Since it’s the 30th anniversary of the Sega Saturn this week, I was looking up articles from back in the day.
First up this feature from Sega Pro 30 - April 1994 (UK)
This magazine can be downloaded in full here:
https://www.outofprintarchive.com/catalogue/segapro.html
#retrogaming
#Sega
#SegaSaturn
@[email protected] As an American who very much did not know about the Saturn (despite owning a Genesis), the thing which brought my attention to the system at all were the Japanese TV advertisements after people uploaded them to YouTube. I’ve since learned that the lyrics to the full “Segata Shanshiro” song are quite elitist, but I still think that Bomberman commercial was just the right level of WTF.
Reading the phrase, “double speed CD-ROM,” does not make me want the hardware, though.
@[email protected]
Double speed cd rom was pretty much the standard at that point.
That’s why the model 1 NeoGeo was so rough to play as it was a single speed drive.
The loading times on Saturn also weren’t bad at all thanks to the larger memory.
2D games especially profited from this.
Till this day it remains my most beloved system.
It’s the system that actually felt like it was made just for me.
That might explain the sales numbers in the west perhaps. 😅
@OutofPrintArchive Reading about how the memory expansion cartridges didn’t work outside of Japan without an additional regional bypass sounds pretty standard for Sega’s international missteps to me. “Plug in this thing, but you’ll need two other things to do so.”
@[email protected]
That’s just basic region locking though.
The Capcom cart was planned for international release at a time, but due to dwindling sales, those plans were shelved.
Barely any games that even supported it released outside of Japan anyway.
And hm the biggest fans had a 4-in-1 import cart anyway.