Sony PlayStation icons on the SEGA Saturn.

Sony’s PlayStation burst onto the scene in 1995 and birthed several major franchises which would go on to become household names for generations to come.
And while not every PlayStation exclusive found its way to Saturn, there are six notable ones which did.
In this video, James “The SEGAHolic” talks you through them all, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.
0:00 - 0:44 Intro
0:45 - 2:52 Battle Arena Toshinden Remix
2:53 - 4:44 Resident Evil
4:45 - 6:46 - WipEout
6:47 - 8:24 - Destruction Derby
8:25 - 10:33 - Tomb Raider
10:34 - 14:06 - WipEout 2097
14:07 - 14:46 - Outro

[@roberto1519]

I remember other comparisons on multiplatform titles, such as Independence Day, which surprisingly runs faster on the Saturn, and I did one myself with Alien Trilogy. I noticed the PS version features lighting effects on the sprites and environment, it also only uses one CPU on the Saturn, so we get another example where development on Saturn didn't have the same attention to detail and probably lack of skill/development tools and the such. The game runs very similarly to the PS as far as performance goes, the stages with lots of glass also look very different due to the dithering. SimCity 2000 is a plain 2D game which runs as a slide-show on big cities, it also does run slow on the PS1, but again, they couldn't take advantage of the multi CPU/GPU of the Saturn. Sure, the game required a lot of RAM, but they could have ran so much better on both systems, specially on the Saturn. It didn't deter my brothers and I from enjoying it on the Saturn, though, as I clearly remember we played this game to death. The Playstation 3 suffered the same as the Saturn, in terms of hardware complexity and weaker multi platform titles, but it had a very, very strong Sony after the massive PS2 success, which in turn, managed to overcome the difficulties during the PS3's first rough years and the machine finally shown what it could do in its later years.

[@LePensky77]

I really enjoyed this one, thanks James! Tangentially, it's interesting seeing the heavy use of dithering to give an impression of transparency. It's really important for people to remember that the majority of (or, everyone?) people would be playing these games on a CRT monitor, and indeed the game artists were viewing their art on one too. The scanlines would have softened that dithering significantly, and contributed to a significantly more authentic looking visual effect.

[@umbrellacorp.]

I love hearing the PS1Startup intro.🥰

[@SEGAGuys]

Iconic.

[@donalcrowley7682]

I had Toshinden, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Wipeout 2097 out of the 6 games U mention and I also had a game U don't hear about these days that was PS one first called Krazy Ivan Which was fun mech game.

[@MisterBigMack]

Great video James, still have fond memories of playing Tomb Raider when it arrived on Saturn first, and didn’t realise how long it was from PS to Saturn the release of Resident Evil - and you referenced RE2 - didn’t OSSM mention that RE2 was coming to the Saturn?

[@kaisercreb]

I have Wipeout XL on PlayStation and always loved it and its music. Wish it didn't require a second ps1 link cable and extra game for multiplayer.

[@wonder-games3579]

2:31. I find that funny because...the Saturn version has an exclusive stage with a half transparent ring lol. Also in regards to Battle Arena Toshinden Remix. I do want to mention, SEGA reprogrammed that game. I'm not sure what exactly they did reprogram but according to SSM they mentioned being unpleased with the Japanese release and so worked to improve it for Western releases. You can notice they're credited on the title screen. I will also say that's some very impressive lighting on the last stage shown here on Wipeout 2097! I don't remember it at all. I gotta check the game out again. Overall good video! I've actually played all of the games here on Saturn, and I'd say all but Destruction Derby are fine games to play on Saturn.

[@WWammyy]

On the Sega Saturn version you can actually up the gamma which is fixed in the PS1 version of Tomb Raider

[@Serial_Thriller]

I had almost all of these games. It was always disappointing to see the Saturn versions being slightly worse, especially with Wipeout (one of my fave games to this day). Imagine if devs were doing things like what the Unreal tech demo on Saturn is doing. I have a 4K upload on my channel btw. It shows how the Saturn *undeniably* could have done better, far better, which i always knew at the time, but it's great to finally be proven right.

[@MaxAbramson3]

Exactly what Kalinske and so many developers had been saying at the time. While the saturn was technically more powerful than the playstation, it would be years before we saw the machine pushed anywhere near its limits. A $400 blunder by SEGA, which kept changing its roadmap until basically 1996, when it was too late.

[@SEGAGuys]

The lack of development tools coupled with the surprise launch was a perfect storm. I’ve always said instead of bringing Saturn forward to May/July in the west, it should have been delayed until the fall of 1995 to let the SGL get rolled out and allow the system to launch with not only Panzer Dragoon, but the Big Three of VF2, Sega Rally and Virtua Cop. The message sent would have been entirely different and give the impression that Saturn was worth the wait … although to many of us, it already was.

[@MaxAbramson3]

@@SEGAGuys I still stand by Kalinske's Sega CD+SVP strategy, then going in halfsies with SONY on the PS1. SEGA would've made billions. But imagine a world where SEGA had to take on N64, 3DO, the PC, and PS1 having only that Sega CD+SVP (having to substitute the SH2 because of the chip shortage). SEGA would still be 18 months ahead of SONY and 2.4 years ahead of N64. By the time PS1 was pushing its 5-20k polygon/sec launch titles, Sega CD+SVP would be hitting its practical limit of 20k plus superscaler and rotation abilities of the Sega CD. Not only that, the 2D games could use that extra memory and CPU power of the SVP for arcade graphics, while the CD produced arcade sound and music. More importantly, games would be moving from SEGA to SONY, not the other way around.

[@nickbond6447]

25 years later the Saturn is beginning to be pushed by homebrewers

[@SEGAGuys]

@@nickbond6447Yeah, I’m one of the judges on the SegaXtreme Saturn Homebrew competition this year, some quality original software, mods, and tools/utilities on show. Cheers for tuning in! - James.

[@nickbond6447]

@@SEGAGuys that’s great! Do you know if/has XL2 has released the tools he developed. Would love to see what else could be created

[@StiffPeak]

Great informative video as per usual! I’ve been playing the Tomb Raider remaster that just released and it made me think back at how impressive the first game really was for the time, the sheer scale of the levels had never been done before, kind of still blows my mind! 😂

[@jasonmahon7264]

I really enjoyed this video and I have all these games listed on your video in my saturn game collection. Wipeout 2027 is my favourite racer on the Swga Saturn at the moment. I played wipeout 2097 on playstation back in the day

[@SEGAGuys]

Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for tuning in, Jason. - James.

[@TheRetroMartin]

Absolutely brilliant overview of these 6 titles. I had most of these on PS as i was such a latecomer to the next gen (1998) but i wouldnt play the original Wipeout until a couple of years ago and of course...i got it on Saturn! 😂 The Saturn Resident Evil remains ghe only physical i own of the original release as well!

[@AltimaNEO]

I thought Tomb Raider was built with Saturn in mind? Hence why everything is so blocky, because they took into account that Saturn only worked with quads rather than triangles like on the Playstation. Once they ditched Saturn, later Tomb Raider games took a major leap in quality. Thats not to say the Saturn couldnt do it. I think they were simply limited due to time needed to program both versions of the game, and needing to build an engine from scratch.

[@SEGAGuys]

While writing the script for this video, several sources online stated the game was conceived with PlayStation in mind even though it was brought to Saturn and PC. The use of quads rather than triangles wasn’t necessarily down to developers preferring Saturn as a development platform, but possibly still learning how to write 3D games, which was new to everyone at that time. Development commenced on all 3 versions (PS, PC and Saturn) at the same time, but the game was initially put forward with PlayStation in mind by Toby Gard, who presented the concept to company head Jeremy Heath-Smith during a 1994 brainstorming session for game concepts for PlayStation. That it came out on Saturn first wasn’t down to Saturn development starting first, but Core being forced to finish it 6 weeks earlier than the team would have liked, due to Sega’s European exclusivity deal with Eidos. The upshot is that several bugs found in the Saturn port were fixed for the PS and PC releases. Cheers for watching.

[@ahkmal7153]

The unfortunate thing is they could have actually produced a slightly more efficient game on Saturn if the render pipeline was better optimised. The game has functionality for loading data, it needs seperate portals to seperate large spaces in a room and some rooms can have upto 100 of them. They required to do this due to the small pool of RAM of both platforms. However, both platforms have a difference in how RAM was implemented within their hardware. It’s a shame VDP2 was never used with an opaque texture pattern for water, they probably could have optimised the game to draw less and have more portals for water areas. I guess they preferred to show the area and use the Saturns polygon distortion function to tessellate the quads. Also the draw distance is much larger on Saturn so that should have been shorter in larger spaces to help with performance. If only they had more time and a lot less stress.

[@Leeki85]

All of them were released on PC as well. I would rather say they were regular 3rd party games. The only reason why they were so popular on PS1 was because they were actually good games for that system. First 3D consoles had a rough start and early 3D games aged poorly. However these games had minor impact on PC, since there were many great 3D games on PC already. Only Tomb Raider got popular, but it was still a niche game on PC.

[@Steadysphere]

Great coverage and and analysis James. Quite the lineup of games there, I'd definitely like to try the port of RE1 one day! Were there many examples of the reverse, where Saturn titles went to PS1?

[@SEGAGuys]

Cheers mate, glad you enjoyed it! And yeah there are some examples, but not many of them are what people would consider “big hitters”. One for a follow up video perhaps …?

[@Steadysphere]

@@SEGAGuys I'd look forward to that!

[@Canadian_Gamer]

Well done boys 👍

[@raymiecall]

If the Saturn launched late but with that first batch of AM2 SGL games (and even a graphically great Daytona... got to dream) then things could have been very different. The PS would still have outsold it (it was the "cool" thing thanks to marketing) but the Saturn would have been better supported, sold more and ultimately lasted longer than it did. There are other factors (Bernie the bawbag for example) that might have still killed Sega as a hardware developer, but at least we'd have seen that messy chipset's full potential realised.

[@SEGAGuys]

We’ve long held a similar opinion, that pushing the launch back would have been the better decision, for the exact reasons you mention - SGL availability and the big three as launch titles alongside Panzer Dragoon and other third party titles that had more time in development. Cheers for watching. - James.

[@warpedpolygon]

It would be cool to see some PS1/Saturn releases where the Saturn version is actually better. It's rare but it does happen, Street Racer comes to mind.

[@nickbond6447]

Need for Speed, World League Soccer, Mass Destruction, Duke Nukem 3D, Dead of Alive, Courier Crisis..off top of my head

[@warpedpolygon]

@@nickbond6447 In The Hunt

[@TheKayliedGamerChannel-YouTube]

Anything by SNK or Capcom usually better on Saturn too.

[@warpedpolygon]

@@TheKayliedGamerChannel-KZbin as long as you have the memory expansions, but yeah most of those just feel better on saturn in general.

[@TheKayliedGamerChannel-YouTube]

Many saturn Capcom games even SFAlpha2 didnt need the Ram cart to produce better ports. Konami Arcade Collections usually better too, and Darius Gaiden amongst others especially many shmups released in Japan only.

[@GTXDash]

I'm waiting for someone to make Doom that actually uses VDP1 and 2 instead of just software running only on the CPU

[@G.G.___162]

[@TheKayliedGamerChannel-YouTube]

I'm sure I read Saturn was the initial target format for Tomb Raider in development 🤔

[@SEGAGuys]

Development commenced on all 3 versions (PS, PC and Saturn) at the same time, but the game was initially put forward with PlayStation in mind by Toby Gard, who presented the concept to company head Jeremy Heath-Smith during a 1994 brainstorming session for game concepts for PlayStation. That it came out on Saturn first wasn’t down to Saturn development starting first, but Core being forced to finish it 6 weeks earlier than the team would have liked, due to Sega’s European exclusivity deal with Eidos. The upshot is that several bugs found in the Saturn port were fixed for the PS and PC releases.

[@TheKayliedGamerChannel-YouTube]

​@@SEGAGuysah, ok, but why is the graphics engine quad based on both?

[@ahkmal7153]

@@TheKayliedGamerChannel-KZbin I believe that’s due to the tools one of the new recruits at core built to build the game. Specifically the level building software. The idea was to create the world from grids. I guess this allowed for them to comply with the requirements for Saturn rendering or they probably would have had do to the 3D in software like they did for Thunderhawk 2 and that would’ve been insufficient. Also I do recall a lot of 3D tools drawing quads. Granted that was probably for CG graphics and might have to do with what platform the tools were from.

[@TheKayliedGamerChannel-YouTube]

@@ahkmal7153 If PS was the lead format it still seems a strange move by them considering Saturn used Quads and PS used Triangle based geometry...

[@ahkmal7153]

@@TheKayliedGamerChannel-KZbin I understand, it is rather confusing. The tomb raider team really struggled to create a suitable engine using the work stations they had available, it wasn’t until they could build the levels and game engine better using the grid level building tool, which is when quads became the default choice. In a way it helps craft Lara’s movement. For example; 1 block = idle jump or 2 blocks = run and jump. The Saturn simply benifit by natively rendering quads and the PlayStation could draw them using 2 triangles. I’m also sure PlayStation wasn’t the lead but the first platform to have the game proposed on and it was decided to develop all platforms together