers everything they knew about the rumoured Dreamcast, and as mentioned earlier, the best two demo-discs in the world. It felt that, while Sega wasn't on our side, Sega Saturn Magazine was. Never had an official magazine had to do so much for its fans, with so little.
The Sega Saturn was the BEST CONSOLE EVER for… Sonic special stages
Sonic 3D Blast. A spin-off that some liked and some disliked. Its 16-bit release did done some interesting isometric tricks with the Mega Drive/Genesis hardware, but wasn't particularly notable.
Sega were desperate for a cheap Sonic game on the Saturn. They commissioned Traveller's Tales to port Sonic 3D to the console, with improvements to its visuals and music. But then, Sega had an idea.
The Special Stages. On 16-bit, these special stages were an unmemorable run-across-a-bridge minigame. For 32-bit, Sega tasked
Sonic Team to make a brand-new Special Stage that pushed the Saturn.
What we got was spectacular. It is a reimagining of the Sonic 2 approach, massively expanded in ambition. There are tunnels through buildings, secondary routes through the skies, rises and declines, asteroids and clouds. It is fast, it looks amazing, it has the
greatest special stage music that ever was, and is unbelievably fun to play.
No future re-release of Sonic 3D contained these amazing Special Stages – and either reverted to the 16-bit bridge model or a strange PC-release hybrid stage. All Sonic Special Stages, before and since, paled in comparison to the one type exclusively available on the Sega Saturn.
The Sega Saturn was the BEST CONSOLE EVER for… Being uncrackable
The Sega Saturn took twenty years to crack. For a console this is remarkable.
The Sega Saturn was the BEST CONSOLE EVER for… unique, un-re-released software
Panzer Dragoon Saga - Shining the Holy Ark - Shining Wisdom - Shining Force III - The Legend of Thor/Oasis - Fighters Megamix - Sonic into Dreams - Sonic Jam - Dark Savior - Keio Flying Squadron II - Saturn Bomberman - Panzer Dragoon Zwei - Albert Odyssey : Legend of Eldean - Astal - Magic Knight Rayearth - Deep Fear - Shinobi X/Legions - Burning Rangers - Grandia: Digital Museum - Lunacy/Torico - Iron Storm - Clockwork Knight 1/2 - Last Gladiators Pinball - Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monogatari – Mystaria
These range from transcendent classics of their genres to unique curiosities. Each and every one of them has never been re-released on modern formats, or made available through virtual-console services. They are trapped in the past, a fate totally unbefitting such a unique and often astonishing library of games. And that takes us to…
The Sega Saturn was the BEST CONSOLE EVER for… Being completely mismanaged.
The poor Sega Saturn. It was never going to set the world on fire, with the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 each bringing astonishing new experiences. But it had its own strengths, as a 2D powerhouse and as a 3D machine full of surprises. It had a great library of exclusives. It had built in memory for saves, an expandable 4MB cartridge slot, the option for ten-player local multiplayer, and some absolutely fantastic control pads.
Every decision Sega could have made, they made wrong. No console was better at being so catastrophically mismanaged as the poor, wonderful Sega Saturn.
Acknowledgement: Off-screen Death Tank footage from this YouTube channel
