> The Saturn is not our future
>>3323382
>Gives Sega successful DC launch
>Is fired as a result
>>3323382
who's this old kike?
>Credited for the successful Dreamcast launch
>Literally also one of the main reasons Sega fucking failed entirely
>>3323401
Bernie Sanders.
Why the fuck would he say this
What the fuck was his problem
Why
Why did he say
Why did they not push to support the Saturn?
The Saturn alienated both developers and consumers in so many goddamn ways. It was a nightmare. Its like cutting off a gangerous limb in order to save your life. Too bad it failed.
>>3323435
It failed for 1,000 reasons
>>3323435
The Saturn would have been popular or at least wouldn't have failed so hard if they actually bothered to release all of their games instead of banning them from the being released in the US
"Hardware is not our future"
>>3323513
/vr timeline ends in 1999. Sega still a console manufacturer.
>>3323482
They did not bother to release games because they had a small as fuck user base in America. The cost of localizing any title would be way more than their profit on selling them. That's why they were going for the "we only bring over the best titles" choice.
Grandia was not localized for that reason; by 1998 when it came out, Saturn support was fucked.
They shot themselves in the foot with their early release. Supply was so low, that many retailers thought that Sega was actively trying to sideline them, and they removed all Sega stuff from the shelves in return. If it weren't for that, the Saturn could've done 10x better, and then there would have been a budget to localize many more titles.
>>3323515
/vr/ timeline ends with consoles that were produced during 1999. The Dreamcast was the last console anybody ever made.
>>3323526
It doesn't help that Bernie Stolar was also a big NO 2D IN OUR AMERICAS. Which he did at Sony too.
>>3323535
They brought over a ton of 2d games when the Saturn was still selling - Darius Gaiden, Layer Section, Shinobi, crapton of Capcom games, etc.
They only stopped that once when localizing was too expensive, either due to their small user base, the games size, or because the games used extra hardware.
Only two 2d games were localized but not released in America - Parodius Deluxe Pack and Keio Flying Squadron 2.
>>3323540
And I will never get over KFS2 not getting an American release.
I never really played the Saturn. As a kid I remember playing Time Crisis I think on the system and then my dad sold it. I was 5.
Is it even worth owning?
It's worth owning yes, there are some solid titles, and lots of them have a certain character that's not found on any other system. But if you had a choice of picking up a retro console from that generation, there may be better options to try first...
>muh weeaboo waifu simulator would have saved saturn in USA...FUCK bernie for killing the saturn
>>3323542
>And I will never get over KFS2 not getting an American release.
It's actually a really fucking poor game. I'm more surprised at Parodius not making it, since it is not only a way more solid game but a compilation as well - and they had no problems releasing Darius Gaiden or Layer Section.
>>3323559
You mean Virtua Cop? Time Crisis was Namco's ripoff of it.
I honestly don't get why he's bagged on so much for this. The Saturn was a bomb. He was cutting ties and trying to right the ship for the Dreamcast launch.
>>3323382
What did he mean by this?
>>3323535
>Oakland
How's the MILF and GILF scene going?
>>3323540
>They only stopped that once when localizing was too expensive, either due to their small user base, the games size, or because the games used extra hardware.
I'm pretty sure releasing X-Men vs. Street Fighter in the US would've helped pushed the Saturn a bit. The cabinet was always occupied in every arcade that had it.
>>3323382
What even prompted to say that in the first place? Most companies have enough sense not to disown a product they're selling, even if it's failing badly.
>>3323416
Ah yes, I remember his campaign of no more 2D politics.
>>3323683
>It's actually a really fucking poor game.
No, but Keio 2 does have some sloppy level design and is fairly easy all throughout. Cranking the difficulty to Tengu alleviates this somewhat, but there are plenty of stretches of levels where you are invincible due to being able to tank a hit while holding a weapon and the game showers you with them.
>>3324410
>I'm pretty sure releasing X-Men vs. Street Fighter in the US would've helped pushed the Saturn a bit.
It would've been released in early 1998 when the machine was already fucked, and it would've sold for a much higher price point due to requiring the 4mb ram card.
>>3324496
The problem is that the game mostly appealed to kids, but had shit controls and badly designed levels. The gameplay was bad even by 16-bit standards, and the only special thing in it were a few rotation effects and big sprites.
the game wasn't even any popular like in Europe, where they included the mega cd first title as a demo disc with the entire game available using a cheat code.
>>3324420
It was dead in the water, so why not.
who is this semen demon
>>3323386
Sega of Japan despised seeing Sega of America be successful. They hired Bernie Stolar to ensure an unsuccessful US launch of the Saturn, and then when he turned things around with the Dreamcast they fired him.
>>3323535
>Sony too.
I've heard this repeated, but on what is it based? There's shitloads of 2d games on the Playstation; early releases and otherwise.
>>3323435
Sega of Japan turned down a partnership with Sony because they didn't want to share power with them, and then they turned down a partnership with Silicon Graphics because "the chip is too big," which is code for "we don't want to work with a filthy American company." Sega almost had their hands on the graphics chip that powered the N64, and they turned it down because they wanted to keep all hardware development inside Japan (at least that's the most likely reason, but Sega of Japan never gave their real reason officially).
The Sega Saturn was one board room vote away from essentially being an N64 with a CD drive. Instead the system they made was an under-powered developer's nightmare that was significantly more expensive to manufacture than the SGI-based system would have been, and ultimately Nintendo ended up getting the spoils that Sega left behind. The SGI deal falling through is quite arguably the biggest single blunder in Sega's entire history.
Sega of Japan is the primary reason for Sega's downfall. Their leaders were terrified of taking any risks, and they were constantly getting jealous of Sega of America to the point that they started sabotaging them outright. The 32X was the most infamous example. Everyone at Sega of America said "this thing is terrible, just let us have the Saturn," and they eventually compromised by making it be an add-on for the Genesis rather than a full console, although it still ended up cannibalizing the Saturn's launch (which was a fuck up all of it's own since they shipped it without telling anyone, particularly the developers).
>>3325964
Being a N64 with a CD drive would inarguably remove the thing that allowed later devs to get around the shit texture size limit.
And if they went that route then they would've had great difficulties porting all their linescroll background based classic titles.
IMO if Sega themselves did not think of the Saturn as a leprosy within their own corporation, and gave it better support, then the machine could've thrived until the late 90s. It's unique hardware would've allowed it to do some extremely strange things in 3d that other machines could only approximate at great resource costs. A shame that only a handful of released games really took advantage of this, the machine had a lot of unexploited strength due to its short shelf life.
>>3325973
Don't get me wrong, losing the deals with Sony and SGI weren't a death sentence for the Saturn-- arcade games were still quite popular and the Saturn could play them brilliantly, and it had enough 3D capability that it could have stayed relevant alongside the Playstation and N64. The problem is that Sega absolutely dropped the ball on its American launch and left it out to dry.
And the real kicker is that in a way, Sega of Japan got exactly what they wanted. They were always bitter and resentful that the Sega Genesis was extremely popular in the USA, but a distant second place in Japan. They did pretty much everything in their power to make sure that the Saturn would fail in the USA, while in Japan it enjoyed quite a bit of success. They pretty much committed hari kari on the whole company just so they could say "Look, see? We can beat the Americans."
>>3325964
>Sega of Japan is the primary reason for Sega's downfall.
Sega of Japan was also the primary reason for Sega being as legendary as it is.
I'm getting real tired of this kalinske-based narrative.
Can't believe we're having people defending Stolar now.
>>3326014
Sega of Japan wanted to sell the Dreamcast in the US through mail order only. Stolar convinced them to let him give it a real launch and sell it in stores, for which SOA was able to generate a considerable amount of hype. Stolar was a big part of why the Saturn was a cock up but he also almost saved the Dreamcast. The things that went wrong with the Dreamcast were largely beyond his control.
>>3326014
aaaand here comes the butthurt weeaboo SoJ apologist posting segata again, right on cue
>>3326039
>SoJ apologist
why would I need to be an apologist for SoJ? They made the games. They got people like Andromeda Team and Yu Suzuki, not SoA.
You are the kalinske/SoA apologists.
>>3326046
Stop trying to associate the game dev parts of SoJ to make the business side falsely look better.
>>3323424
Cuz the Saturn was shit. He knew it and everyone but Japancucks knew it.
>>3326547
I'm not trying to make SoJ's business side falsely look better, but I'm not going to pretend that SoA was some kind of savior to Sega like you guys do.
Keep reading these biased Kalinske interviews though.
aka the guy who single-handedly shit all over English localizations of anything that wasn't 3D
>>3326725
He understood the market? Wow, what an asshole.
>>3326753
m-muh weeb jrpg would've saved the saturn in the west, YOU BAKA GAIJIN!!!
>>3325973
>Being a N64 with a CD drive would inarguably remove the thing that allowed later devs to get around the shit texture size limit.
The texture size limit had nothing to do with SGI. Here's an open challenge: try and find a consumer-level 3D GPU released before the N64 that had more than 4 KB of texture cache.
The texture limit was effectively created because the N64's texture unit has no data paths on the motherboard to system RAM, and this was the case because there was little point due to system memory being a unified single channel allotment without read under write. Again, this did not have anything to do with SGI's chip. Sega could have been free to add several RAM allotments with independent channels along with SGi's chip.
Also as a final point, the N64 having cartridge-speeds had little impact on improvements in texture quality of N64 games over the system's life. Texture quality was improved because game developers became better at much defragmenting their virtual RAM pools which mitigated the high latency of system RDRAM.
So, in summary, Sega not accepting SGI's proposal was completely unacceptable, both at the time, and in retrospective, in absolutely every single way.
>>3325973
>It's unique hardware would've allowed it to do some extremely strange things in 3d that other machines could only approximate at great resource costs.
Like what?
>>3326879
Sega of America did nothing wrong, you stupid USA hater.
>>3327250
>USA hater.
Wrong, I'm not a USA hater and I'm not a SoA hater either, they did good things, I'll give Kalinske credit for bundling Sonic with the Genesis and lowering the price.
My problem is when you guys blame everything to SoJ while thinking "SoA did nothing wrong".
If SoJ did "everything wrong", then they also did everything right, because Sega = SoJ.
SoA was just a marketing department.
>>3327235
unique skyboxes and ground planes, free blending of skybox/ground with polygons, free fogging, windowing of select polygons to a background (for ex. making a 3d figure that changes between its own shape and a "hole" to a background image or ground/skybox), unique water rippling effects.
You can also have a set of polygons rasterized as a background. This can give you transparent polygons. But if you take it further you can also apply all the usual background effects to these polygons, which would allow you to do absolutely sick per-line effects that only pixel shader level hardware could match.
>>3327261
On that note, Bernie Stolar shat on the Saturn precisely because he was hunting talent to build up the DC library.
And when SOJ told him to sell the machine for $250 so it generates profit from hardware sales, he went against them and announced that the machine costs $200 - and then quit from Sega.
He may have killed the Saturn, but the DC launch wouldn't have been half as good if it weren't for him.
>>3323382
Get ready for the FUTURE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6ZEYISED54
>>3323535
But wasn't he the one that got Mortal Kombat 3 to debut on PlayStation first?
>>3327310
If he didn't fuck over the Saturn as bad as he did, the Dreamcast as we know it wouldn't have had to exist so early.
>>3327310
He killed Sega, dude.
He cost Sega a lot of money.
>>3327310
Sega sold 9.2 million Dreamcast consoles and were running out of cash fast.
If those 9.2 had been 250 dollars, instead of 200... That means Sega would have made an additional 460 MILLION dollars.
>>3327693
That's assuming people would have still paid $250 for it.
For all you know, it could've sold less than 9.2m if it were $250.
>>3327310
>>3327693
Just to put that in perspective, if Sega had that additional 460 million dollars, they could have survived another year with the Dreamcast. It would have been profitable. This means potentially another 12 months to produce stellar games, Dreamcast addons, who knows what, and they could've sold a few million more consoles. The Wii U, once assumed dead, had sold about 10 million and is now almost at 13 million in a year and a half.
Just saying, Stolar didn't do Sega any favors. The Dreamcast instead sold the same number of consoles as the Saturn he called dead.
>>3326547
The same SoJ that dominated the Japanese arcade market for years?
>>3327302
Can you give examples of Saturn games that show some of these techniques?
>>3327310
>Be poor
>Sell system at loss
Great job there
>>3327672
The release date of the Dreamcast was fine. They beat the PS2 to market by a year, which is something they needed to do, especially since Nintendo was expected to release their next console the year after in 2001. Sega didn't have enough command over the market to avoid getting buried between Playstation and Nintendo, so their best bet was to be the first on the market, and in 1999 the PSX and N64 were looking pretty long in the tooth anyway.
>>3328260
>be poor
>don't sell system at a loss
>nobody buys it (and so nobody buys software either)
>go bankrupt even faster
