Saturn Review

I was researching thru Game Faqs and perhaps steal a review, yet I haven't. Everything there was 8 or 9 or 10. Sega Saturn biased. In reality we know that Saturn "sucked", N64 sucked much less, and PS1 was awesome. With a few possible exceptions.

Many Saturn games were coming to the US that made it to Playstation after Saturn's death including 3 Game Art RPGs

Grandia - which was suppose to be Sega's weapon against Final Fantasy VII. The PS port is idenical graphically, sound, and gameplay...and recieved a 9.2 at Gamespot and 9.0 at IGN.

Lunar 1 and 2 - Port of the ill fated 16-bit Sega CD which I guess was Working Designs strategy of getting an average RPG to small nitchi Sega RPG fan hooked. That also went to playstation and scored a 7.5 at the lowest and 8.0 at the highest.

Princess Crown - RPG from Atlus and Vanillaware that got ported to PSP this year. It is amongst the most popular Saturn games at Gamerankings and Gamefaqs. Never came to the US.

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner was ported to PS2 as a remake of the Saturn game. Did come to the US, but scored below average [for me] 7.5 out of 10.

Daytona USA got a remake on Dreamcast known as Datyona USA 2001

Then of course the 2K sports series

NFL '97 was designed by Visual Concepts and continued on Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox till 2004

World Series Baseball by Visual Concepts continued on Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox till 2003

Earthworm Jim 2 was ported to PS thru the Saturn port of the Genesis game

Panzer Dragoon Saga got a sequel on Xbox called Panzer Dragoon Orta and got a 9.2 at IGN.com and 9.2 at Gamespot. It was a lackluster seller.

Then of course the Saturn game Shenmue (thought to be 95% finished) got remade for Dreamcast and still is the most expensive videogame project to date.

Now for the actual review:

I started up the Saturn, was heavy, and played Gex 2D platformer. Crystal Dynamics succeeded in giving it that B game feel. It felt like Donkey Kong Country of all games. The first and only level I played was the Cemetery, because it was discusting. The controller was decent

Then I popped in Virtua Fighter 1, the really blocky game. This game had only 3 buttons to control from and felt really dated, and there was no special moves that required pressing 1 button twice quickly or C+A or A+B or A+C or anything. The music was horrid.

After that I stuck in Daytona USA. I played the beginner and intermediate races. With the horrid dpad, I managed to get 8th place. Now this game DOES NOT feel like the 2nd best selling Arcade unit of all time, that's for certain. I'm thinking that the best selling one was MS. PAC-MAN. The music was terrific though, but the cars and low res textures feels like 1994! Sega actually improved the gfx further in the Championship Edition, but I don't own it.

Next up is Sonic 3D Blast. I am so used to playing this with the Gens emulator that I give this a slighty better score now that I used the Nights 3D controller. So it got bad reviews. That's because it wasn't very expensive to make. Back then Traveler's Tales were new to the industry and was working cheaply, and Sega had to do money elseware such as Shenmue (stupid Shenmue!) and Panzer Dragoon trilogy. I liked the music of the second area. It seemed too easy.

I did play 8 minutes of Nights into Dreams. This game is way to cutsy for me. There are colors, and you go around loops, and the gameplay is so dated now, that Nights into Dreams 2 (while got 6.5 on Wii) probably plays a bit better. It's just that crazy Sega fans will always be biased towards the best selling US Saturn game.

It also had Guardian Heroes, Shining Force 3, and Panzer Dragoon Saga that never got played by many people. I played Guardian Heroes and Panzer Dragoon Saga via a PC-based emulator. My last bought Saturn game from now on will be PD2 Zwei.