/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10018881
It should have been on n64

nothing couldve saved the sadturd. it was just a walmart ps1. let it go

>>10018881
If it was exclusive, it would have pretty much cemented it in 1st place in Japan. Multiplatform it would probably have slowed the PS1 from taking off the way it did in 1997 in Japan.

For the rest of the world it would depend on if it actually got localized and how much funding got dumped into it's marketing. Part of why Final Fantasy VII was so big outside of Japan was because Sony footed the localization and marketing bill.

>>10018887
t.

>>10018881
If this and other square games were exclusive to Saturn, it would've eclipsed the PS1 in Japan, and Saturn definitely would've done better in the West. Not sure if it would've saved it though, as this game also had a huge marketing budget from Sony for it that I'm not sure Sega could've matched, and assuming everything else about the Saturn's circumstances remained the same, the momentum for any further console sales would've likely still been near zero in Western markets in 97.

This thread is exactly why everyone thinks Saturn fans are lunatics.
>Ugh what if the Saturn had PS1 games, and was like the PS1, and sold like the PS1, and the PS1 didn't exist? Would it be saved then?

Square never worked with Sega even a single time; what a dumb concept.

>>10018947
Neither did they work with Sony prior the Playstation

>>10018952
Indeed so. For that matter, why didn't Enix make Dragon Quest 4, 5, and 6 Multiplats on the SNES AND Mega Drive/Genesis, then onto the Saturn with DQ 7?

>>10018881
Correct transposition would be onto the Dreamcast. Saturn couldn't run it.

>>10019028
Majority of the game is just drawing very low polygons over pre-rendered 2D backgrounds. That's pretty much what Saturn's designed to do with the VDP1 + VDP2 set up. The more tricky part would be the battles but those are only targeting 15fps. So those shouldn't be too much trouble either save for the transparency effects.

>>10018945
Yeah it’s pretty much that.
>>10018947
I think you vastly underestimate just how much money Sony had. To be clear, they didn’t run out of Walkman money until like 2015. That’s the Walkman cassette player. In the 90s Sony had as close to unlimited funds as a company has ever had. Sega was hurting badly for money. And Sony dumped absolutely insane amounts into marketing for FF7 specifically.
>>10018962
Money. Sony had insane amounts of money. That was their prime years as absolute juggernauts.

Just so people can understand. Just Sonys HiFi equipment grossed 4x as much as Segas total revenue in 1991. From just that singular thing. Sonys revenue and profits were many times what Segas was. There was never any hope for Sega to compete. It’s not possible to overstate how much money Sony was able to throw at the PlayStation brand. Any one division from Sony was easily outperforming Sega in its entirety.

>>10019076
Yeah, however they wouldn't have had go to bankrupt if the Shiturn hadn't been such a massive fucking piece of shit.

>>10019080
>Yeah, however they wouldn't have had go to bankrupt if the Shiturn hadn't been such a massive fucking piece of shit.
The 32X and Sega of America sitting on warehouses of unsold 16-bit hardware and software carries more of that blame than the Saturn.

>>10019080
They were already in their twilight phase and Sony was at their absolute peak in the entire companies history. It’s like comparing Microsoft to if like, Hasbro released a console right now. There was never any chance for Sega to compete. Sony was a giant in multiple markets.

>>10019083
>NOOOOOOOO SoA'S ONE SIDED STORY TOLD ME THEY'RE GOOD BOIS THEY DINDU NUFFIN JAPAN BAD

>>10019083
32X would've carried Sega into the first half of 5th gen though, until the 3dfx-Dreamcast was ready to be released as the true Mega Drive successor.

Why were SoJ so retarded and killed it off for the Shiturn, which only caused them to fail ?

>>10019094
>32X would've carried Sega into the first half of 5th gen though
Delusional

>>10019094
>32X would've carried Sega into the first half of 5th gen though
32X was dead before it even released. It wasn't going to carry anything.
>until the 3dfx-Dreamcast was ready
The 3DFX based Dreamcast would have been even more underpowered compared to the later 6th Gen console than the actual Dreamcast.
>Why were SoJ so retarded and killed it off for the Shiturn
They killed it off because it was immediately obvious that it was a horrible idea and was doing more harm than good. Devs and Consumers didn't want to touch it. What Sega of Japan should have done was tell Sega of America to suck it up when they were crying about having to move on from the Genesis. They should have told them to start focusing on 3D games and prepping for Saturn like they were already doing in Japan.

>>10019061
>Sony had insane amounts of money.
To put it in perspective, they spent about 100m USD marketing 7. Almost 200m adjusted for inflation. That's in the same ballpark as something fairly recent like Endgame and dwarfed the marketing budget for Hollywood blockbusters back in the late 90s. It was absolutely unprecedented in the video game industry.

>>10019104
>32X was dead before it even released. It wasn't going to carry anything.
Sold more than the Saturn did in 1994.
>The 3DFX based Dreamcast would have been even more underpowered compared to the later 6th Gen console than the actual Dreamcast.
They would've released a more powerful system a few years into 6th gen.
The 3dfxcast should've been their 5th gen console, instead of the Sega Shiturn.

Any sane company would've looked at the Playstation and then at the Saturn and went, oh shit, we can't release this, back to the drawing room lads.
But they didn't, and so Sega paid the price, in more ways than one.


>They should have told them to start focusing on 3D games and prepping for Saturn like they were already doing in Japan.
No. Saturn should've never been a thing. it was an over-engineered, over-priced piece of shit that killed Sega, too hard to develop for and costed Sega too much to manufacture.

Kalinske was right. Bernie was right.

Fuck the Sega Saturn.

>>10019130
>Sold more than the Saturn did in 1994.
No it didn't. 32X sold 500k at most in 1994. Saturn in Japan alone sold 840k in that same amount of time.
>They would've released a more powerful system a few years into 6th gen.
So they'd be constantly playing catch up then?
>The 3dfxcast should've been their 5th gen console, instead of the Sega Shiturn.
And they'd be in a terrible position in that case as they'd be releasing their 5th gen console right before everyone else released their 6th gen console. It would be 32X all over again. No one would buy it or develop for it and instead just wait for the 6th gen systems.
>Any sane company would've looked at the Playstation and then at the Saturn and went, oh shit, we can't release this, back to the drawing room lads.
The Saturn's hardware is fine and more than enough to be competitive against the other 5th gen consoles. The issue was more that Sega of America were completely unprepared with quality software at launch because they were wasting resources on the 32X.
>Saturn was too hard to develop for and costed Sega too much to manufacture.
It wasn't any more difficult to develop for than the N64 or PS2. And at launch in Japan it only cost about $40 more to produce than the PS1 did. The major cost factor in both systems was the memory, which fell in price rapidly over the next few years and the prices of the consoles fell rapidly as well.

>>10019130
The Saturn was well suited for the games Sega planned to release on it. And worked phenomenally for those titles that were doing well in arcades. What sony did with exclusives like Syphon Filter, FF7 and MGS was completely unheard of. They treated marketing their games like huge events. They spent more marketing individual games than entire companies spent on marketing for the year. The scale was unheard of. And manufacturing spend for electronics is planned years in advance. For example, the planning on the Xbox One started around 2009. You can’t just hit a reset on this stuff. Sony developed the PlayStation rapidly and placed a huge bet on new trends in programming and computing. The Saturn was well designed and powerful. It just happened to not be the right bet. Hindsight is 20/20

>>10019149
>The Saturn was well suited for the games Sega planned to release on it. And worked phenomenally for those titles that were doing well in arcades
tbf it took Sega a while to get titles working "phenomenally". Early arcade type titles were kind of ass with Daytona USA being a flagrant case, specially when pitted against PS1's Ridge Racer running like a dream. Took them until 95 with the trio of Sega Rally, Virtua Cop and Virtua Fighter 2 to start squeezing the system well, but by then it was established in the collective's mind that the Saturn was graphically inferior to the PS1. They should've worked harder to bring better stuff in the initial months, such as VF remix instead of the already outdated Virtua Fighter 1, and a version of Daytona USA that ran as well as Daytona USA CE. Initial impressions were everything during the 5th gen, and Sony nailed those.

>>10019172
A lot of this was due to things being rushed out. Resources were split to try and get games out for both 32X and Saturn in 1994. This is probably what hurt the original port of Virtua Fighter on Saturn, and Daytona USA was rushed out sooner than anticipated to appease shareholders when things weren't looking good after the 32X disaster.

If there was no 32X, and all of Sega's console division was focused on getting good quality software ready for Saturn's launch, things probably would have been different.

>>10019175
Per Sega both the 32x and Sega CD were successful. It’s only now that people claim they weren’t. Nothing about the amount of units shifted for either was a failure. Sega had a good run and flipped. It’s a brutal business to be in and there’s no way they could’ve competed with a juggernaut like Sony

Doesn't matter because it would have never come out in the west

>>10018881
You've got it backwards. Playstation didn't succeed because it had FF7. FF7 succeeded because it was on Playstation.

>>10019289
Yeah people say this like there wasn’t some of the best RPGs of all time on the Saturn…

No one would have been able to purchase the game, no matter how great it was. It just wouldn't have been available and no one would have known about it

>>10019308

and sony firing the money cannon at global advertising for it.

Final fantasy was always 2nd fiddle to Dragonquest in terms of success.

>>10019316
True, it has an excellent RPG library but soa sure didn't want you to know that

I think what people itt (and outside too) tend to overlook was just how insanely stylistic Sony made their technology. The PS1 rode itself on being a CD media player and the boxes for their games carried the Album aesthetics of CD Walkman's at the time too. Considering that Sony was at such an apex of groove even with their technology, I think if I was marketing a game with as much style as FF7, the last thing I would want to show it off on is neither the N64 or the Saturn.
Dreamcast, 'maybe', but definitely not the Saturn since even the console itself imo looked pretty ugly. Looks like a weird Atari console and anytime I see it irl I get taken aback. I would put it in the same league as PS4 for how uggo its design is. Even the OG Xbox looked better.

>>10019330
>Dreamcast, 'maybe', but definitely not the Saturn since even the console itself imo looked pretty ugly
White Saturn was kino though

>>10019330
>the boxes for their games carried the Album aesthetics of CD Walkman's at the time too.

except for the first generation of its launch games.

this seems really revision-y, and corpo simping for 90s sony.

>>10018893
Almost all the graphics and a lot of the programming was done in the US too, so it had an easy in to the western market

>>10019335
it might be, though, a lot of folk underestimate the music trends at the time and Sony rode on its music labels really hard to the point they primarily geared its design philosophies around it. even if the actual album art of a lot of games were 'eh' here and there, the boxes themselves always looked aesthetically unique.

>>10019332
damm, you're right. it looked a 'lot' better. i dont get why they didn't ride with it harder. even then, it still looks tacky. strikes me as a weird bootleg console you'd find in a thrift store. its really puzzling because up until then, all of Sega's consoles looked really good. i dont know what went wrong here. the plastic itself even looks cheap, even on the controller.

>>10018881
Battles would run at 5fps

>>10018885
There's a reason why there's barely any jarpigs on the N64. They need spectacle to be interesting because the gameplay alone isn't good enough and for that you need CDs for FMVs

>>10019252
>Per Sega both the 32x and Sega CD were successful.
Sega CD, sure. 32X though was a failure. Even Sega admitted this when they pulled the plug on it less than year after it launched.
>It’s a brutal business to be in and there’s no way they could’ve competed with a juggernaut like Sony
They didn't need to get 1st place that generation, they just needed to ride out the storm of Sony's hype machine. No one was going to beat Sony that generation. But finishing in a strong 2nd and not completely tanking their brand outside of Japan would have left them in a much healthier position.

>>10018887
Ironically the Saturn sold more than the N64 in Japan

>>10019382
I know that this is true but it sounds ridiculous. The Saturn might as well not have even existed outside of Japan. I didn't meet anyone who had owned a Saturn until around 2015.

>>10019479
Since this is /vr/ that is likely due to a lack of socialization

>>10019492
I once had a decent number of friends in the distant past, but most people I knew had a PS1 or N64. I even had one friend who had a Virtual Boy. A lot of my friends (including myself) also had a Genesis. There was a lot of console wars arguments back then, with people arguing about whether N64 or PS1 was better, but no one I knew had a Saturn or talked about it, I don't even remember seeing Saturn games in stores.

>>10019492
I socialized quite a bit back when I was growing up and I totally agree with >>10019479. I knew literally 0 people who had a Saturn. Didn’t even know it existed for many years.

>>10019573
I remember in the late 90s they had those kiosks in stores where you could play games like Banjo Kazooie and Spyro, but they never had a Saturn one. When Dreamcast came out I was confused about why Sega had waited so long to make a new console, since I thought that Genesis was the most recent console before that.

>>10019573
>>10019624
I think it really depended on where you lived. From 1994-1998 we lived near Chicago, and myself and a few other kids at school had Saturns. While it wasn't as common as an N64 or PS1, kids did have them and knew what they were. It did also have shelf space in stores like Toys R Us, Electronics Boutique, Blockbuster, etc. I remember seeing sports games as well as stuff like Sonic R, Sonic Jam, 3D Blast, NiGHTS, Quake, Street Fighter, Megaman, Resident Evil, etc. on store shelves in that area at that time.

In 1998 we moved to a somewhat rural area on the east coast and I was the only one at school who had a Saturn and knew what it was. The only place I saw games in stores was at Electronics Boutique and it was all in the bargain bin and was just common stuff like Mortal Kombat 3, Madden, etc.

I remember playing Nights at a store demo unit (wasn't impressed) and I knew one kid who had a Saturn. My best friend, who is a year and a half younger than me, doesn't remember ever hearing of the thing before the internet. It was really only relevant for like 2 years and was basically off shelves by 98.

>>10018887
Kmart* PS1

These what ifs are always so sad. Sega didn't just lose prominence in the console market. They got dominated pretty badly after the Sega Genesis. It is a damn shame to because I definitely enjoy them especially in retrospect for nostalgia sake. At least mostly Genesis though and Dreamcast though.

>>10019376
>jrpgs didn't exist before 5th gen
good luck with your mental retardation

>>10020337
Never said they didn't. It's just that they were getting stale and the games essentially played like previous gen jarpigs so they needed something to make people interested in them such as FMVs

>>10020348
good luck, anon

>>10018881
Final Faggotry 7 is overated. Just another jarpig that delusional retards think has a good story and shitty cgi cutscenes that take up most of the CD capacity. Idiots are impressed by digital visuals so they ignore the monotonous grinding turn based snorefest that is jarpig combat.

>>10020431
go savestate your way through another shmup to delay your suicide by one more week, trannoid

>>10019479
>>10019573
I knew one guy with a Saturn. It was an older relative, 25-30 yrs old at the time. He was always a bit of a racing fanatic and bought the Saturn for its arcade racers and because he was already a Sega fan since the Master System

>>10020431
>monotonous grinding
You don't have to grind at all in FFVII. Generally the series are very light on grinding and hasn't needed it since the NES titles. It's funny how you fuckers who hate things on principle and not because you've tried them keep getting exposed time and time again.

>>10019316
Literally the only one i know is PDS

It is one of the best FF games but saturn had a lot of good RPGs

>>10019061
>To be clear, they didn’t run out of Walkman money until like 2015
God, is that why Sony has been so shit for so long? They had bank so they didn't give a shit and then just fumbled around the end.
I still remember those pro headset of theirs I had that received abuse for 7 years, they were amazing. Bought the same after, same price, they were garbage and didn't even last a year

>>10018945
n64 toddlers are even worse >>10018885
at least the saturn had a few good games meanwhile n64 had

>>10019492
Nigga I didn't even know the Saturn existed until like 2018

>>10020851

>>10019050
i mean
didnt virtually every cutscene in this fucking game have a transparent color flash on the screen

>>10020431
>grinding random encounters for 15 minutes bad
>grinding shitposts on 4chan for 12 hours good

Very tiresome.

>>10018881
lol no
Saturn was doomed from day 1.

>>10021743
>didnt virtually every cutscene in this fucking game have a transparent color flash on the screen
VDP2 can do that kind of effect easily. Where it would get tricky would be some of the 3D magic effects in battle, but even those could be doable with VDP1 blending, dithering, as well as handing some of the effects off to VDP2. The battles only target 15fps after all.

>>10018952
yea no wonder they didnt you retard the playstation was the first sony console.

>>10021928
Yes, that was my point, thanks for making it clear to less privileged anons.

>jarpig
yeah your attempt at forcing whatever meme slang this is into popularity isn't gonna work pal

What if the Nintendo PlayStation happened and Sega partnered with Microsoft?

I think we missed the greatest gaming timeline ever. We are in the bad timeline

>>10022084
sony would have made their own console eventually after probably getting boned on the pay split between nintendo

>>10018881
If it came out on the Saturn it would've bankrupted Sega because they were losing so much on console sales.
Also, the game would've only sold 1 million max, and would've went relatively unknown in America and Europe.

>>10019083
>Sega of America sitting on warehouses of unsold 16-bit hardware and software carries more of that blame than the Saturn.

Sega of Japan telling them to stop selling Genesis stuff is to blame for all of that.

>>10018881
No. There's a reason Squaresoft decided to make FF7 at PS1 since it was the most successful console and because N64 cartridges wouldn't fit the game.

>>10018881
Tomb Raider was first released as a Saturn exclusive. Did it saved Saturn? No. Also it sold poorly comparing to PS1 version.

>>10018881
No, but this could have. Wisely however, they chose to release it on the Dreamcast instead of the Poopurn.

>>10022314
>Sega of Japan telling them to stop selling Genesis stuff is to blame for all of that.
No. Sega of Japan didn't tell them to not sell that inventory. Sega of America was ordering like it was still 1992 and then when it didn't sell it ended up sitting in warehouses. They then tried to hide it from Sega of Japan. When Kalinske left and Irimajiri came in as CEO of Sega of America he discovered it and wrote off all the unsold inventory.

This is what resulted in the massive loss in FY98 and why suddenly a bunch of Genesis stuff was dumped on the market around this time. It's also why Majesco still had a bunch of older Genesis and Game Gear games when they started distributing those systems in 1998. Didn't you ever wonder why there's so many copies of Sonic 2, Sonic Chaos, Jungle Book, Columns, etc. for Game Gear out there?
>>10022365
>Tomb Raider was first released as a Saturn exclusive
For a month and only in Europe. Not really the same thing as an actual exclusive.

>>10022371
Based Floigan chad

>>10022371
holy based

>>10018881
No. That game sucked

>>10019028
The Saturn could have run it, we know this for certain.
That said it wouldn't have saved it alone, but it would have sold well and been meaningful.
I've always wished Square would have brought 7 and 8 to the Dreamcast, rather than looking at the Saturn.

>>10018881
Only if it was an exclusive

>>10018885
should of

>>10020337
Tales of Phantasia on PS1 added animation that they could not have had on SNES.
But you knew that. Jackass.

>>10022741
nah

>>10018881
Sony won because they could win cheap consoles because they owned the cd copyright and consequently they owned the DVD and blu ray copyright. IP wars is what destroyed the industry worldwide

>>10019028
It could run it, just with a graphical downgrade. Mesh transparency, 256 colors, and the like. Look at the fight scenes in Shining Force III for an example of how it would have looked.

>>10022741
kek you vile creature

>>10023968
>Mesh transparency, 256 colors, and the like
You wouldn't even need to go that far. You can do 15-bit RGB for 3D graphics and 24-bit for VDP2 layers. You only need to go down to 8bpp if you're doing 640 or 704 pixels wide, which FF7 doesn't do, it runs at 320x224. Mesh Transparency would probably be done for some effects but not all. A lot could be done by VDP2 or even by VDP1 in some cases.

>>10020348
The best JRPGs of 5th gen were pretty close to 4th gen in style
>bof3
>lunar
>xenogears
>grandia
>so2

>>10024740
Most of those are still doing more than what you'd expect on 4th gen systems.

>>10024764
I mean, fine, but they aren't just FMV gimmick games

I love the Saturn but nothing could have salvaged it in the west specifically. Not even if Sonic Xtreme were to come out.