Sega Saturn Review

The Saturn is the most interesting failure the console business has produced. Sega built a machine tuned for sprites at the exact moment the industry turned to polygons, bolted on a second processor almost nobody could program well, and handed developers a renderer that drew quadrilaterals while everyone else's tools spoke in triangles.

Conversions from Sega's own arcade hardware are superb. Conversions from anything else look worse than they should, and the third party support that decided the generation went elsewhere. Then came the American launch, announced and executed on the same day months ahead of schedule, at a price a hundred dollars above the PlayStation, with a handful of games ready and several major retailers cut out of the deal entirely.

What survives all of that is the library. Nights into Dreams, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Guardian Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Dragon Force and the finest home fighting game conversions of the era make a run of software any machine would be proud of, and Japan kept the console alive long after the West had written it off. As a business decision it is a case study. As a games machine it deserved far better.