And why can’t I find it anywhere? I know it wasn’t very popular when it was out, but is there really a huge demand for it now? I remember 7 years so, I could walk into a retro game store and see a console for $45.
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The Sega Saturn did a lot worse than the PlayStation outside of Japan, even compared to the Nintendo 64 - only about 2 million Saturns are thought to have been sold in the United States. And over time the disc drives have been failing on them from age. Doesn’t help that Sega stopped making Saturns back in early 1998, long before the Nintendo 64 (2002) and original PlayStation (2006) were discontinued.
Combine that with the ever-growing retro gaming hobby/bubble, and now a lot of the working ones are, by this point, in the hands of enthusiasts of the system who don’t really intend to sell, or collectors who would want a lot of money for them.
299 and having no games the year it released was what hurt them. Also not having an actual Sonic game. They would rather push out bad VNs.
PlayStation was less of a bitch to develop for, too. Once Sega fucked the US launch, it was over for the Saturn. Nobody was going to try learning to wrangle two CPUs, a 2D background-drawer and a 2D sprite-drawer that had its arm twisted into becoming a 3D quadrangle renderer when the market wasn’t there for it.
Really, the only reason anyone collects for the Saturn is that it actually did pretty respectably in Japan on account of being the best 2D machine of the generation and actually having a competent launch strategy over there. Arcade ports, JRPGs and platformers are most of the Saturn’s stand-out titles. Ironically, the Nintendo 64 with its “3D-or-bust” attitude didn’t do well at all in Japan despite a respectable second place in worldwide performance.
I’m guessing that its rarity is boosting pricing. Have you considered emulation for gaming, or is it that you wanted the physical console?
I think Saturn emulation is one of the more difficult ones to get working right. I would go emulation, but a lot of the games I want to play are multiplayer and multiplayer on a PC just isn’t as fun.
@GreenCrush At least nowadays Saturn emulation works pretty well. With the right settings, it is like emulating Playstation games. My PC CPU is from 2013 and it works fine (with a GTX 1070). I am using RetroArch, but that is another complicated software suite to get into. But the Saturn core (a plugin in RetroArch) I am using is basically part of the standalone emulator suite Mednafen: https://mednafen.github.io/ . (Edit: Sorry I forgot that I used an additional program called Mednaffe: https://github.com/AmatCoder/mednaffe, that is a GUI for Mednafen.) So if you want get into emulation for Saturn, I would recommend starting with this, if RetroArch isn’t your thing.
Has Mednafen been made more user friendly? Because last time I used it, it very much was not.
@ArugulaZ My bad. I thought the default Mednafen has a GUI. What I used in the past was another program called Mednaffe as a GUI for Mednafen, which I highly recommend if you don’t like RetroArch. If you understand commandline applications, then Mednafen is easy to get into. Otherwise, I can see why its not user friendly. I’ll edit that part of my previous reply.
That’s fair. It took a good amount of work to get my emulation working well enough to play some of my old favorites.
One of the biggest hurdles I had was learning to play Saturn games on a modern controller; the Saturn controller had 6 face buttons lined up in two rows of three, while all the controllers out today copy the xbox/playstation setup of 4 face buttons in a diamond configuration. It was a real pain to remap the controls for some games.
It’s been working great on the Retroid 2+ though, and imagine it’s even better on the newer ones. It’s become a lot easier recently
Right? I wish I had the insight to save all of my old consoles. There was no reason to get rid of the nes once I got the super Nintendo. And that was gone when I got the PS1. Wish I still had all those.
It flopped. It adds mystique to the system, since so many did not play it when it was actively supported. You see this a lot with game systems that crashed and burned… the Turbografx-16, the 3DO, the Nuon, and one of Sony’s rare bombs, the Playstation TV.
Like NBC used to say, “if you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!” That’s doubly true for game systems. People want to know what they missed.
@GreenCrush Since the retro boom, many retro stuff got more expensive, not only the Saturn. Also the Saturn didn’t sell as well as Sony, therefore it is more rare.
