Many of the best titles for the Saturn happen to be the victims of short print runs too and so you can expect many of them to fetch an extremely high price on the secondhand market. In terms of the bit era specifically, if I had to name one game in my collection that prompts the fondest memories of that time then it would have to be Tomb Raider. Unlike the modern interpretation though; where feeling nostalgic is seen as a good thing, I ascribe to the more classical definition where nostalgia is a painful emotion.
Please enable JavaScript to submit this form. The bit Era. The single best piece of advice I can give to potential collectors is this: Always have a target in mind and know your limits. About the Author: Alex Hajdasz. Alex is a professional UX Designer who writes about video games past and present.
He was once described as a "complex individual" and absolutely took it as a compliment. They've experimented with purposely capping the framerate at 30fps to further emulate the graphical conditions of the old consoles, but as Blanchard puts it, "they wouldn't have stuck with it back then if they didn't have to, so now, we're just like 'Nah, fuck that.
When you're trying to line up a lock-in during aerial combat or pulling off a pristine drift through a hairpin turn, you may not even notice all the miniscule aesthetic details that make Blanchard's environments feel so authentic. The single, metropolitan-themed track currently available in the Drift Stage early alpha demo is essentially a highway floating between skyscrapers, supported by concrete pillars that gradually fade into a black void reminiscent of PS1-era draw distances.
Getting the faraway city skyline to look just right in the vibrant, orange-and-purple skybox was an incredibly complex task involving parallax scrolling and projected textures, all to recreate that sensation of a surrounding that never seems to get closer, no matter how far you move in any direction.
Drift Stage programmer Chase Petit had to write code for the express purpose of replicating the effect. And yet, all this effort to mimic the bit style might be dismissed by those without an emotional attachment to fifth-gen-era graphics. Take the static, purposefully grainy ocean in Sky Rogue: "People tell me all the time that the water texture sucks," says Blanchard, "and I'm like, 'Uh, no it doesn't. If you think that sucks, you don't get why it's there.
That said, low-poly art styles have been known to pay off with younger crowds, Minecraft being the dominant example. I feel like as long as you know what you're doing and you're using low-poly as a tool to make your game better, it has a chance of taking off.
But if people just start trying to do it because it's a trend, and they want to make money, it's gonna be terrible, and it's probably gonna make me switch to a totally different career path," he laughs. In all seriousness, Blanchard welcomes more indie game artists to join him in revitalizing bit graphics.
Every game I've ever played - including my own - with that art style, or something similar, is good. And Blanchard isn't about to abandon the art style he worked so hard to perfect once Drift Stage is formally released. It didn't help that nearly one year after its release, the 3DO didn't have any killer apps. Why spend dollars on a console that failed to take players to the next level? Enter The Need for Speed. Electronic Arts focused on a more realistic experience for the release of The Need for Speed , displaying textured polygons running at solid frame rate instead of crazy, fast-paced action.
It worked. The game also attempted to recreate the sounds made by the vehicles, what was a big deal in Live action sequences, while dated and somewhat awkward in retrospect, helped to increase realism for the time, creating a package unlike anything else on the market. The title would eventually be ported to the Saturn and PlayStation with better graphics and significantly improved frame rate. The exorbitant price of the console was still very much prohibitive to consumers, especially considering the upcoming Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation would cost a fraction of Panasonic's console.
But was still not over. A juggernaut was about to make its debut on bit consoles. The freedom of movement it allowed in a 3D space made most gamers actually feel like they were playing a next-gen game. Though from a technical standpoint Doom is not really a 3D game, gameplay is what matters the most, and for gamers used to merely moving their avatars from left to right in a 2D side-scrolling game, Doom was a revolution.
The innovation came at a cost: bit platforms could not run the game properly, at least not like it was envisioned. This is where the horsepower from bit machines came into play. The first bit system to receive a port of the most popular PC game at the time was the 32X. Now, this was a somewhat odd choice, since the 32X was an add-on for the Sega Genesis. However, the port was surprisingly competent, though the game did not run in full screen and, thanks to the limitations of the cartridge format, sizable chunks of data had to be cut, compared to the PC original.
One week later, the game was released on the Atari Jaguar, a bit machine, to great acclaim. Now, while a commendable work, this version could not really compare to the 32X and Jaguar releases. If anything, the SNES port only proved that bit machines were falling behind and bit systems were the future.
In November , Doom was ported to the Sony Playstation. This was, at the time, the best version of the game, even surpassing the original in some areas. Graphics were greatly enhanced with animated textures, dynamic lighting and transparency effects. Unlike the Jaguar version, both sound effects and soundtrack could be played at the same time. The 3DO version was released five months later and, for all intents and purposes, is nearly unplayable.
The main programmer was given only ten weeks to finish the project, and it's quite surprising that it could even be ported as it was; but the gameplay was very sluggish and the low frame rate made it feel like the 3DO was trying hard but ultimately failing to keep up with the game. The Saturn port was only released in and, while not as bad as the 3DO port, is severely flawed with a very inconsistent frame rate.
This would raise concerns about the Saturn's ability to handle first-person shooters and was a huge blow to the reputation of Sega's console; not only was Doom released very late, it also played noticeably worse than the 32X port, released almost two and a half years earlier.
Sega was quick to patch up the hole five months later when the Saturn received a port of Duke Nukem 3D with dynamic lighting effects and a solid frame rate; this port is often considered even better than the PlayStation port, released in September Nevertheless, after Doom , the damage had been done. But I digress. It's not time to discuss about yet. Important adventure games like D , Myst , Policenauts and Alone in the Dark 2 made their way to the three platforms.
But it was Resident Evil , in , that really took the world by storm; and the 3DO was not invited to this party. Resident Evil is responsible for making true one of the biggest unfulfilled dreams of the generation: it truly felt like a movie that could be played. It's by no means an FMV game, though. Capcom's title made use of live action cinematic sequences, 3D character models, pre-rendered backgrounds and immersive audio to transport players to its own world.
The company even coined a new term to design its genre: survival horror. Now, it's important to stress that Resident Evil was not the first game of its kind -- Alone in the Dark as well as the Japan-only Clock Tower preceded it by a few years. Resident Evil , however, perfected the formula well, as much as tank controls can be considered perfect, that is.
Players were in full control of their characters in a huge mansion, trying to find their way through a then unmatched tense atmosphere. The title made masterful use graphics, music and sound effects to completely immerse the player. The game was only ported to the Sega Saturn over one year after the original release for the Sony PlayStation. This led to some rumors about the Saturn not being able to run the port, which were put to rest once the game was released for Sega's console in a flawless conversion that not only retained all content from the PlayStation original, but also included an all-new gameplay mode, the Battle Game mode.
However, by the time the game was released for the Saturn in North America, Resident Evil 2 was right around the corner, being released for the Sony PlayStation only three months later.
Capcom still planned to port the sequel to the Sega Saturn which never materialized , but it was clear that Sega's console was in trouble.
The remaining bit systems, the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation, were finally finding their pacing after highly experimental years from to The journey was a little rough, though: companies had a hard time learning how to port first-person shooters Doom and Hexen , 3D fighters Virtua Fighter and Tekken and racing games Sega Rally and Ridge Racer to Sega's and Sony's flagship consoles.
But after Resident Evil , consumers were more and more inclined to play on bit systems and eager for more. Then, Nintendo finally made their move. The company decided to counter-attack Sega and Sony with a bit system. While the Jaguar was performing poorly and was mostly unfairly seen as a joke at the time, the Nintendo 64 came to the market with strong ambitions.
Nintendo meant business. After Super Mario 64 hit the market, pressure was on. The revolutionary title greatly expanded possibilities for 3D worlds and it was time for the companies to show whether they could reproduce such immersive levels on bit consoles.
It didn't take long, though. Tomb Raider proved that bit consoles could handle complex 3D environments. The game, however, had a very different approach compared to Super Mario For starters, Lara Croft was supposed to represent a real woman, with real ambitions, in a real world.
Of course it can be argued that Lara was hypersexualized and her proportions, especially her breasts, were not exactly realistic. But she was more realistic than an Italian plumber trying to save a princess in a kingdom filled with turtles, mushrooms and piranha plants.
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