Cross Talk Revolution

Oh no The Princess was captured!…what ever will do? Oh I know, lets call Link he has nothing better to do, and Mario is stuck on the pipe. Ken, Jay, Killjoy and Valiek are here to discuss some good old Zelda Talk! Enjoy!

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Are you ready for part two of what some say the favorite episode to date! Of course you are! Ken, Jay,Bug,Hytek and David are back for another top notch episode. Where the cover a ton of stories including larping as well as cover some other great games! also check out the big announcement!!

(you can still send in emails and voicemails regarding Sega Saturn and , Zelda, ….  )

(  You can be on next weeks show. Just send us an email with what you want to talk about and we will get back to ya!  )

Email us at retrogamers@crosstalknet.com

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Europe

Despite the success of Sega’s previous consoles in Europe and although the Sega Saturn was launched in Europe in July 1995—a few months before the newcomer PlayStation‘s release—the momentum for Sony’s console amongst consumers began to build rapidly, stalling Saturn sales in the region. As a result, the Sega Saturn never enjoyed the success it achieved in Japan or even the post-launch hype the machine was awarded in North America, leaving the market almost solely in the competition’s hands. By the time that the Nintendo 64 hit European shelves in early 1997, the Saturn’s sales had long since stagnated.

The last commercial licensed release in Europe was a survival horror game called Deep Fear, released by Sega Europe in November 1998.

However, support for the Sega Saturn in the UK was bolstered by the successful publication of Sega Saturn Magazine.

[edit] End of an era

As price drops continued throughout the 32-bit era, the system board design of the Saturn was not as easy to condense in a cost-saving manner and Sega fell behind after price drops offered by Nintendo and Sony. As a marketing strategy, Sega bundled three of its best selling games (Daytona USA, Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter 2) with the system in order to keep the more expensive Saturn competitive with its rivals. This gave the console a boost in sales, but it wasn’t enough to cause any significant impact in the console race.^{[citation needed]}

The Saturn’s motherboard was complex and difficult to consolidate, making it expensive to produce.

By early 1997, the Saturn was trailing the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation in both North America and Europe to such an extent that senior management began planning a new platform and, by E3 in 1997, had begun talk of the system called the Katana (which would later be named the Dreamcast). Sega of America President Bernie Stolar, who was strongly in favor of the upcoming console, announced “The Saturn is not our [SEGA's] future.”^[9][10]

As Sega began public discussion about their next generation system, barely two years after having launched the Saturn, it became a self-defeating prophecy, some citing it as an example of the Osborne effect. This move, combined with Sega’s recent history of short-lived consoles, particularly the Sega CD and 32X which were considered ill-conceived “stopgaps” that turned off gamers and developers alike, led to a chain reaction that quickly caused the Saturn’s future to collapse. Immediately following the announcement, sales of the console and software substantially tapered off in the second half of 1997, while many planned games were canceled, causing the console’s life expectancy to shorten substantially.^{[citation needed]} While this let Sega focus on bringing out its successor, premature demise of the Saturn caused them financial problems. Even though the Dreamcast did address many of the problems with the Saturn, Sega’s bad reputation caused customers and publishers to be skeptical and holdout to see how it would fare against Sony’s PlayStation 2.^{[citation needed]}

The aggressive move to replace the Saturn resulted in a rift between Sega and many of their third-party developers and publishers. North American developers were already hostile to the Saturn because it was difficult to program for, and because they were left out by its early release, so the future project alienated what remaining support Sega had in that region.^{[citation needed]} However, many Japanese developers had strongly supported the Saturn in its homeland and saw little reason for Sega to rush another platform to market. The announcement caused a substantial drop in software sales, causing frustrated third parties to cancel many planned releases.^{[citation needed]} The early abandonment of the Saturn hurt third party software support not only for that system, but also for Sega in general. Several major publishers such as Electronic Arts declined to support the upcoming Dreamcast, which played a part in its discontinuation as well.^{[citation needed]}

Several games intended for release in North America or Europe were canceled. These titles include Sonic X-treme, Policenauts and Lunar: Silver Star Story, the latter two remaining as Japanese market exclusives. Further cancellations in 1998 followed cutting the western release lists down to titles such as Steep Slope Sliders, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Burning Rangers, The House of the Dead, Shining Force III (One part in a 3 part series), Magic Knight Rayearth (North America) and Deep Fear (Europe).

The Saturn was discontinued in 1998 in most countries, on April 3, 1999 in North America, and in 2000 in Japan.

Japan

The Japanese Saturn was released in November 1994, just six weeks ahead of its rival, Sony’s PlayStation.^[1] Approximately 170,000 machines were sold the first day the console went on sale.

Many of the games that made the Saturn popular in Japan, such as the Sakura Taisen series and various console role-playing games, or even most North American games in general such as the Sonic R series and European BIOS, were never released in foreign territories as it was assumed at Sega of America and Sega of Europe that they were not appealing to a Western audience.

The last commercial licensed release in Japan and last official game for the system was Yuukyuu Gensoukyoku Hozonban Perpetual Collection, released by MediaWorks on December 4, 2000.

[edit] North America

By the end of 1994, the 16-bit video game era was in twilight in North America and gamers were eagerly anticipating the new 32-bit machines from Japan. In early 1995, Sega president Tom Kalinske announced that the Saturn would launch in the U.S. on “Saturnday”, (Saturday) September 2, 1995. This date was greatly anticipated by gamers and the media. It also allowed Sony to announce that the PlayStation release date would be one week later on September 9, 1995.

However, at the first Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in May 1995, Kalinske announced that the “Saturnday” date was a ruse and that the system was being released nationwide by a few select retailers immediately (May 11, 1995). It appeared that Sega had a real opportunity to take a commanding 4-month lead in the 32-bit race by beating the PlayStation to the market.

The “surprise attack” launch backfired on Sega for several reasons. The Saturn was released at a high price point of US$399, while Sony announced a US$299 price for the PlayStation at E3 itself, as a response to the Saturn’s earlier release.^[7]

The early launch also meant that the Saturn had only a handful of games available at the moment, as most third party games were slated to be completed and rolled out around the original September 2 launch date, and as many successful Japanese titles were not imported. Third party publishers, particularly these based in North America, were angered as the surprise launch prevented them from capitalizing on the momentum inherent in an anticipated, planned release. Essentially the only software available on the shelves at launch was software released by Sega. Many within the gaming industry viewed the early launch as a calculated move to give Sega larger sales of Saturn software at the expense of independent developers.

In addition, the retailers who were not included in the early launch (most notably Wal-Mart and KB Toys) felt betrayed, with some retaliating by supporting Sega’s rivals. This resulted in Sega having difficulties with these distributors for the Saturn (and also for its successor, the Dreamcast). For example, Sega’s actions so angered KB Toys that they refused to release the Saturn at all, and actually went as far as having some retailers remove anything Sega-related in stores to provide more retail space for the Saturn’s competition instead.

By the time of the PlayStation’s release on September 9, 1995, the Saturn had sold approximately 80,000 systems. The PlayStation sold over 100,000 units upon release in the U.S., and Sega’s dreams of early domination of the new generation of hardware were quickly forgotten.

From 1995–1997 the Saturn became the “other” system, running a distant third behind the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation. However, it was the preferred system for many arcade and import gamers. Sales of the Saturn would generally spike as new arcade ports were released, but would die off again shortly after. By the end of 1997, Sega had announced that it would develop a successor (the Dreamcast), causing console sales and game releases to drop dramatically.

The Saturn’s commercial failure caused Sega to lose US$267.9 million and lay off 30% of its workforce.^[8]

Development

Sega‘s 27-member Away Team, comprising employees from hardware engineering, product development and marketing, worked for two years beginning in February 1993 to design the Sega Saturn’s hardware. Since the project was top secret, Hayao Nakayama dubbed the project “Aurora”. The Saturn was a powerful machine for the time, but its design, with two CPUs and six other processors, made harnessing this power extremely difficult. Also, many of the ancillary chips in the system were “off the shelf” components, increasing the complexity of the system because the components were not specifically designed to work together. Rumors suggest that the original design called for a single central processor, but upon hearing of the PlayStation‘s capabilities, a second processor was added late in development to increase potential performance^[who?]. At the rollout of 3DO in 1993, Sega of America president Tom Kalinske boasted that “we have a more powerful machine waiting in the wings, but the time’s not ready yet.” However, one major design change was forced on Sega, and the culprit was the Sony Playstation. (Next Generation magazine vol. 1 #12 Dec 1995 page 46 paragraph 3) (Note: According to Next Generation Magazine, The Sega “Away Team” was created By Sega America for the launch of the U.S Saturn)

Third-party development was initially hindered by the lack of useful software libraries and development tools, requiring developers to write in assembly language to achieve good performance. At least during early Saturn development, programming in assembly could offer a two to fivefold speed increase over the C language.^[5] To save development costs and time, some programmers would utilize only one CPU. One such case was with Alien Trilogy.

The implementation of dual CPUs within the Saturn was not ideal. The biggest disadvantage of the architecture was that both processors shared the same bus and had problems accessing the main system RAM at the same time. The 4 KB of cache memory in each CPU was critical to maintaining performance. In general, very careful division of processing, in addition to the already-challenging task of parallelizing the code, was required to get the most out of the Saturn. One example of how the Saturn was utilized was with Virtua Fighter‘s use of one CPU for each character.^[5]

Compared to the PlayStation, the Saturn’s hardware was difficult to work with because of its more complex graphics hardware and lesser overall performance, as noted by Lobotomy Software programmer Ezra Dreisbach.^[6] In order to bring Duke Nukem 3D and PowerSlave/Exhumed to the Saturn, Lobotomy Software had to almost entirely rewrite the Build engine to get adequate performance from the Saturn.^[6] Also, during testing of an unreleased Quake port for the PlayStation, the Saturn’s performance was found to be notably inferior for the game.^[6]

Unlike the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 which used triangles as its basic geometric primitive, the Saturn rendered quadrilaterals. This proved to be a hindrance because most of the industry’s standard design tools were based on triangles. One of the challenges brought forth by quadrilateral-based rendering was problems with making some shapes, notably triangular objects. This can be seen in the Saturn version of Tomb Raider, in which triangular rocks are not rendered as well as other systems’ versions of the game.^[6] The hardware also lacked light sourcing and hardware video decompression support, the latter being a major disadvantage during a time when full-motion video was quite popular.

• From Next Generation Magazine “So many 32-Bit Systems To Choose From” issue: (vol 1, #12)*

It’s fair to say there has been some criticism of the Saturn architecture recently; the apparently hap-hazard board design has been criticized, and negative comments of a similar vein have been circulating. The complex architecture has been causing problems for programmers up until now. This seems to have been most evident in arcade conversions like Virtua Fighter, which has been roundly castigated in areas of the videogame press for its poor, glitchy graphics.

Sega has responded to these criticisms in two ways. First, it has developed a new set of graphics libraries which it claims makes the job of programming the machine much easier. In fact, Sega of Japan has presented the new graphic libraries as an entirely new operating system. Second, it has been pointing out that despite the early programming difficulties, the games are going to get much better with time, as with nearly every other console system. (Virtua Fighter 2 is only 70% done and is said to be the fastest and best looking Sega Saturn game to date) Citation:(Next generation Magazine Vol. 1#12 Dec. 1995 pg. 47-48)

Still, if used correctly, the quadrilateral rendering of the Saturn had advantages. It could potentially show less texture distortion than was common with PlayStation titles, as demonstrated by several cross-platform titles such as Wipeout and Destruction Derby. The quadrilateral-focused hardware and a 50% greater amount of video memory also gave the Saturn an advantage for 2D game engines and attracted many developers of RPGs, arcade games and traditional 2D fighting games. With creative programming, later games like Burning Rangers were able to achieve true transparency effects on hardware that used simple polygon stipples as a replacement for transparency effects in the past.

The cartridge slot was useful for adding extra RAM or storage devices for saving games to the system. Two ROM cartridges were released with Sega Saturn games. One with King of Fighters ’95 & the other with “Ultraman: Hikari no Kyojin Densetsu“. The ROM cartridges contained part of the game data because not enough RAM was available. Two different RAM cartridges were released for the system; a 1 MB RAM cart by SNK for King of Fighters ’96 and a 4 MB RAM cart by Capcom for X-Men vs. Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter. A RAM expansion cartridge was also required for the games, “Groove on Fight” & “(Final Fight Revenge)”. Both companies were known for their sprite-based 2D competitive fighting games and many of their subsequent games utilized their respective cartridges. (such as “Vampire Saviour” & “Cotton 2″ [by Takara]).

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It here! The ep that has been in the works before Ep 1 almost two months ago. We are proud to announce the release of Sega Saturn Part 1… Listen to Ken,Jay, Greg and Mark discuss the tech behind the Saturn and Go over there top 3 Games and top 3 imports! Enjoy!

(you can still send in emails and voicemails regarding Sega Saturn and , Zelda, ….  )

(  You can be on next weeks show. Just send us an email with what you want to talk about and we will get back to ya!  )

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Here he goes again, another Retro Gamers TV is released. This game of choice Excite bike for the NES enjoy!

(you can still send in emails and voicemails regarding Sega Saturn and , Zelda, ….  )

(  You can be on next weeks show. Just send us an email with what you want to talk about and we will get back to ya!  )

Email us at retrogamers@crosstalknet.com

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Ken from the Retro Gamers Podcast, introduces the first ever Video Review from the Retro Gamers. This week, Ken breaks down and gives a brief review of Zombies ate my neighbors by Lucas Arts, find out what Ken thinks right here!

Email us at retrogamers@crosstalknet.com

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We are back again this week, to talk Pen and Paper RPGs with Ken,Jay,Hytek,Bug and David. So listen as they take you back to a world before crazy video contraptions!

(you can still send in emails and voicemails regarding Sega Saturn and , Zelda, ….  )

(  You can be on next weeks show. Just send us an email with what you want to talk about and we will get back to ya!  )

Email us at retrogamers@crosstalknet.com

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