Rock on, Sega Saturn.
Sega Saturn = dual processor or dual core? I’m sure there’s a difference. But anyway, Sega Saturn was the culmination to an extent of Sega’s campaign of expanding the Sega Genesis into a multi-part 32bit maachine that ran CD-ROMs rather than just a stand-alone 16 bit cartridge machine.
True, Sega CD or 32X-CD games couldn’t run in the Saturn’s CD-ROm drive and Genesis carts didn’t fit in the cart area. But the machine was very versatile for its time. The main strength of the hardware was 2D games and especially 2D arcade games made by Capcom.
PSone could not touch it in this regard because the memory cards used for it were small affairs that were very puny looking compared to a cart for Sega Saturn. (It should be noted that none of the games for Sega Saturn were in cart format. The cartridges were various usages.)
In regards to Capcom games, Japan saw a whole plethora of arcade quality games that didn’t see the light of day in the USA until Sega Dreamcast. It is unfortunate however early 3D games for Saturn looked kinda bad.
And there is its. The machine that killed the hardware market for Sega: the Sega Dreamcast. I think two mistakes were made: prototyping in the USA for the Dural machine when all along Sega wanted to use the Katana Japanese format. A lawsuit brought on by 3DFX cost them. Mistake number two was giving Microsoft a gateway to videogames by licensing the Windows CE gateway or whatever it was that made it easier to transfer some PC games to DC…. at least for the big studios anyway.
I never did like the idea of personal VMUs for each controller but atleast the gamepad was designed to allow a vibration pack and a VMU to be installed together into the controller rather than one or the other in the regards to N64. They obviously borrowed the concept from Nintendo as well as giving the machine four controller ports.
The people in Sonic Adventure were rather blah but many games on Sega Dreamcast were exceptionally well done graphically.
A fad of the PSone era that continued way too long was the usage of pre-rendered backdrops. That’s when you have 2D backgrounds and 3D polygon people running around these areas. See the first Resident Evil game for example. Many, many offenders on this front. Resident Evil: Code Veronica on DC (and the X version on newer machines) was a little better with scrolling pre-rendered locations.
A true 3D environment to me is when you can rotate the scenerary around your character somehow with the controller. But often times this made the game a little more confusing to play because you might forget which way you’re supposed to be heading.
