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RCBH928 wrote:

nullPointer wrote:Even to this day I can count the number of Sega Saturns I've experienced in the wild on one(?) hand. So at least for me it's not that Saturn was viewed as an underpowered or outcast console; it was virtually non-existent.

This is an unfair comparison, but by the end of the Saturn's lifetime there were just as many of them as there are Switches today. Not sure if rare, but maybe they were all in Japan.

Yeah I'm guessing that in my case it just boils down to U.S. market penetration of the Saturn and the fact that I've generally lived in less populated areas of the country. Anecdotal observation all the way, lol! I'd hazard a guess that in the U.S. Saturns are/were more commonly found in densely populated areas. But yeah, if I walked into a local pawn shop and found a Saturn sitting on the shelf, it would almost be equivalent to finding a unicorn.

nullPointer wrote:

RCBH928 wrote:

nullPointer wrote:Even to this day I can count the number of Sega Saturns I've experienced in the wild on one(?) hand. So at least for me it's not that Saturn was viewed as an underpowered or outcast console; it was virtually non-existent.

This is an unfair comparison, but by the end of the Saturn's lifetime there were just as many of them as there are Switches today. Not sure if rare, but maybe they were all in Japan.

Yeah I'm guessing that in my case it just boils down to U.S. market penetration of the Saturn and the fact that I've generally lived in less populated areas of the country. Anecdotal observation all the way, lol! I'd hazard a guess that in the U.S. Saturns are/were more commonly found in densely populated areas. But yeah, if I to walked into a local pawn shop and found a Saturn sitting on the shelf, it would almost be equivalent to finding a unicorn.

I lived in central England, a highly populated region where Sega had been really popular.

I still never saw a Saturn, even in the shops.

I, too, have seen wild Saturns infrequently enough to count on one hand. At least I've seen them in the wild, though. I never saw a real life Turbo Grafx 16 until I bought one on eBay.

I remember Saturn in Toys R Us next to a Virtual Boy with Sonic 3D Blast. VB had Tennis. I played Turbo16 in class in 6th grade. My teacher brought it from home. Played a bit of Vigilante. So a year or two ago finally bought the game myself. Sure not a great game but nostalgia.

marurun wrote:Not necessarily. Remember, Nintendo had a history of censoring going back all the way to the NES (with a couple bizarre exceptions, like the end of Bionic Commando). Sega did a little censoring, too, but wasn't nearly as aggressive and obvious about it. When Mortal Kombat was first released on SNES and Genesis, the Genesis version had red blood and the SNES version had "sweat" blobs instead, because Nintendo thought it was too violent. The Genesis version outsold the SNES version and was considered superior. Sega also had a burgeoning arcade business, and arcade games were more aggressive, generally, and seen as more for older kids, where as Nintendo's console-only offerings were often seen as being for younger kids, even if this view was oft mistaken. Nintendo always explicitly considered their consoles family-friendly, whereas Sega didn't, necessarily.
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I see your point, but I just can't imagine a parent would tell their child they can have the SNES but not the Genesis because thats the "adult" console, while I can see it totally happening with Xbox 360 vs Wii. There wasn't that much of adult oriented content in difference.

marurun wrote:Sony sacrificed a lot to get those numbers, whereas Nintendo sacrificed numbers and textures a bit to get a more modern 3D core.
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I wonder if any one made a new hack where they installed high textures on old N64 ROMs to see how it will look without that caveat.

Segata wrote:Nope. More Switches out there than Saturns. 14.86 million NS sold. Saturn was just over 9 million. Wii U sold more than Saturn and Dreamcast. Vita has even sold more. SS and DC were outsold by SMS and even TG16. The only thing that saved Saturn as we know is Japan where it sold over 5 million of it's 9 million units.

You are correct but if it was just 4 months earlier, the numbers would be closer The switch is selling about 1 million a month. All of the Dreamcast, Wii U, Saturn, SMS , and TG16 sales numbers are close enough to categorize them together. There difference is around ±30% compared to PSX sold 3x N64 for example.

Plus its just a little bit unfair to compare Saturn/Dreamcast numbers to Switch numbers simply because the market is much bigger now, there is 1.5B extra people on earth today than back then and the industry became more mainstream, its bigger than the movie industry now last I heard.

nullPointer wrote:Yeah I'm guessing that in my case it just boils down to U.S. market penetration of the Saturn and the fact that I've generally lived in less populated areas of the country. Anecdotal observation all the way, lol! I'd hazard a guess that in the U.S. Saturns are/were more commonly found in densely populated areas. But yeah, if I walked into a local pawn shop and found a Saturn sitting on the shelf, it would almost be equivalent to finding a unicorn.

alienjesus wrote:I lived in central England, a highly populated region where Sega had been really popular.

I still never saw a Saturn, even in the shops.

I am surprised to read this, even if you don't know any one who had it surely you must have seen it at stores like Walmart being sold next to PSX and N64. I am going to guess any game shop back then had Saturn games on shelf.

RCBH928 wrote:

I still never saw a Saturn, even in the shops.

I am surprised to read this, even if you don't know any one who had it surely you must have seen it at stores like Walmart being sold next to PSX and N64. I am going to guess any game shop back then had Saturn games on shelf.

There weren't any chain stores dedicated to games in the UK back in the day, as far as I'm aware. Games were sold in electronics stores like Curry's or department stores like Woolworths. I never saw Sega Saturn games being sold in either. I saw them in catalogues, but never in person. There were also privately owned stores that sold and rented games and videos too. None of the ones in my hometown has Sega Saturn.

Your Dreamcast, Wii U and whatever comparisons are flawed because the majority of Saturns were only sold in Japan. In terms of market penetration, Saturn had a far worse presence in the UK and the USA than the likes of the Dreamcast, the Master System or the Wii U. The Turbografx comparison feels far more appropriate, in that most of those were sold in Japan too. And as mentioned by people earlier in this thread, most people never saw a Turbografx back in the day either.

RCBH928 wrote:I see your point, but I just can't imagine a parent would tell their child they can have the SNES but not the Genesis because thats the "adult" console, while I can see it totally happening with Xbox 360 vs Wii. There wasn't that much of adult oriented content in difference.

For the SNES and Genesis themselves, I'd agree, there wasn't as much of a general difference in perception because most titles were still in the general all-ages-ish kind of range. Like Comics Code comics or similar. However, we did start seeing boundaries getting pushed, and a pretty well defined ratings system in place by the time 32-bit systems really came about. With regard to that, there was a window of time where Nintendo was sticking to keeping things family-friendly, and Sega was allowing for more (even then, Mortal Kombat required a code for red blood on Genesis). Once the ratings system was there, Nintendo relaxed their position, and I don't think it was something that really followed into the N64 launch (figure, they had things like Shadows of the Empire, Turok, KI: Gold, DOOM 64 and so on relatively early).

I think the biggest factor is simply the decline of third party support for Nintendo - N64 carts were expensive, and the hardware somewhat focused, making it a less than ideal platform for a lot of genres. Meanwhile, the PS1 was much friendlier to develop for, and secured a ton of support as a result. Later in that generation, many of the big N64 releases were the first-party ones, most of which were family friendly, and the high cart prices were more acceptable if the point was to buy the kiddos Pokemon Stadium and have it not get broken (a big advantage of carts over the more fragile disc based games). For the more avid audiences, the system became more one to dust off for Zelda, or maybe keep in the common room for multiplayer.

Again though, I think that's something that was a lot more the case later in the generation - certainly by the time the Dreamcast rolled around - than how people saw it at launch.

RCBH928 wrote:

marurun wrote:Sony sacrificed a lot to get those numbers, whereas Nintendo sacrificed numbers and textures a bit to get a more modern 3D core.

I wonder if any one made a new hack where they installed high textures on old N64 ROMs to see how it will look without that caveat.

I think there are some N64 emulators where you can load texture packs. But of course it's not as simple as this. The N64's texture cache is set up such that it CAN display higher resolution and larger textures, but it has to construct them out of lots of smaller textures, and the system has to then micromanage all that texture loading, which will reduce the frame rate. The games that used the RAM expansion cart on the N64 had more and better textures, and also suffered occasional frame rate drops as a consequence. The N64 just isn't all that great at texturing, which is a real design quirk, though arguably a reasonable trade-off given that you could only pack so many textures into the cartridge ROMs and shared system RAM. It's not like the PS1 was throwing around high-res textures, either, if we're being honest. But it helped that it had dedicated VRAM.

Which felt more next-gen for you? Saturn, PSX, or N64?

The PSX really looked from the future with the symbols for buttons instead of letters. I was amazed this thing could play audio CDs. Back then if you wanted to play Audio CDs you had to buy a dedicated system. Of course, there was the idea of the memory cards too and the controller with handles to grab. There is a lot more. The fact that you could play a game on a CD was amazing to me, back then I thought games can only be on cartridges kind of like the idea that a movie can only be on VHS (I didn't know about laserdisc).

That being said I can't deny the N64 4 ports, spaceship-looking 3-handles controller with analogue (was it the first analogue ever?), no loading, full 3D on a cart based system, the free roaming Mario64 (I haven't seen one before, even Crash Bandicoot was linear) with him jumping into paintings to enter levels was magical. I still remember the life like blue waters of Waver Racer. It couldn't look more real than that! Looks a lot better than Jet Moto.

isiolia wrote:
I think the biggest factor is simply the decline of third party support for Nintendo - N64 carts were expensive, .

marurun wrote: The N64 just isn't all that great at texturing, which is a real design quirk, though arguably a reasonable trade-off given that you could only pack so many textures into the cartridge ROMs and shared system RAM. It's not like the PS1 was throwing around high-res textures, either, if we're being honest. But it helped that it had dedicated VRAM.

Did they ever explain why they went the cartridge route? Wasn't it because it was harder to make bootlegs out of? The disadvantages seem a lot more than the advantages here. Not sure how it was percieved back in the mid-90s.

alienjesus wrote:Your Dreamcast, Wii U and whatever comparisons are flawed because the majority of Saturns were only sold in Japan. In terms of market penetration, Saturn had a far worse presence in the UK and the USA than the likes of the Dreamcast, the Master System or the Wii U. The Turbografx comparison feels far more appropriate, in that most of those were sold in Japan too. And as mentioned by people earlier in this thread, most people never saw a Turbografx back in the day either.

Market penetration wise, I guess you are correct I don't judge consoles by market penetration because they are usually judged by total sales, I think the Saturn(maybe TG16 too) is unique in which it was successful in 1 region only making the rest of world unaware of it. Usually its the opposite where something is popular everywhere else except that 1 region/country.

Have you seen a Neo-Geo in person? That was a lot harder to spot I think only 1 million units sold.

https://nintendoeverything.com/monster- ... h-america/

WOO! Monster Boy finally coming out and physical for Switch! Makes me so happy!