Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 297: Sega Saturn

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its launch, Sega Saturn is paid tribute by Jeremy Parish, Diamond Feit, and Stuart Gipp. The good (its games!), the bad (executive infighting!), and the ugly (umm... its Symphony of the Night port?).

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, if you like it, if you love it, put some rings on it. Hi, everyone. It's Jeremy Parrish, and this is Retronauts, and you are, I don't know who you are, but you're listening to the show. And for that, I am grateful. And this week, we're going to talk about a video game system. And it's a little different than the usual. podcasts we've been doing. This is the first pandemic protocol episode of Retronauts. So instead of a bunch of people being together in a studio, it's a bunch of people literally skyping in from around the world. And folks, why don't you introduce yourselves? Let's go backward against the

clock to the UK. Is it still called the UK now that Brexit and the no deal has happened? Are you just England now? It is for now called the UK, but who knows what the future holds in this terrifying climate. And who are you? I'm Stuart Jip. Hello. I am a Retronauts contributor and a man who likes every game. And even further away, we have... Hi, my name is Diamond Fight. I'm in Japan, where the Saturn did really, really well. Oops, I gave it away.

Oh, you gave it away. Also, the title of the episode, gave it away. Oh, no. It's fine. Yeah, it's great to have both of you on the show. You've both been contributing to the website and to the social media for geez, more than a year now. So this is actually long overdue.

I'm sorry that it took a global pandemic for me to finally get you both on the show. Well, the good news is you have my number now, so the flood gets through. Yeah, so anyone who reads the site or follows our social media channels has been seeing Stu and Diamond's work because they basically are the ones who do all that stuff for us. Bob and I pretty much just make the podcasts and wrangle everything on the business side now. That's not entirely true, but mostly true. Bob does a lot on social media also, and I do some on the website, not as much as I should. But in any case, we could all agree that podcasting is good, and that's why everyone's really here.

And by everyone, I mean you, the person who is out there listening. Thanks again for joining us in these troubled times. And speaking of troubled times, this episode coincides with, the 25th anniversary of maybe the worst decision that Sega has ever made. And that is the... That's a doozy. It is, but I mean, it's the 25th anniversary of the American launch of the Sega Saturn, which I'm hard pressed to think of a single instance where you can look at the launch of a system,

the launch strategy, and say, well, that about wrapped it up for that system. But that really is the case with Sega Saturn. And it's really unfair and unfortunate because it was such a great system, so many great games, and it deserved to do so much better. I feel like that's kind of the prevailing sentiment we have around here with Sega consoles is it just deserved to do so much better. And yet, but fortunately, we have some non-American perspectives here, or non-U.S.-based perspectives, shall we say. So I'm curious to hear what your respective experiences with Sega Saturn were. Diamond, I guess you were in the States at the time of the Saturn, but you can maybe pick up some information about the Japanese feeling about Sega Saturn just through osmosis.

I know they just brought back Segata San Chiro, or at least his son. So that's saying something. What's the kind of sentiment when it comes to Saturn over there? Well, it's always seemed to have a really strong presence in used game stores and those kind of shops. It's right up, you know, I mean, obviously, the place. the PlayStation's library was gigantic. So, of course, every store in this country is going to have, you know, three to five thousand PlayStation games just sitting on the shelves.

But the Saturn is there. The Saturn is repped. My favorite Saturn story living here in Japan is that one day I was at a party, at a friend's apartment, and a man showed up to the party, and he opened his backpack, and inside his backpack, he had a Sega Saturn and like six or seven games in there. And we just started playing them at this party. I don't know what commits him to bring it.

Maybe he just always had it on him. And unsurprisingly, a man who carries a Sega Saturn in his backpack, he's pretty good at Sega Saturn games. But, yeah, it was definitely a good party experience. It's like, hey, we're just playing Saturn games now. This is excellent. Did you call him the Sega Saturn? Sorry, Sega Santa. That would have been really funny if I hadn't bungled it.

No, I thought you were going through the Sega Satan. Oh, no. I'm sure I remembered his name for. a while, and I think I message him on Facebook afterwards to thank him for it. But, no, it was, it was just one of those unexpected pleasantries of, you know, living in Japan. Suddenly you meet someone who, who loves Sega Saturn a lot. I definitely did have one when I lived in the U.S. I don't think I got it quite at launch. I probably waited until 96 or so when the price was a little lower. But yeah, I was, I was super into it and I enjoyed it for what it was. But yeah,

eventually it just sort of, it just kind of faded away as other systems popped up and outshined it. And how about you, Stu? I've been, my experience of the Saturn is essentially that it made very little impact at all. And I remember playing things like Sega Rally because I had friends who were into racing games essentially. But other than that, I just didn't really see them outside of sort of collectors and hobbyists. And Sega, of course, they did super well in the UK generally with the, with the market.

system did really well over here. The Mega Drive did well everywhere, obviously. The Genesis, excuse me. It's okay. You can call it Mega Drive. It's two to one on that one right now. Yeah, that's true. It's just a better name all around. I think we can admit that now. It really is. It really is. Genesis is a band, not a, not a game console. And a torpedo. Right. But, I mean, I'm sure we'll get into pricing and such later, but it came out over here at at 399 pounds, which is close to $500. And the Saturn was, sorry, the PlayStation was about 100 quid cheaper. So, everyone, and the PlayStation courted this kind of youth market

and picked up on games sort of becoming cool with things like wipe out with music like The Prodigy and et cetera, doing the soundtracks. And they captured this kind of clubland thing that the Saturn sort of didn't have at all. They just kind of went, well, we've got archaic. conversions and we've got Panzer Dragoon which is one of the most confusing sort of esoteric things to launch with I think but it didn't really make an impact over here the PlayStation just completely consumed it I think it was something like three to one sales within about a year the PlayStation destroyed it that's still way better than Saturn did over in the US I suppose it is

yeah um but I don't I don't see it's got a sort of a scene over here because like I said Sega and Sonic hang around a lot longer with the likes of Sonic the comic, there was a constant Sega presence in things like news agents and things like that. But even when there were no games being produced, you still had this notion of Sega sort of sticking around, which was pleasant, but the magazines even couldn't pretend that the Saturn was a success at all. Yeah, it's weird, because you mentioned the importance of Sonic, and yet there wasn't a whole lot of Sonic happening on Sega Saturn. I mean, there was Sonic Jam and some collections and stuff, but that's kind of it.

Sonic Jam and Sonic R Racing, which was an extremely brief, odd foot racing game starring Sonic, which we'll talk about later, I guess. But Sonic Jam, I played that a lot because it was just another way to play the Sonic games I really liked. and that's not a great selling point for a new console is you can play the old games from the previous console actually I think that's kind of the entire selling point for the Xbox Series X is you can play the games for the and the PlayStation 5 they're both like hey

all those old games that you already own that you love we're not going to have any new games for a while so please enjoy you're not wrong as soon as I said it I realized no wait it it actually is the major selling point for the but the idea there is backward compatibility with a software you already own as opposed to having to buy a new collection of games. So, yes, I get the point.

Point taken. So as for myself here in the U.S., I owned a Saturn. I probably bought one in 97, so it was before the end of life for the system. I had an encounter with it maybe in, you know, like 1995, late 95, early 96. And I was on a business trip and stayed at someone's house, not really a business trip. Anyway, basically they had Rayman set up and I was like, oh, this is actually pretty impressive. This is kind of neat. I like the feel of the system.

But at the time, I was like, all in on Nintendo. I expected Ultra 64 to be the most amazing thing. And they were going to have a Star Wars game at launch. And I saw that Mario with the penguin dropping it over the cliff. And I was like, I can't not get the next Nintendo system, which I did. And then six months later, I was like, well, I've gotten all the fun out of this system that I'm going to get. And that kind of broke my Nintendo fidelity. So I jumped in on PlayStation.

but as I started to, you know, accumulate more cash because I am part of the ruling class, actually, no, just because I had my first job, I was able to afford a Saturn and picked up a handful of games for it over, you know, the next few years and really enjoyed what I played. But it definitely was kind of second in my heart to PlayStation just because there was so much happening on PlayStation. It was just a vibrant and, you know, a fertile playstation. for video games and so many games that I loved. And Sega of America, you know, there was a lot of great stuff to choose from that they could have pulled over from Japan, and they elected not to.

And so most of the best Sega Saturn memories I have are of import games. And to me, that kind of speaks to the way Sega of America really mismanaged the system. They really didn't play to its strengths and didn't really cater to the like super hardcore audience that has become kind of the Saturn's main following. You know, you can't just pursue the hardcore gamer demographic because then you end up with a tiny slice of the market like the Neo Geo, which, you know, sustained itself with really high costs and high quality software, but Saturn was, you know, more of a mass marketplace.

So they couldn't just do the core, like hardcore, insane gamer. But they should have embraced them and really, you know, brought over those shooters and platformers and all those great-looking, 2D games, but they were, I think, wrapped up in the idea that only, Americans only like 3D games. And maybe that's true. Maybe they were right. Maybe there was just no place for the Saturn. But there should have been. That's what I'm saying. It was sort of the case over here as well. And it came with the PlayStation that in, I keep referring to the magazines, but they were such a major part of the culture

over here, that 2D games would just get bad reviews almost on principle because they were 2D. There was just like, this is not the future. This is not what we want. The mega drive's finished. We want Super 3D now. Yeah, I think, you know, the sassy attitude of the UK gaming press, it's always been a lot more like, it's such a reserved culture. And then you read the video games magazines and you're like, wow, there's some bile lurking beneath the surface. Yeah, like they, I, we would get UK-based magazines, you know, over in the news racks here sometimes.

And they always wanted like $10 for them. So I never actually bought them. but I would pick them up and flip through them. And yes, there was nothing but bile for 2D games at the time. But that also happened in the U.S. media. You know, I was a devotee of Next Generation magazine, which was basically Edge, but with a different name for America and fewer letter U's.

And they had the same. It wasn't snarky, but it was definitely like, oh, why would you want to play this? It does not have polygons at all. There is no mip mapping in this video game. You do not want to touch Castlevania Symphony the Night. how mediocre this thing is. And that, oh, go ahead.

Sorry, I wanted to throw in there. So in 1997, I was working in a software, et cetera, in a mall. So I kind of saw firsthand, both from staff and customers, how they reacted to games and 3D versus 2D. I know our Sega Saturn games were way, like, way in the back corner of the store, like nowhere, you know, the PlayStation games were the number one thing, and the Nintendo 64 games were there, and the PC games were there, and the Sega Saturn games were already. and afterthought in 1997.

But I could see, you know, staff-wise, people talking about new games. And, you know, as you just mentioned, Cynthia Knight, like, I had a coworker who he thought it was the most, he thought it was the ugliest game in the world that this game looks like garbage. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I love this game. And he was, he was angry at it. Like, I don't understand how you couldn't be angry at this game.

It's so good. So, well, we had, we disagreed on that matter. But that just, I feel like he was not, he was not uniquely stupid. It was just, there was just a prevailing attitude that I feel like it lasted. a long time, and I've brought it up in several of my columns up to this point, but like, it was a real thing that people thought 2D was somehow the past and bad. And why would you, why would you even bother with this anymore? And it's like, there were still plenty of good games, and the Saturn had plenty of them. Yeah, and I, I don't think I ever really bought into that. Like, I definitely read that and I was like, oh, new games, you know, 3D, this is, this is definitely the way to go. But then after playing those games for a while, I started to realize, hmm, you know, I still really enjoy classic games, you know, 2D games. Like, I still want to go back, back and play Yoshi's Island or even the NES Mega Man games. And that's kind of where my games writing started in the late 90s, just for my own website, just writing, you know, about what I guess

now at the time were classic games from two generations back, you know, on the NES, even though that had only been out of circulation for like three years. It felt like so much longer ago. And, you know, I was just writing to say, hey, these things are good and fun. And they still have value and kind of made it a point to pay attention to 2D games when they came out for PlayStation just to be like, yeah, take that Sony, take that Bernie Stoller. I like sprites, screw you. And Sega Saturn was all about the sprites. That was what it did so, so well. And SIG of America just kind of shied away from that. I don't know as much about the UK, European side of the Sega Saturn business, but I assume it was not quite so strict.

Like, you guys got things like K.O. Flying Squadron 2, which is a gorgeous little hand-animated 2D platformer sequel to an extremely expensive Sega CD game. And it's just a lovely, fun, lightweight little treat of a game. And it came out in Japan and the UK, but not in America. So is that kind of par for the course? It's not something that I've got, unfortunately, is a terrific knowledge of because it sort of went in and out, in one ear and out of the other, so to speak.

It was like such a flash-in-the-pan sort of console, and the PlayStation just completely subsumed it. I mean, we were getting these things like Mega Man X-3 on the Saturn, but no one was buying them because they were just getting like 4% reviews in Sega Power magazine. It was just like, this is garbage, this is trash, nobody wants this. We want Panzer Dragoon, and we want, I don't know,

athlete kings or whatever are the 3D sort of things we're going to play platformers we want pandemonium damn it's got polygons and a sassy lady with a jester what the hell but the culture sort of war so to speak it was so you you were getting like i remember very vividly there was a again in sega power magazine there was this like eight page feature about how mario sixty four was trash and knights was the best game ever and the future uh the console wars yeah that i think it was illustrated with photos of the staff dressed up in like dueling outfits with like flintlock pistols and things like that's how intense it was as far as i know it never escalated to real violence but you never know that's good i'm glad i'm glad there were some restraints there

So, yeah, that's kind of the world that Sega Saturn was born into. I assume everyone here also owned a Mega Drive or Genesis at the time. Everyone I knew owned one. I had one for a couple years. I went Master System to PlayStation 2. I did not have any machines in between. That's a big leap. I was playing emulation on the PC, but I think that sort of helped explain why I am the way I am.

But no, everyone I knew had a Mega Drive. You never saw, I would barely see a Super Nintendo or NES. It was Mega Drive all the way, everywhere. You'd go into places like clubs, clubs, and there would be Mega Drives just mounted on the wall to play. They were everywhere. Yeah, the Sega Genesis Sega Mega Drive was not a big success in Japan, But it was huge in America and the U.K. And, you know, it really put Sega on equal footing with Nintendo after Nintendo had dominated the market for half a decade or more, or at least in the U.S.

I know Nintendo was kind of a non-presence in England for a long time. But from what I understand, you know, based on sort of the official recollections, which are all kind of through the American side of Sega people like Tom Kalinsky, that created a lot of friction between some. Sega of America and Sega of Japan because, you know, Sega of Japan was obviously making the games and they were creating all these arcade hits. But then Sega of America, through their marketing and their licensing, they really dominated the console markets in the West. And so they had a lot of clout. And I think Sega's Japanese management was like, you know, we still want to be sort of the guiding voice for this company. And the American executives felt like, well, you know, we're responsible for the lion's share of our profits right now,

so we should have a seat at the table. And, yeah, I mean, it's hard to say exactly what led to Sega's downfall, but I do think that was one of the things was this constant sort of power struggle between Japan and America and, you know, Japan pushing back against the U.S. and saying, hang on, you guys aren't in charge. So, you know, just take your marching orders in America saying, no, no, we're awesome and cool, and you should listen to us. you know, we're provably smart because we have, you know,

these Sega Genesis commercials that are mean to Nintendo and everyone loves them. So, you know, then you end up with things like the 32X, which was more an American initiative than the Japanese initiative. And kind of, let's put it this way, the 32X and the Saturn launched about a week apart in Japan. They're both 32x machines or 32 bit machines from Sega. one of them adds on to an existing console, one of them is a standalone console, both of them have cartridge slots, but neither of them have any cross-capatibility, even though they're based around the same general architecture, the Hitachi-S-H-chips. I think that friction was part of the sort of the nail and coffin was Sonic Extreme, which was the big sort of hope for the Saturn, this cancelled Sonic game they were going to produce.

That was being developed overseas in America, I believe, with the Knights engine at one point. And then Yuji Nakka sort of must have found out about that and had a bit of a, I don't know, a kind of a hissy fit. It was just like, no, no, they're not using my engine. And I really, they had to scrap the whole thing and start over. Yeah, I mean, it probably, my guess is that he probably kind of saw that as a, you know, an unfair power play by the U.S. And the original Sonic was developed internally at Sega of Japan, and then Sonic 2 was developed in the U.S. by Sonic Technical Institute, or Sega Technical Institute, whatever.

So, yeah, I can definitely see, like, there would have been some hard feelings there. But instead of, you know, working in unison and being a cohesive whole, the two sides of the company were really pushing against each other. And there was just a lot of, I don't know, I think when the Saturn came along, from what I've read, the American side of the company was like, this machine is not going to do it. like the hardware here is not kind of up to standards. And it seems like Sega of Japan, when they started the Saturn project in 1993, their thought was, oh my God, the Atari Jaguar is going to eat our lunch.

We've got to come up with a Jaguar killer, not realizing that the actual market itself was the Jaguar killer. Like, Jaguar just kind of killed itself. And gamers were like, yes, let's kill that thing. Jaguar was just like, wait, we've got an exclusive bubsy. We've got a new bubbsy for you. Fractured fairy tales, guys. I mean, come on.

And the market just sort of shrugged. That's the one Jaguar game that I've played, and it's really, really terrible. Congratulations. You've played the best game on the system. Oh, no. No, no. That's not true. But yeah.

But yeah, so they kind of originally went in sort of thinking in terms of the more traditional console tech. You know, Jaguar was very much. about 2D graphics, about, you know, more traditional. It couldn't really do 3D that well. You know, there are a couple of decent 3D games on there. But for the most part, it was more of an old school system, shall we say, a traditional system. But at the same time, they also, Sega also was like, you know, we've got this whole Model 1 situation going on in arcades. And games like Virtual Fighter are pretty successful and amazing.

So, you know, we need to figure out how to make these two things work together. And they didn't quite. Sega Saturn is a weird hodgepodge of technology, but I can't really speak to the internal drama that happened there. I don't know if either of you have a little more insight into that, but I do know that just every article I've ever read on Sega Saturn has made it sound like Sega, you know, the sophomore slump. If you kind of overlook the Sega master system, which was kind of a minor hit in a few territories, Genesis and Mega Drive, you know, that was really kind of their big, their big hit. So then they had to follow up with another hit, and they just couldn't quite pull it off. And that happens to a lot of companies.

There's always kind of like this up and down, up and down cycle. As you brought up. As you brought up earlier, you know, the fact that the 32X and the Saturn both launched, I mean, the Japanese launched for Saturn and 32X was both November 1994. So I feel like that between the two warring districts or divisions, you know, they couldn't decide, well, do we want to hang on to this Genesis success, or do we want to try to debut this new console? And they just, you know, the 32x

was this bizarre sort of middleman that just didn't appease anybody and ended up just flopping hard. So I think they, they weren't even sure how to let go of their huge success. Like, how do we go to the next generation? Well, they worked on this machine and then eventually, as you let off the show with,

they didn't even know how to launch the new machine. So it kind of, it kind of failed from before day one. The 32X for me is one of those things that I look back at, and I just can't. I just don't know what they were thinking. I don't understand the process that led to that things being made in the first place. It was just launched, immediately abandoned, and in my experience, I could barely ever get it to work anyway. Yeah, I spent some time last year trying to get a 32X set up on an analog mega SG and running an

HD. And I've, I've developed newfound appreciation for how weird that entire piece of technology was. And I feel like that probably deserves a conversation all its own. I know we've done some talk about 32x here, but, but yeah, it's a strange choice. And again, it just conflicts with the, the Saturn itself. There was a little more of a gap between 32X's launch and Saturn's launch in the U.S. But again, the Saturn U.S. launch was, was not good. Sorry, Sega basically looked at the world's first E3 in 1995 and said, this is a great opportunity to just totally hand the market to PlayStation. And I think they thought they were being very strategic and cutting,

but they went out, you know, gave this long press conference, announced the price, $399. That's, you know, pretty expensive, but considering the power it offered, maybe not unreasonable. And, oh, by the way, the system is available today. which should be really cool, but it kind of wasn't because they only shipped 30,000 units. There weren't a ton in the marketplace, and there were only like six or seven games available for it until that fall. It came out early over here as well, and there was no marketing.

It just dropped one day. There was no time to market it in the magazines or TV or anything like that. Yeah, in theory, that's really cool. You know, Nintendo does this all the time with their Nintendo directs. They're like, you know, here's a game. game that's coming up and by coming up we mean you can go buy it right now in the e-shop that's fine but that's not an entire platform it's not hey this uh you know 400 pounds buy this site unseen that is almost half a grand right yeah yeah just kind of like a big big strategic mistake and you know it

even hurt them at retail because they gave the system exclusively to uh i wrote it down it was software, etc. Babbage's, Toys R Us and Electronics Boutique, all of which have the distinction of no longer existing. But they didn't loop in Walmart or Best Buy or any of the big box stores with larger, I think, distribution chains. They just went for the core gaming stores. And, you know, of course, the biggest retailers in America for electronics and video games all said, you cut us out of the loop on this guys. So why should we support your system like you know we could have been here day one profiting off your system selling games and consoles and really pushing for you but instead you went with you know the little shops you stop

out in the mall so who cares like why why should we support you so that wasn't great and uh it also allowed sony to come in the next day and say oh by the way PlayStation more powerful and a hundred dollars less so that really yeah you never you never want to go first at e3 always I always love the competition, give their pitch, and then you come in and undercut them. That's one of those electric E3 moments where I don't know the chap's name, unfortunately, but the Sony representative, I think he just walked up to the microphone, leaned down and said $2.99. That is correct. And that was it.

And it was just electric corporate beauty. Do love those corporations. I have to wonder, given this was 1995, I have to wonder if this strategy might have worked, if it had been a few years later and the internet had been, you know, more of a thing because at that point, you know, if you go up on stage in E3, you announce a new thing and like,

oh, by the way, it's in stores now. Well, how long does it take that message to reach the people who actually want to buy the thing? I mean, if there had been a more active internet at the time, you know, say if it was maybe 99 or 2000, maybe people, or even a little bit later, maybe people would have been, oh, it's out right now and maybe people would have rushed out to buy it.

But instead, they probably had to wait for, you know, a newspaper or a magazine, to report to them, it was already out. I'm sure at some point they thought it would be smart to surprise people, but they didn't realize how the act of their surprise would just spoil by the time it reached anyone's ears. Well, I don't know about YouTube, but my AOL chat room was lit. I was just waiting for the next issue of computer and video games and then picking it up and everything like, oh, by the way, between the last issue and the next issue, the Saturn came out.

So I guess going by that. Also, it's all sold out, so it doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah, there were 30,000 satins. They're all gone. All right. So strategic mistakes aside, the console itself is actually pretty nice. I love the feel of it. I love how compact it is. It's just like this little dense box of video game power. And it's not necessarily the right kind of power for the market that existed at the time. But it is power undeniably. And the Saturn could do stuff that PlayStation definitely could not. Nintendo 64 could not. You know, for a certain kind of game. experience, Saturn was the way to go. It had a huge amount of RAM built into it. I think PlayStation had two megabytes and Saturn had four and a half, which, you know, when you're loading in hand-drawn sprites and things, bitmap art, you need a lot of RAM and that gave it the capability

to give you really great renditions of games like Street Fighter Alpha 3 that didn't drop the frames of animation like PlayStation did, give you in the hunt and metal slug for my REM. and NASCA, and, you know, give you these great ports that the PlayStation just could not pull off, and Nintendo 64 didn't even bother to try. So it did have limitations in terms of 3D. The frame rates tended to be really pokey. And I was trying to figure out exactly, because I know the Saturn has sort of a really distinct approach to rendering polygons. It doesn't use triangles like every video game machine system ever. It uses quads. And the, the article I was reading the other day or last night or whenever it was I was researching this said that

instead of rendering like true triangles, they're actually like sprites that are being glued together and distorted in real time, which kind of seems like a fine hair to split. But basically it did kind of create this visual incompatibility with other systems. Like if you wanted to create a game for Saturn and wanted to create a game for PlayStation, you had to, I think you had to rework the character models because PlayStation used triangles. But, you know, Saturn at the same time, even if it couldn't render as many polygons or whatever per second as the PlayStation, it also didn't have that warping and the texture shifting that you saw on PlayStation. Like, you know, if you go back and play a PlayStation game, you put a camera in the wrong spot in a 3D space

and the whole floor is just going to like vibrate because it's having trouble rendering the depth on the polygons. You don't get that on Saturn. Everything is like, stable and rock solid and it maybe moves like 10 frames per second. But as it's moving slowly and kind of giving you a headache, at least you're getting a headache from kind of the frame rate as opposed to the fact that the entire world is warping and shifting in front of your eyes the way it does on PlayStation. Yeah, I just, I go back. I think about the games that came out that were, you know, both on PlayStation and Saturn. I think there are several games now that are sort of famously thought of as PlayStation or PlayStation exclusives, but in fact there were Saturn versions.

you know, Resident Evil came out for Sega Saturn and Siff of the Night came out for Sega Saturn Tomb Raider debuted on Sega Saturn and came out on PlayStation later but I think because of the way things went forward people think of it as a PlayStation game and I just think in general Well, yeah, Sony actually locked down the franchise

they were like, we want this to be exclusive so they saw the success of it and were like Sega can't have this But in my memory of those games whenever you look at the two of them side by side there's just something looks off about the Sega versions for all those games You know, even the Tomb Raider, I definitely, I played the Saturn version of Tomb Raider.

That's the version I owned. And I think after the fact when I saw the PlayStation version, like, this one just looks a little nicer and I couldn't put my finger on it because I didn't know about quads or triangles at the time. I was, you know, a dumb kid. But I could tell something was different and something looked off. And I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of the answer. There was some outliers like lobotomy software produced exhumed or power slave, I think it was called. America. And that was their own sort of proprietary engine. I can't remember the name of it annoyingly. But I believe that's something that impressed Sega so much that they sort of contracted

them to make ports of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake. And of course Quake, the original, did not appear on the PlayStation at all. It was on the N64, but it wasn't on PlayStation. And those are some of the smoothest, most impressive 3D games that I've seen on the Saturn. They are rebuilt in a new... It's not the Quake engine. It's this new engine they've rebuilt, which allows for things like sort of colored lighting and sort of a tilting viewpoints and things like that. They're very impressive on the Saturn. Yeah, PowerSlave has a great reputation on Saturn. It's not one that I've played, and I was wanting to try it out before recording this episode,

but my Saturn, when I plugged it in and turned, or not plugged it in, but turned it on, I think it needs to be recapped because it won't start up. So that's very sad and unfortunate. Was Power Slave? Was that the first person shoot that had kind of a weird Egypt vibe to it? Yep. Yeah, that's right. Oh, yeah, I played that one.

Yeah, that was a fun one. It's good. It's like a sort of Metroidvania-ish sort of first-person shooter where you gain abilities, return to old levels, and you're able to find new things. It was really well-made and fun. Yeah, the Saturn is unique. I can't think of another game console that out-of-the-box has both a disk drive and a cartridge slot.

Am I missing anything? I really can't think of anything. Like, you could buy CD add-ons for cartridge-based systems like Sega CD. and Jaguar CD, but as far as, you know, just coming with support for discs and cartridges, it's very unusual. And I don't think Sega really did enough with it. Like, you could have done anything with that cartridge slot. And it really seemed like, you know, when we first read about Saturn, it was going to have,

you know, 32X compatibility or something. I don't know that that was ever in the cards. But instead, the cartridge slot was mainly used for RAM expansions and for save memories. Like you could buy devices that would give you more RAM so you could, you know, beef up the visuals of 2D fighting games even more. And, you know, you could save memory beyond what was in the internal slots. And you didn't have to worry about the internal battery dying and losing your save RAM, which tended to happen a lot. There was also a modem that was released for the cartridge slot and a, I think, a video CD support, like module where you could watch. video CDs on Saturn, which, like, I guess, you know, that was your thing. I know video CDs

were really popular in Asia, but the quality on them was extremely low, so it wasn't really that compelling. Were there any games that supported the network at all? I can't think of any. I wasn't aware I had that connectivity. There were a few. It was the netlink modem in the US and a first-party Sega modem in Japan. And there were some games that supported it, but I didn't write them down. There was also the system, also had the ability, just like the PlayStation, for you to link two systems together, which I did not realize, but there was a device, a cable, that would connect multiple systems, and there were a total of seven games that supported it, all of which were released in Japan.

The only one that supported it in the U.S. was Hexen, and you had to, like, use a debug code to access that, and it was buggy, and it would crash. So not really the best supported feature of the system, but the, um, the, the cartridge slot's interesting because basically it's like a familiar form factor for a feature that both N64 and PlayStation also had, which is, you know, RAM expansions. On the N64, you just plugged in a RAM chip on the front of the console. The PlayStation had the ability not to give you more RAM, but to kind of expand the features of the system with the port on the back, at least on older models. They eventually dropped that, but there was like a serial port on the back. That's

where people like me plugged in GameSharks so that we could play import games and input the GameShark codes that would let us work around the import lockout. So that was all built into like the top part of the system. So it is kind of an unusual looking device in that sense and that it has two different input functions. But it's not like the purported Nintendo PlayStation,

which was going to be a cartridge and disk-based system. It was really just a disk-based system. The cartridge slot, I think, went particularly unused in the U.S. As I recall, I don't think those RAM carts ever officially got a U.S. release. I think they were almost, I think they were exclusive to Japan or sold with some imports, but I don't ever remember seeing the cartridge, like any RAM carts for sale in U.S. stores. But I know I have very fond memories of the Netlink. That was, in fact, the first Internet thing I ever used in my home.

This was, you know, 96. I didn't really have a very good computer available to me in my house. So most of my internet was based on, you know, plugging my Sega Saturn in and using that link and very slowly typing in things with a, you know, on-screen keyboard through this, you know, very primitive web browser. But, hey, you know, it was good enough to go to chat rooms and give people anger at me.

So it was, you know, it was fun at the time. And there were, I definitely heard stories of games you could play, but that was all stuff I heard about sort of years after the fact. I never, unfortunately, never actually tried them. But yeah, Japan had all these things. Japan had the RAM cards. Japan had save cards. Japan had, you know, all sorts of add-ons.

I guess I don't know if it's, you know, which came first. It did well in Japan so it had more add-ons, or it had more add-ons, and so it did so well. But, I mean, I was reading up on before we started recording. And I saw information about a disk drive plug-in, a printer interface, an entire set. Yeah, the floppy disk drive. Yeah, an entire set. That was wild. word processing.

Like, you could write your homework on your Saturn, I guess. Why not? Yeah, it's hard for me to say if some of those things were released officially in the U.S. or if they just showed up here because around the time I bought my Saturn, the local Babbage's was actually selling more import Saturn software than they were domestic. Like, I almost bought a copy of Radiant Silver Gun there. It was just back behind the counter in the day that I finally said, you know what? I'm going to pull the trigger and pay $50 for this gosh, darn.

game. It was gone. And I immediately regretted it because, you know, now that sells for a whole lot more. And the price immediately shot up. But, you know, I bought stuff like Konami's MSX antiques, which was a collection of like 30 or 40 games from the MSX home computer that they ported to Saturn. I saw Shinobi Legions there and like the Japanese version of it. There was just all kinds of import stuff that was showing up. And they did sell the ST keys, but I don't know if those were released in the U.S. as U.S. products or if they were just imports that they just happened to sell because for some reason Babbage's was selling Japanese games. Anyway, a few final notes on hardware. I mentioned the internal battery, which fortunately is Sega offloaded to the VMU

in the future. Those batteries still die a lot, but at least it doesn't fubar your entire system when a VMU goes. And there were a few different versions of the Saturn. I think most people listening to this are probably familiar with the American Saturn, which was just black. It was just a black box. But the Japanese Saturn was this really nice kind of warm gray color with black and blue accents on the buttons. And like the disc drive was kind of a glossy black that stood out against the gray. What was the, what was the UK release? Was it also the black version? It was the black box. Yeah. I always thought it was a good looking system, though, even in that form. it has a nice aesthetic. It's sort of a good for collectors, I think. One of those

slightly odd looking, but kind of cool what they used to think the future would be sort of systems. I kind of like it looking at it. Yeah, I just find myself completely bored by any system that is solid black. Like to me, that's just, it's not interesting. Like, do something lively. And that all happened on the Japanese side. There was the white Saturn, which was actually like a very, very light gray. But it had a red, like kind of a pinkish red, eject button that really stood out. The skeleton Saturn, which was a smoky, translucent

gray plastic. And on the disc drive, it has this kind of very 90s-looking text arrangement that says, this is cool. That's not wrong. We got to bring back the translucent consoles. Oh, man, for sure.

Why is that not an official switch thing already? I know there's like home... I don't know. I don't know. When did that last happen? The Switch Pro-controlled has it, but that's about it. It's also, but it's still, it's like black, it's black see-through. So if you're really, really squint, you can see it. But it's, yeah, give me that bright, give me another bright orange system that you can

see through, or purple, you know, a purple game boy. Yeah, I feel like Game Boy Advance was the last system to have, like last released system chronologically to have translucent variants. And then that kind of went away. Everyone was like, oh, that's, that's so late 90s. Yes, that's the point. It's cool. It's neat.

It says on the skeleton Saturn, this is. is cool. Can you, can you deny it? It says right there. Oh, well. And on the side of the ones that aren't see-through, it says, this is fine. This is acceptable. This is disappointing. This is passable. This is black. It's all black. It's what you want. Yeah. More, more systems to just describe themselves on the side, please. That saves me a lot of time. Yes, absolutely. Let's see, Japan also had the high Saturn, high as in Hitachi. It had an integrated video CD card. There was also the high Saturn Navi, which much like the Car Marty FMTown Marty variant could be installed into automobiles so you could, I guess, play Daytona as you were driving. There was the Japanese

V Saturn, which was basically the Japanese Saturn, except it said V on it and had a different startup screen, and that was released by Victor as an RCA. And then finally, not for retail, but there was the Titan arcade board, which was a beefed up Sega Saturn. I think it had a little more RAM, and played host to like a couple dozen games, most famously Radiant Silver Gun. Yeah, I was going to ask if that was one of them. And things like, I don't know how to pronounce this, Sukugurente. Yeah, you got it. Yeah, a lot of the shooters, like, that's, you know, very arcade-style gaming, so it makes

sense that those would show up on the Titan. But yeah, that's pretty much it for kind of the history behind the Saturn and the rundown of the hardware. and our general sense of disappointment, not in the system itself, but in how it was handled. But we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back,

we're going to talk about the stuff that wasn't a disappointment, and that's the games. Running Diagnostics in three, two. Men like that is a podcast. Good so far? That really sucks. Oh, no.

Shut her down. They thought they could make something funny. They can't do anything. They can't. A born mission. We can. Listen to men like that. How does BloodBorn stack up again?

say, Oregon Trail. And is Bomberman just loadrunner from a different point of view? Find out on Hardcore Gaming 101's top games, where we objectively, definitively, and scientifically rank the games you nominate for our ever-growing list. HG 101's top games. Twice a week, every week, right here on Greenlit.

Hunter, Hunter, Yu-Hakashow, literary analysis, comparative localization, Jojo references. The works of Yoshihiro Tagashi hold a specific kind of magic, and the people who seek to examine their roots and spiritual descendants are known as The Spirit Hunters, available on the Greenlit Podcast Network. All right, so we're really here about the video games, and there were a lot of them, even though there weren't as many as on PlayStation anywhere close,

but PlayStation was kind of, there might have been too many games, honestly. I feel like Saturn is just the right size for someone to be able to say, you know what, I really love the system and I want to collect all the games. Now, whether that's financially reasonable is another question, but at least,

you know, it's something within grasp in terms of like, I think I can fit all these on a shelf. And the question is, you know, are those cases still in good shape? Probably not. Oh, no. They had very,

They had very aesthetic cases in the UK. I'm not sure how they were in the United States, but they had the Mega Drive-style plastic clip cases with the sort of tags. They weren't dual cases. They were plastic, hard, shell cases. They were lovely. We had basically, you know, CD cases, except huge.

And they were made of this very, very brittle plastic. It's what they used for Sega CD. And I think they, I think what happened was they over-manufactured for Sega CD. And they had all these cases. left. We're like, well, we'll just keep going and use these for Saturn. And they definitely stood out, but yeah, they're just so fragile. Like, if you look at them funny, they'll crack. And in fact, you know, I work for limited run games and my boss, Josh Fairhurst, is really, really a huge fan of Sega Saturn and Sega CD and very, very into collecting. And so we as a company

commissioned and had manufactured a huge volume of those cases, like the actual cases, we got the rights to it and everything, in part so he could have, like, clean cases for his collection, but also so that we could sell things like Panzer Dragoons remake in a special edition that has the American-style Sega Saturn box, the long box. So that's kind of neat. You know, it's the links we'll go to. Anyway, um, Speaking of Panzer Dragoon, I would say that was definitely the big, like, notable game at launch, even though someone mentioned earlier that it was kind of an esoteric sort of game to pin your hopes on. I'd say so.

It's a sort of product of a different time when games like that could be successful or more successful rather than just kind of a niche products. It has more in common with something like, I don't know, with something like near almost or more accurately sort of like Dracengarde than it does a big launch hope sort of thing. It's a very odd, strange game. Well, I think Panzer Dragoon was a big launch game, in part because it showed the 3D capabilities of the Saturn. And, you know, at the time, it was this generational shift and this technological shift. Just having a game that was like, hey, look at what we can do.

That was significant. And so technically, it was very impressive. It was developed by a group internally at Sega called Team Andromeda. and, or maybe they came along later and did the sequels. In any case, it's a, you know, a rail shooter, so there's not a lot of variety to the gameplay, but you're riding on a dragon. It's got a very sort of surreal style.

They had Jean-Gerard Mébius, the French comic artist, come in and do like key illustrations and packaging art and everything for it to kind of give it this distinctive style. That didn't, of course, come through in the U.S. version. In the U.S. version, on the cover, we got crap-ass renders of the characters that looked ugly. As was the style at the time.

As was the style of the time. But in Japan, the packaging is lovely. It's this, you know, it's a Mbius illustration. And it's very sort of somewhere between, like, Alphonse Muka and, like, Bandezine. Like, it's just, it's very distinctive and very eye-catching. It's one of those games that I would actually buy just to have the packaging. Or, you know, if someone wanted to do like a poster or something, that'd be cool too. But, yeah, just a really thoughtful and artful creation.

And to your point, Stuart, not something that would be a launch title in other generations, but it could work there just because in addition to being artful, it was also like, whoa, check it out. I'm flying around in 3D and shooting homing lasers from a dragon's butt. It kind of makes it kind of makes me think of like siniosis. I think that's how you pronounce it. and like the Roger Dean covers of Shadow of the Beast and things like that. Yep.

It gives me that kind of vibe. It's a kind of vibe that you just don't get now, and it makes me sad that it's gone. I know. That's something that people need to bring back, for sure. But yeah, you know, I mentioned that no other console generation could have a launch title like Panzer Dragoon. And I guess that's not really true because Xbox One launched with Crimson Dragon, which was basically Panzer Dragoon by some of the same people. And it wasn't really that great and didn't really. make a splash compared to, I don't know, what was, what was there, was there anything at Xbox

one's launch that made people say, whoa, there was a Dead Rising game and there was that like super racist loco cycle or whatever it was called? Oh gosh. Oh, and Killer Instinct, that was it. Killer Instinct was the big thing. Yeah, was the Master Chief Collection out at launch? I don't even know. No, that was later. Oh, okay. And that wasn't actually good and playable for like two years after. That's true. Yeah, not a, not a good point of reference. But yeah, Panzer Dragoon, definitely, even if it's a game that could have existed any time, it's a game that could have only been a pillar of the console at launch. The other pillar, of course, I guess there were two others. One was Daytona USA, which is, I would say,

Sega's best-loved racing game outside of Outrun. What do you guys think? Yeah, I'd actually agree with that, yeah. It certainly has a legacy. It's a game I'll never forget. It happened to be in the movie theater I used to work at, and it was right behind the, the cashier's desk. So throughout the day, I would just hear, oh, I'm blank on his name, Mitsiyoshi, but his stirring rendition of the theme song, or basically that one word in the theme song over and over and over again for hours and hours. So it's always in my heart and membrane. Well, I think we've talked about this before on retronauts, not we collectively here, but as an entity as retronauts, have talked about how Daytona USA really is kind of the culmination of like arcade racing done the Sega style

where you've got like the just it's so energetic and upbeat and happy. You've got blue skies everywhere, lots of colors, you know, the the sort of stock race cars and there are lots of primary colors that just really pop out. It's fast-paced. It's kind of a no-brainer kind of game. Like you really don't have to think about the racing the way you do and, you know, something like Grant Horismo. Just a good, fun, energetic game. And yeah, as you mentioned, Mitsuyosu is music. Like, you can't feel bad going away from that. You have to, like, even the game over theme, you're like, oh, gosh, I messed up, but I'm going to play again. God dang it. It's one of the few Saturn games that you can go and buy right now on your Xbox as well, which is nice.

Oh, that's right, yeah. Yeah. Let's see. Other big game, Virtual Fighter. Was it the first one? Yeah, it was the first one, right? It was launched on Saturn. And that had already come out on, no, Virtual Fighter 2 came out for Genesis, and that was not good, whereas Virtual Fighter was much more convincing on, you know, hardware that could really support it, and I think was well received. I don't know. I'm not, Virtual Fighter is not really my schick. I'm not much on to it. But I do think it was more impressive than Clockwork Night, which was one of those kind of ugly, it was pre-rendered, right? Pre-rendered graphics? Yeah. 2D platformer. Now you're talking my language. Okay. What's the deal with Clockwork Night? Like, I've never been able to see the appeal in this game, but... There is none. It's got this astonishingly ugly aesthetic with these kind of garish colors. It feels weird just to move around because of the kind of quasi-3-D backgrounds moving behind you.

It's a little bit... I don't even know what to compare it to. It's not entirely dissimilar to something like Clonoa on the PlayStation, but it came way before and it's a lot sort of stickier and less fun to control. It's got appeal for just being odd And for them thinking this would sell systems That's funny to me But it's pretty that and the sequel are just

Games that exist They're like pandemonium like you mentioned earlier They're just there Pandemonium is at least interesting Because the first one was so aesthetically out of place For the mid-90s And then the second one was so try hard To get into that 90s vibe

Where it's like, hey, that cute little kid you saw who's running around. Now she's sexy. And also the jester guy, he's still a jester, but he's an angry jester. Clockwork and IKEA didn't really change things up for the sequel. It was just kind of like, here's more paparinchu or whatever his name is. I think it might be one of those games that sold decently well due to being a launch title, so they had to make a second one.

Kind of like NAC. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Except NAC is amazing, but I guess we'll get to that some other time. Uh-oh. We're going to come to blows over this one. All right, also at launch Pebble Beach Golf Links and worldwide soccer, probably called worldwide football someplace else. I think if it were really worldwide, it would not be called soccer.

But in any case, there's always some sports games, and those were them. So now that we've been through the very meager kind of launch games, what are the best games that came out in the West, in your opinion? I'm kind of opening the floor to both of you. So either of you just jump in and talk about stuff you love to play, like things that you played back in the day or things that you picked up later. Well, I know for me, one of my favorite Saturn games that wasn't a port. of an arcade game. We'll talk about that later.

But one of my favorite original Saturn games, and for many years, exclusive Saturn game, was Guardian Heroes, which should look this up. Pretty sure it's a treasure joint? I feel like that's a treasure joint. Yeah, it is, it is, yeah. 100% of treasure joint. And it is just, it's this fantastic, it has the soul of beat them up in that you pick your characters and you're moving to the side and characters show up and you're fighting them, but it has this sort of multi-planal effect that I think two, two or three

sort of planes you can hop back and forth between. The number of enemies on screen is ridiculous. The size of your attacks is absurd. You can, you know, between the different characters, you know, casting magic and using explosives, you can essentially juggle enemies up into the air and hit them repeatedly. There's, of course, there's a branching path system that kind of almost, if you imagine like that, you know, when at the end of the outrun game where you see the sort of the one turns out of two, turns of three, you can see all the paths. Like, that's the sort of the array of choices you can make in guardian heroes to end up in very different endings. There's at least one ending where I know you go to heaven and you fight something that looks a lot like God.

And, of course, there's something where you fight a demon, probably the same spot. But, yeah, it's just, it's this absurd glory. It's all 2D sprites. It's all, yeah, all sorts of scaling. It's really fun, totally absurd. I think, pretty sure that one had a multi-tap adapter that allowed you to have more than two players. I don't know how many, maybe four players, but there was even an arena mode where you could just go on and you could pick any character in the game, even like villager NPCs who have no ability to attack at all. But you can put all these characters in a giant arena and you can just fight each other.

And it doesn't matter that the characters have no attack abilities whatsoever. And yeah, it was just this great game that me and my friends would play for weeks and weeks and weeks and, you know, between the alternate paths and, you know, figuring out weird ways to combine our moves. the arena stuff. It just had this incredible replayability. And I'm happy to say it is one of those games that did get a second life. It came out on Xbox Live Arcade, which I was very fortunate of to review for OneUp. It's actually, that was one that I wrote about for OneUp.com. I don't know. I'm hoping, because it's on that Xbox, you know, architecture, I'm hoping you can play it today on your Xbox 360 or Xbox 1 or your Xbox Series XSizzes. Yeah, it's backwards compatible, so it should be available, which is great.

As long as it doesn't get delisted. Just don't confuse it with the Game Boy Advance one, because it's not as good. Oh, yeah. I feel like there have only been a handful of efforts to build on this game. One of them was the very mediocre GBA game, and the other was Code of Princess, which was, like, it's actually not a bad game, but the decision to say, like, what have Guardian Heroes, but with Big Titty Anime Girl with no clothes on? It's just a little off-putting.

Yeah, they leaned into that, and it was, it was. I think it was a 3DS game at first, which, you know, and it was maybe a late 3DS game, if I recall. It was actually fairly early on. Oh, was it? Okay. But it's purported to other systems now, so you can try it again, I think, in different ways. But I never actually, I have not taken the plunge on Code of Princess, unfortunately. It's okay.

It just doesn't have the same sort of like, ah, there's just something about this that Guardian Heroes does. And, you know, I recently did an interview on Streets of Rage 4 with the team. at DotMU and Guard Crush and LizardCube who are making the game. And they cited Guardian Heroes as like the last great 2D brawler. Like, you know, that was, that's the last time that that particular format really did something new and different. And they kind of looked at that as, you know, not something they're trying to imitate, but they want to bring back, you know, the sort of feeling that you got playing Guardian

Heroes. So, yeah, definitely one of the Saturn's real standout games. So you mentioned a multi-tap, Diamond. and there's no multi-tap game more amazing than Saturn Bomberman. The Saturn game that allows you to play up to 12 people, I believe. You can be 12 Bombermen running around. Sometimes I see it like Pax or Midwest Gaming Classic or, you know, places where they have retro gaming room set up. Like someone will occasionally set up a Saturn Bomberman, you know, a full scheme where you can all play it.

And it's just ridiculous. It's right up there with the, uh, Steel Battalion Room. It's something I was able to play at an exhibition a good few years ago now. It was set up for, I think it was 10, I'm not sure, with a huge screen, and it was pretty much transcend and Bomber Man. It was amazing. And it's sort of a direct sequel to Mega Bomberman.

I don't know if it was called Mega Bomberman in the States, the Mega Drive one. So it carries over that really just lovely aesthetic as well. Yeah, all those 16-bit, 32-bit Bomberman games were a lot of fun. And then they were like, oh, but we should do it 3D. it lost a little something. Let's see, other good multiplayer games. Death Tank. What's that?

Death Tank. What is... Death Tank Svi. It's a game that you can only access, I believe, on the Lobotomy Software, ports of Junukin 3D and Exhumed and Quake, which I mentioned earlier. I'm not sure the exact combination, but if you have two of those games, like if you have a save from Quake and you boot Junukum 3D, you can access Death Tank Svi, which is artillery game

a little bit like worms obscure sort of I don't believe you can move in it it's a much more old school artillery but with Saturn kind of colored lighting that was eulogized and raved about at the time as the best multiplayer game

existed and you can only access it by owning two slightly obscure Saturn games I think it came out on the Xbox Live Arcade after that but I wasn't able to play that port, unfortunately. I was not aware of that, but that sounds kind of amazing. It is. It's great. One that what I was aware of, but never had a chance to play, was Burning Rangers.

Do you have experience with that one? I had a friend who had that game, unfortunately, all I remember about it is thinking, this is pretty good 3D for the Saturn and then putting something else on, unfortunately. Yeah, I think it had, like, its big thing was it had transparent fire effects, which was kind of hard to do on Saturn. I think it's one of those games that really kind of is dug in with the kind of a Sega cult because it turns up in a lot of their sort of superstars games. Like there's a racetrack based on it in a racing transformed.

The music turns up in things like Sonic Pinball Party. But other than that, they haven't seemed fit to re-release it, which is odd, in my opinion. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff kind of lost on Sega Saturn. Panzer Dragoon has just gotten a remake at the time of this recording. It's just gone up for sale. and on the e-shop and a few other places, maybe? Is it a timed exclusive on Switch? That's my understanding.

I think they're doing Panzer Dragoons Vi as well. Right. That's been announced, but I don't think any of it has been seen yet. Right. And then, of course, there's Panzer Dragoon's Saga, which is now like a $400 game and was immediately rare because it was released at the very butt end of the Saturn's life after Bernie Stoller was like, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. It was only one third rare in the UK.

because they gave away Disc 1 with Sega Saturn magazine as a cover mount. Oh, Lord. I know. It's insane. Why would you do that? I don't know. I guess to make you want to play more of it, but then you're getting something like, I think that's a three-disc game.

Yeah. So they're giving you a good, I don't know, 10, 15 hours. No. I don't even know how long is. No, Panzer Dragon Saga is a very brief game. It's like a 20-hour RPG at most. It's very compact. There's not a lot to it in terms of volume, but it's just so unique and creates this very

immersive world. Like, they really take that Mebius style of world, like his vision for the world, and turn it into a game and, you know, like really flesh it out. It is a kind of a Holy Grail, I think, I mean, for me specifically, but also in general for retro gaming, because

it, now that Shane Mu has happened, now that that's been re-released, I think it's all eyes back on Panzerrugan saga as the last kind of great, lost Sega RPG. Right. I remember seeing a copy of it in a second-hand store for about 25 pounds and being like, that's a bit expensive for a second game. I think I'll leave it.

I remember seeing a whole rack of them at Toys R.S. for 20 bucks. And I picked up one. If I picked up all of them, I'd be riding high. So you mentioned, you know, we said, oh, why would you do that about releasing just the first disc of Panzer Dragoon Saga? But Sega did that was Shining Force 3. In Japan, Shining Force 3 is a three-part game, three different releases that tell a big story. In America, we only got the first scenario. So we only, like, the official release of Shining Force 3 was one third of the game. That's another, I think, Holy Grail is, you know, getting scenarios two and three of Shining

Force 3 because Shining Force is obviously, you know, for Sega fans, it's a huge tactical RPG, like a really cutting edge on Sega Genesis title that really kind of push the boundaries of the genre. And Shining Force 3 came out of the tail end of Saturn's life. And Sega of America only local. one of them and barely localized it at that. That's one that really needs, uh, needs a second chance. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's strange when I, when I, when I sort of sit back and look at it, how many of Sega's major franchises just did not turn up on the

Saturn at all. Sonic is the obvious one in any major capacity. There was no streets of rage. There was no fantasy star, I don't think. Nope. No fantasy star. And I don't understand that at all. Yeah, it really seems like they wanted to just kind of cut ties with what had come before as opposed to turning what come before into you know sort of a new generation 3D kind of thing they try with their sort of big their new hopes like knights into dreams which was a really major satin title and it's been popular enough to get a sequel on the wee which i heard is terrible um it got re-released on the playstation two and then that re-release got re-released on the 360s steam etc it's a game about gosh i don't even know how to describe what it's about you play as this dream creature kind of flying

through quite pretty looking very colourful bright sort of 3D stages but it's strictly 2D gameplay or on a 2D axis you're supposed to fly through these rings to collect I think it's called idea it's one of those games where everything sounds fake um but I have friends who will who swear by this game and at the time it got good reviews but going back to it now I just find it really difficult to get to grips with because it's one of those games that's got kind of fixed camera angles that will arbitrarily change and your controls will sort of change with them And when it's a time attack-based score, sort of score-attack-based game, that really requires you to memorize exactly when those weird changes are going to come up. I mean, once you do, I'm sure it's really smooth and good, but it doesn't make a good first impression, I don't think, and that's kind of important on a new system.

It was definitely such an odd release to come out of the time, because they obviously had high hopes for it. It was made by Team Sonic. They were hyping the fact that it was a Team Sonic game, and it was the era of mascot platformers, even though I wouldn't call it. out a platform, but it had a, it had a character, a star character that had a distinct look to it. But it was kind of like, again, it's, it's the late 90s. I don't think magic, magic festive dream creature is on anyone's list, you know? At this point, the Sony PlayStation is selling itself on a Dominatrix with a whip. It's like, okay, and here's our fantasy creature and kind of, is she wearing a gestures cap?

Is it he or she? I don't know, but fly through these rings and score lots of points. It's like, I definitely played it, and I definitely, I gave it a fair shake. I know it did come with its own special sort of, I think they called it the 3D pad, because it had an analog stick on it. And if you look at it today, if you look at it today, it just looks like the first draft or the Dreamcast controller. So yeah, I know people who love it.

I never loved it, but I definitely played it enough to sort of say, well, this is kind of interesting, but it's not at all what I want to play right now. There's a lot going on in nights, but it's. all going on in the background, which you can't pay attention to because you're against the clock the whole time. Yeah, the one notable thing about Nights is that Sega was so into it, they released a free disc called Christmas Nights that, I believe if you played it on Christmas, you know, with the system clock set to Christmas Day, you got all kinds of special bonuses, but it was

basically like a demo disc, pretty much, except for the Christmas theme. And that was included with a few different magazines. Yeah, so you got cover mounted over here. Yeah, it was quite a major thing. thing. But, you know, I feel like one of the big strengths of the Saturn in the West, you know, we didn't get a lot of the shooters and the fighting games, but we did get a surprising number of pretty good RPGs. I mentioned Shining Force 3, but there was also, I put virtual hide light on here as a joke, but Legend of Oasis was an actual legitimate good, legitimately

good action RPG, kind of an isometric take on Beyond Oasis from Sega Genesis. I think it's officially like a sequel or a prequel or some sort of in-universe. Yeah, it involves Thor, the same dude. Right. Yeah, that was that was one that I definitely loved a lot at the time. It had a different look to it. You know, it did sort of have a vague Zelda-ish feel from the perspective and the, you know, the sword fighting and the monsters, but it definitely was distinct from Zelda in lots of ways.

I, for some reason, my biggest memory is fighting with mimics that were, you know, disguised as treasure chests, you know, trying to score new items and discovering, oh, no, it's another monster and had to fight that off. But, yeah, that was definitely a game I put a lot of time into. There was also Dragon Force, which was more, not really an RPG, but more like a strategy game, but is very highly revered. And that one now sells for a tremendous amount of money because it was a working designs game. And so also there was Magic Knight Ray Earth, which was the very very very very good. last game released in the U.S., even though it was one of the very first announced, there's all kinds of troubles around that one, but the working designs did finally get it out, and now it sells for a huge amount of money, and I really wish I'd kept my copy, because I enjoyed

the game. It was a, you know, nothing great, but it was a fun little Zelda-style game that made use of the three heroines for Magic Night Ray Earth. You could switch between them to use different kinds of magic, because they all have their own elemental affiliation, water, air, fire, and kind of retold the anime in a much more compact fashion than the anime based on the manga and anime by Clamp so very much of the 90s but I'm glad it did make it out

it might be briefly worth mentioning they also released Mega Man 8 for the Sega Saturn it was a version just for the completest really that's the only version where you can fight Cutman and Woodman when it was released in the PlayStation and Sony sort of demanded extra content for their version, and for some reason that translated to them getting a little booklet

and Cut Man and Woodman being removed. So, at Mega Man 8, it's like this kind of anniversary celebration kind of thing, which is why they threw the old bosses in. But it's the only version where you can fight them, so I think that's worth mentioning. Yeah, every time Mega Man 8 is reissued, which has been like twice, I ask the developers, hey, are you doing the Saturn version or just the PlayStation?

And they say, we're not doing the Saturn version. It's just the PlayStation version. So, yeah, that release is the only way to play that. But Mega Man was much more prolific on, well, no, I guess that's not true. If you look at imports, there were a ton of Mega Man games on PlayStation, but there were a surprising number of releases on Saturn. Mega Man 8. There was the Super Adventure Rockman, the adventure game, Mega Man X3 and X4. So for like that very brief window, Saturn was the place to go. to play Mega Man games because they all, you know, it was a 2D system, powerhouse, so it looked a little better than PlayStation. There were a lot of games that just were better on Saturn than on PlayStation, Rayman in the Hunt. All fighting games, all fighting games, but unfortunately all of those were pretty much import games, so you had to import from Japan.

And that's what we should talk about now. Yeah, there were some things got released. And again, I think this goes back to the Ram Cart problem, because I think as the fighting games got more and more intensive as the 90s wore on. I think the Saturn versions required that extra RAM cart. I don't think it was available in the U.S., so I just, I don't think things got released. But definitely on my Saturn, Street Fighter Alpha 2 was a game that I played daily. The Saturn had a pretty good, of course, black joystick, and that was one that I just played. I play Street Fighter Alpha 2 almost every day just coming home from work. I'm just going to

play this game through almost all those, the various versus games. came out the original Dark Stuckers did not but the sequel Night Warriors came out on

Saturn eventually vampire savior the third Dark Suckers game did but that was only in Japan

because that had the the RAM card because that that game just had too many characters

and too many things going on I know it got a PlayStation version but that was always that was

definitely you know frame rates were cut it was kind of a general thing

it became almost like an early meme because if you looked at fighting games on Saturn

versus fighting games on PlayStation, there would always be some, you know, little cuts or little tweaks to the PlayStation version that some of them were real headscratchers. I know the most famous one, I think it was either Alpha or Alpha 2. You know, when you do a super move in those games, your character has this sort of these after effects, shadows of your character behind you.

And in the arcade game, those shadows are always blue. And in the Saturn version, the shadows are blue. But for some reason, in the PlayStation version, the shadows were the same color. So it just looks like your character suddenly has, like, like, like eight or nine twins behind them. And it was just kind of this weird decision, like, well, why did you do this? And why does, I mean,

why would you make it just look different for no apparent reason? But so that became a thing when magazines pointed out the shadows and everyone's like, where are we talking about shadows? But it's like, you know, at that time, if you're looking at two different versions and one looks more like the arcade game, I know for me, I was like, well, I'm going to get the one that looks like the arcade game. Of course I am. With the RAMPAC, you were getting either sort of Arcade Perfect or close to Arcade Perfect.

So it was no contest compared to the PlayStation versions with so much cut down animation and crushed up, squashed up sprites and just not as good by any means. If you go to YouTube and type in any of those 2D era games and put in the word comparison, you'll see entire channels that just show the arcade version, the PlayStation version, and the Saturn version. And of course, neither one quite matches the arcade version, but the Saturn version comes pretty close. And the PlayStation version, when you look at it next to the two, it looks. strikingly different, you know, some characters have, like, you know, their idle animation is down to maybe only four or five frames where, you know, the Saturn and the arcade version

is like 12, 13, 17. It's a huge difference. Yeah, so let's, you mentioned a lot of these games, but most of them were available through import only. There were all three Street Fighter Alpha games, the various Darkstalkers games, X-Men, Children of the Adam, Marvel superheroes, X-Men versus Street Fighter, and then several King of Fighters games. so if you were into the 2D fighting scene the Saturn was definitely import Saturn specifically was definitely where you wanted to go there was some other interesting fighting games too like a galaxy fight that Sunsoft brawler

which had all kinds of weird characters in it including the protagonist of Trip World the obscure and expensive little Game Boy game that's such a strange crossover it is I mean it was it was just like hey let's put every character we own in here And so there he is. Also, kind of on the same tip is just the proliferation of 2D shooters on Sega Saturn.

And very few of those, if any, saw a release in the U.S. The Parodius Double Pack made it to the UK, to Europe. And that would be, I won't try and say the Japanese titles, but Prodeus and Prodeus Fantastic Journey, which was nice to have. But other than that, I think that was pretty much it. We didn't get Thunderforce or Bats a gun or anything other than that. Yeah, did you get the... the Gradius deluxe pack or the salamander deluxe pack?

I don't think so. No, not till the PSP. Okay, so those were both released on Saturn and PlayStation, but only in Japan. But obviously there was Radiant Silver Gun, which we've talked about, a legendary treasure shooter, which fortunately is much more available and accessible now than it was for a long time. It's still pretty pricey on Saturn if you want the original version, but it's been ported to Xbox Live, and I think, I feel like it was put somewhere like PlaySaltz, but let's see cave shooters

I think Don Pachi and Dodon Pachi are cave, aren't they? Yeah, yes. Okay. I-Rim shooters like X multiply and image fight came in a double pack. There was Strykers 1945 and Cotton 2. Strikers 1945 is very much like, that was rising, right? And they basically were like, what if we took Capcom's 1940X series and made it a manic shooter.

And that's what they did. Cotton 2, on the other hand, was a cute-em-up, side-scrolling shooter where you play as a little witch who is in desperate need of candy. So she blows the shit out of everything to get lots of candy.

As you do. As one does, yes. Was the MSX collection you mentioned earlier, does that include, like, Nemesis 3, that sort of shooter as well? It's been a long time. As soon as you mentioned it, I immediately mentally checked it

on the Buy This Now list. Yeah, so there's, I think there were two MSX deluxe packs or collections for Saturn. It's been a long, like we're talking 20 plus years. Yeah, yeah. I seem to recall there were some of the shooters that were on there. I bought them because I was like, oh, MSX Konami, that's going to have Metal Gear and Akamacho Dracula. And it didn't.

But it did have a lot of other games, but I just didn't give it too much time because the games that I really wanted were not on there. And I really should have looked up the list before I bought the games. They were like 15 bucks each at Babbage's. And I said, ah, why not? You probably got Arctic Adventure out of it, I mean, so it's not all bad. Yeah, yeah, there's some good stuff on there. I mean, like, if I'm remembering right, there's like two collections that comprise 50 or 60 games in total.

So that's like half of Konami's output for MSX, because they were just ridiculously prolific on MSX. But it's a ton of games. All the Thunder Force games showed up on Saturn. You had the two gold packs, which were one, two, three, and four, and then Thunder Force Five, which of course was more important. than the PlayStation version of Thunder Force 5, which is what we got here in the U.S. Other shooters like Shien Ryu and Soku Gurintai and Batzugan. So, yeah, if you liked tiny ships just spewing an insane amount of bullets and missiles, the Saturn was the place to go.

I think that the radiant silver gun port, I may be mistaken on this, but it's still desirable because the Xbox Live Arcade version, I think it cut a lot of the sort of extra features that were in there. There was a lot of voiceover that wasn't present, but I'm not 100% sure on exactly what was removed. You are probably right on that. Let's see. There was also, oh, yeah, there were some Shin-Magame Tensei games, Soul Hackers, was kind of like the big Holy Grail for SMT fans for a long time until it was remade pretty nicely on Nintendo 3DS of all things.

Let's see, Princess Crown was the first vanillaware game. and basically it was such a huge failure that, from what I understand it made George Kamitani a pariah in the games industry for a long time, and it was hard for him to produce another game for like 10 years. But it's a, if you like that jointed puppet style, like very elaborate, painterly, vanillaware style with some light action RPG elements, Princess Crown is definitely one to pick up on Saturn and has been reissued a few times. Most recently on PlayStation 4 as a freebie that came with 13 Sentinels, the most recent

Kamitani Venil Aware game. But I don't know if that one's coming to the U.S. Probably not. We're probably not getting the bonus. Grandia got at start on Saturn, although was eventually ported, according to many fans, in a much worse form on PlayStation. Sokara Tyson, which has just been relaunched, rebooted, started on Saturn. Lunar 1 and 2 got great ports on Saturn that were reissued on PlayStation. Baroque, which was remade for Nintendo Wii. It's kind of a rogue-like sort of action game or RPG-ish kind of game was on there. Tactics Oger was remade for Saturn and then remade for PlayStation to less impressive effect.

And then, of course, there was Final Fight Revenge. I am not familiar with Final Fight Revenge Imagine Final Fight Except then it's a fighting game And it's really terrible It's got bad 3D graphics It was produced in the US I believe

But only sold in Japan It's got really terrible 3D graphics It's like floaty It's just not fun to play So I assume this was not a well-received game It was a little sad face next to it Because yeah it's It was a bud

And yet they then went and made Final Fight streetwise They learned nothing They learned nothing, yep, except at least Final Fight Streetwise was a brawler as opposed to a fighting game. That's true, and it had Slipknot. Oh, yeah, hell yeah. Am I overlooking any notable import games? I don't want to drag this episode out too long. A lot of retro compilations as well.

I say a lot, a fair number, mostly schmups that you've mentioned already, but things like Capcom generations. I think there was a disc for the 1940s series. a ghouls and ghost disc I might be confusing this with the PlayStation Run though? It was the exact same games on both systems. There were five discs. It was Ghost and Goblins series

1940X. There was one that had Commando and Merks. The best disc ever was Pirateship, Higamaru and Son Son and something else that doesn't matter because it's not as good as those two games. Right, there you go. And then the fifth disc was some street fighter games. And that is the only one that made it to the US

as a street fighter collection. And then They did another Street Fighter collection that was not part of the Generation series because it was such a success. Can you feel the sunshine? That's that promise and I love you there. Don't you feel sometimes? You just need to run away. Reach out for the sunshine. Forget about the rain.

good signs and they'll come back again Yeah, like other stuff You know, like Twinkle Star Sprites was a Neo-Geo game that was ported to Saturn. Bubble Symphony was another bubble bubble sequel that I think

has only ever been ported to Saturn. Yeah. So there's quite a bit of original, unique content out there. If you like dating sims, by the way, Saturn is your jam because all that 2D hardwere where, you know, spray pushing power was perfect for anime.

So there is a lot of anime on there. I want to mention, it's not an import, but I want to mention Sonic Jam briefly again, because while that was not much more than a collection of Sonic 123 and Knuckles for the Mega Drive, it was a pretty good, interesting collection. And for some reason, they haven't replicated its sort of features in any of the 2000 subsequent Sonic compilations. there was a thing called I believe Sonic World which pushed Sonic into a very ugly small sort of 3D environment almost to say

look we can do this too look here he is it's Sonic and he's doing stuff but you'd run around this world and in this area there'd be like a museum like a building and if you went into the building you would get a bunch of sort of archival things like commercials about the Sonic series all in Japanese

you'd be able to go and listen to the music from all of the or Sonic games, you'd be able to lock on the games to play Sonic 2 and Knuckles, Sonic 3 and Knuckles. And also, from my perspective, most interesting is they'd actually made fixes to the games that were optional. Like, bottomless pits had been replaced with, well, non-bottomless pits, and they'd added or taken away platforms here and there to make the games just that little bit better and more fair. And, of course, all of the subsequent versions, they just sort of went like, no, we're not doing that. So you would just get, for example, having to load a game

50 times to unlock the next game instead. Yeah, I don't have anything to add to that. But you also mentioned Sonic R and haven't really followed up on that despite your promises. Oh, yes. So please, please let's wrap on that. Yeah, Sonic R, the R presumably stands for racing, but I don't know. It could stand for anything. They do not make it clear.

But it's essentially a pirate now, Sonic R. No, on the Wii, maybe they would have done that, but not now. but it's a foot race game where you play as Sonic and his at the time fairly limited selection of terrible friends Tails Knuckles, Dr. Abbotnik, not strictly his friend but you had I think it was four tracks based vaguely on sort of concepts from the Sonic games like you'd have your Green Hill Zone style greenery ruins

and blue skies water kind of thing you'd have your sort of chemical plant style industrial stage etc all that sort of thing. And sort of the draw was each stage had Chaos Emeralds hidden in it as well as sort of collectible coins where you had to get all five of them and then finish first to unlock

a sort of challenge race against another character. And eventually you could unlock a fairly bizarre cast of sonic characters like the really unusual Tales doll character, which seems to just be a stuffed dull of tales. In sort of the fan community, it's been elevated as this kind of haunted, cursed character, which is really unusual.

The Tales Golem. The Tales, yeah, sort of. But it's one of those games that I feel really sums up what the Saturn offered, which is, it's really fun, but you can beat the whole thing in like 40 minutes, 50 minutes, you're done. Like, you've unlocked everything. You've seen everything. And to me, that's one of the reasons why the Saturn just maybe didn't have the appeal that the PlayStation did, because these more in-depth games, these RPGs, they weren't really getting brought over to the West.

So you were getting things like, I don't know, House of the Dead, which is a brief game, half an hour tops, you know. These arcade ports Daytona, I mean, if you're the kind of person who's going to go back over and over again and play these games, that's great. But one of the draws of these arcade games is you were dropping, I don't know, 10 pence in, getting a go, and then you're like, okay, I'm done.

It's not the sort of experience that necessarily holds that it's appeal when you bring it home. But, you know, that's subjective, obviously. But when the PlayStation was getting things like Final Fantasy 7, it's just difficult to consider it the best choice. Yeah, tastes were definitely shifting. And Sega played to its arcade heritage and roots, which, you know, as they should have,

but I think in the US we did have kind of a dearth of, and the UK also, just a real void there when it came to the deeper, more substantial games that were becoming a thing on PlayStation. station. You know, this is, this was the era where people like SquareSoft were just copying, pasting content and a vagrant story so that they would have a game that was long enough to make people happy because a 10-hour game, no, no, that's not enough. You need a 40-hour game. So, yeah, kind of misread the market there. From my sort of collectors and importers' perspective,

the Saturn, I think is just, it's wonderful. There are so many fantastic shooters on there. Even just the shooter library alone makes it worth buying, honestly. It's, it's, wonderful. There's so much stuff that still hasn't been ported. It's basically emulate it or this. Yeah, the only problem with Saturn, you know, importing it as a collector now is that the prices have just gone through the roof. Like 10 years ago, it was a really great opportunity to build a great library and just find all kinds of treasures you'd never experienced before. Just go into a retro gaming shop and spend, you know, $20, 30 on a game kind of blind and feel like, well, you know, there's a pretty good chance

that it'll be well worth this and more. But now the best games are selling for three, four, $500, if not more. Like, you know, Psychic Assassin Tarumaru or whatever, you know, these games are selling for thousands of dollars. So it kind of, it's kind of tough. And that's how I want to

wrap this up, talking about how best to play Saturn these days. And, you know, aside from the games that we've mentioned that have been ported to Xbox Live or whatever, there just aren't a lot of opportunities. There's, you know, you can hunt down the original hardware. And like I mentioned, mine needs to be recap because it won't start up anymore. But, you know, if you want to play the original games on there, it's going to be really expensive.

And what you really have to do is get one of those drive emulators like Phoebe or Rhea. And unfortunately, most of those, I think there's some solutions that are in development that'll be better. But the guy who sells those is like really fickle. And basically he's like, I'm going to sell 10 of these and I'm just going to put him up for sale. and I'm not going to announce it in advance. So if you're one of the 10 people who catches it, then you get one of these drive emulators. It's really strange.

Like, it's a very unfriendly solution. And that's why I'm frustrated by my system because I did buy a modded system that can play any game, you know, from an SD card. But now I can't play any games because the hardware is, you know, dying out. So I need to get that fixed. Can those batteries be replaced, the internal batteries at all?

Oh, yeah, the internal batteries can. My problem is the capacitors. I think the capacitors have gone. So I need to get those replaced, one, so that it will work again. And two, before the leak, you know, the capacitors start to leak and damage the board. Because there's no going back from that one. Saturn emulation in the last couple of months seems to have taken a bit of a step forward because, now I'm not familiar with the technical aspects of this in the slightest,

but there's an emulator called SSF. and previously I found it very difficult to deal with you'd get your ISOs or your CDs or whatever mount them and you'd run them but nine times out of ten there'd be some kind of weird issue but for some reason the latest version of it seems to play nicely with pretty much anything from any region so SSF is now I would say a pretty viable way to play these games

considering they're not going to be reselling them yeah I mean definitely buy games when you can but with most of these games, it's just not happening. And the other big emulator that is kind of well-respected for Saturn is Medifan, which has been around for a few years. And Medifin is actually the basis for the Saturn module in the upcoming Polymega console, which is a modular console. I think, you know, it kind of had a rough start because people felt they were being deceived

about its nature. But I tried it out last year at Game Developers Conference and was really impressed by the quality of the emulation and some of the options. available, and it basically will play any game from discs. So you still have to buy the discs. But, you know, in terms of a like off-the-shelf solution for playing Saturn games, I think the polymega is probably going to be it for the foreseeable future. And it's, it's pretty solid from what I've seen. But yeah, Saturn is definitely kind of one of those voids in video gaming. It's frustrating because it is kind of hard to get a hold of the games

and to emulate them properly. But at the same time, most of those games aren't being reissued. And it's not like there's a, you know, Sega Saturn mini console or something. So it's just kind of, wouldn't that be great? There was speculation when they were doing that countdown to the anniversary, that that's what they were going to be announcing. And I was kind of thinking, they're not going to do that. Like, what was, what are they even, they're not doing that. No, no way. No. And they didn't. But, but hopefully, you know, at some point, Sega will reclaim its Saturn heritage because it is a good system. And it did have a lot of really great games on it. And I feel like, you know, lots of things kept it from being the success it

deserved to be, but there's always, you know, a second chance, especially now when people are hungry for great classic games. Anyway, that's it. That's Sega Saturn, 25th anniversary celebration. We tried to do our best to write the wrongs of history. I don't know if we did it, but we at least tried, and that counts for something. So, uh, Diamond, Stuart, why don't you tell us where we can find you on the internet as we wrap out. Let's start over in Japan. Well, most of what I'm doing right now is for Retronauts. So, yeah, I'm doing some tweets for the retronauts. And every week I write a column, which is commemorating some anniversary from the week before. That's actually a Patreon exclusive. So I think it's a $5 level, I believe,

where you get the extra bonus episodes per month and you get to read my column. which so far this year has covered things like Star Trek Voyager, Marvel versus Capcom 2, the Out Foxies, you know, whatever I feel like writing about that also happens to have an anniversary that week. And of course, in general, if you want to just look at me, not retronauts, look me up on the internet. My handle is almost always Fight Club, but it's spelled like my last name, which is F, E, I, T, and not like the verb.

All right, and Stuart. Most of my stuff is writing for Retronauts as well. I'm doing a couple of columns on the website sort of fortnightly, but one of them will crop up each week. It's altogether then, which is looking at four of something, which is a very vague description, but it gives a lot of scope. I've done, for example, recently I did a look at all of the Alex Kid Games. I did a look at stuff like Metal Slug,

just whatever sort of comes to my fancy that week, or if there's an anniversary to pick up on. I also do a column called Reconsidered where I'll take a look at something that's maybe not talked about so much or generally considered not so great and I'll explain why it's in fact excellent. That's kind of my main thing that I do because all games are good.

I've also, if you want to find my stuff in general because I do all manner of things, the best way to start is to look for me is at Stupacabra on Twitter. Like Tupacabra with Stu, it's extremely clever. And finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as Gamesbite and hosting podcasts

such as this, and also writing at limited run games and doing other things there. So I'm around, you'll find me. But Retronauts, of course, you'll find at Retronauts.com on podcatchers, it's Retro-Nots as an astronaut, not as in Retro-Nnothing. And you can also find us on Patreon. That's right.

That's how this show is supported. Patreon.com slash Retronauts allows us to, well, in times of not pandemic, allows me to travel to events and to record podcasts in San Francisco. Now it's just paying these guys to contribute to the site and to the social

media feeds and also helping to feed me while my wife is unable to work because of the pandemic. So your support is great and appreciated and you get exclusive content depending on which levels you support us at. So check us out patreon.com slash retronauts

and we'll keep making podcasts for you and talking about cool old games and great old systems that deserve better. So thanks again, you two, and we'll definitely have you both on again individually and together, hopefully. In the meantime, I need some breakfast because trying to coordinate these conferences in three different time zones across the world is some weird timing. It's very early in the morning for me, and I'm very, very hungry. So good night, everyone, or good morning, or whatever the hell it is for you.

Sayonara. Cheerio. We're going to be. You know.