Saturn Was "More Powerful Than PlayStation" Claims Argonaut Founder

All the power in the world won't help if the machine is impossible to develop for.
Sadly the Saturn was just that .

Remind me of the Yu Suzuki Quote that VF2 was only using 60% of the Saturns power.

I read that as "Claims Arrogant Founder"

@KitsuneNight This! Sure, it was SLIGHTLY better technically with 2d effects but the system was super clunky to develop for, compared to the ps1 which was not only cheaper, but had a better range of capabilities, had a wide game library in all regions, and was much simpler and easy to create games for. This isn’t even a knock against the Saturn, it’s probably my favorite Sega console, it’s just there’s a very good reason the ps1 trampled both it and the n64 to a lesser extent on the market.

@PinballBuzzbro Atari Jaguar was probably even more difficult to take advantage of, as the programmers had to make the chipset work in tandem within the limited memory RAM and work around bugs that were left in the hardware before release.

Not sure of the development time but Croc 2 was released on PlayStation in 1999, well beyond the Saturn's short lifespan.
Though with a September 1997 launch of the first game, I think a sequel would've been too far out.

Let's all accept he's 100% accurate. Well, shame it didn't matter when all is said and done, at least not to the over one hundred million people who picked the PlayStation over the Saturn and were 100% satisfied with that choice. And even now I guarantee you that the vast majority of people would still pick the PlayStation over the Saturn again if they had the choice today. So it still doesn't matter. It simply is what it is. Saturn is clearly a great little console. And the PlayStation is the PlayStation! Nuff said.

@KitsuneNight You mean harder to develop for. So no, it wasn't just that. This can be seen in the homebrew scene now. The problem was because the Saturn was a pain in the arse to develop for and time was an issue back then, developers couldn't get the best of the hardware in the time they were given.

The Saturn was more powerful than the PSX, and Jez isn't the only one to say it.

@RetroGames

Well yeah, I would choose the Playstation too and I love the Saturn to bits.
But I would choose the PS1 because it has way more games.
It's library is deeper and way more diverse then the Saturns.

Mos ps1 games being cheaper and easier to get then the Saturn's also help.

@Toohats
The homebrew scene has 30 years of hindsight.
The developers on the 90's didn't have that luxury.

Sega practically dumped a Frankenstein of a architecture with 8 different processor in their laps and told them to figure it out.

The Saturn might be more powerfull but if most developers from the time couldn't tap into that power whats the point ?
That design torpedoed the Jaguar too.
It had a over complicated designa nd most developers just leaned on the Moto 68000 cause thats what they knew best.

@KitsuneNight Exactly.

I think a lot of Sega fans are holding a lot of bitterness from multiple generations of consoles or something, so they get totally fixated these days on how their system's were hard done by and how everyone was wrong if they said they were weak or whatever, which most people actually never really did. But it's all largely completely irrelevant.

Console fans should just be happy with their system of choice if they truly enjoyed it at the time, whatever their system of choice was.

I picked the N64, which got its ass handed to it at the end of the day by PlayStation in many ways, and certainly in terms of the size of the games library and sales. If given the choice today, even I might pick the PlayStation--I technically did initially and then sold it to get my N64--but I totally loved my N64 and see no need to argue where it was more powerful than the PlayStation to somehow try and sooth the wound of the loss.

I loved my N64, and I can say both the Saturn and PlayStation were great too.

It's kind of like the PS2. From a hardware perspective, it probably should have failed. It was hard to develop for, and the GameCube and Xbox were more powerful. But that's where the audience was, so devs got familiar with it and tools got better over time. Late releases look much better than the launch games. I'm sure the same would have been true for Saturn (and Dreamcast), but there just wasn't that much time for multiple generations of games on either platform. I always look at Burning Rangers as an example of what could have been. That game is fully 3D with transparency and impressive (for the time) lighting, etc.

What damaged the Saturn to a degree I think was those later multi platform games, and the visual appearance of launch titles like Daytona next to Ridge Racer. SEGA Rally looked greatly superior to Daytona and VF2 looked very impressive, but Saturn ports of trendy titles like Destruction Derby and Wipeout looked bad next to the PS1 versions. The popular view was the Saturn was less fashionable and the games looked worst. I was a Saturn fan myself and had a region modded console for imports, but it was a shame. When big titles Tomb Raider 2 and Resident Evil 2 both skipped the Saturn, it just added to the popular Saturn couldn't run those games.

Certainly VDP2 could do some things the PS1 couldn't, and those wobbly vertices and dithered graphics you'd see so often on PS1 seemed less of an issue on Saturn. Was an interesting generation no doubt.