Scrolled back to goddamn 2018 and couldn’t find the Saturn thread so fuck it. I just want to post these videos of Solo Crisis, which was apparently developed as an ActRaiser 3 before deciding the brand was dead by that point.
The plot is something like: a long time ago, when the Earth was still in its “original” form (in this case, referring to before the Earth was split), Humans prospered and were grateful to God. God responded by blessing the Earth and its inhabitants with miracles. When Humans begin to overrun the Earth, however, people stop praying and begin fighting with each other. People became more decadent while the land became more desolate. God responds by dividing the Earth in two – the top half where the righteous and pure of heart reside, and the bottom half where the wicked will reside. God hoped that invoking this harsh world on the wicked would cause them to convert to righteousness, but instead, they cursed God creating the Devil. The Devil turns those living in the bottom world into monsters and creates a language for them so that the word of God would never reach them. Realizing that he can’t save the humans in the bottom world, God chooses people from various tribes of the top world and gives them the power to separate the human souls from the bodies of the bottom world monsters. He then creates a gate that leads to the world below them. The Devil does the same.
You can build houses and stuff on the land to increase people’s “faith” (SP) which is used to do things like toss lightning, burn trees, flatten land, etc. It’s like a strategy RPG take on ActRaiser. From what I can tell, entering the bottom world/re-entering the top world is represented by literally flipping the map over. It’s a bit nauseating, but kind of cool. You can see it happen at around 30 minutes into the second video.
Is Saturn just in the Air? I see it everywhere now that Im digging into the catalog. Though for about a month Ive been stuck on Grandia (with a translation patch). Telling people Grandia is great is not like news or anything but I really like the way it looks on saturn.
Sadly Saturn proficiency seems to require Japanese proficiency!
Its an an isometric lock and key trot-n-blast combining 90s anime maximalism and toyetic cuteness.
It hits a real charm sweet-spot for me that counter balances it’s lack of real meat.
Its just total candy to me I cant explain it better.
i also wrote about paneltia story, which is another creation rpg, where you build the world with tiles as you explore it.
i wish i had more to add right now than self-promotion, but my current computer sucks and can’t do saturn emulation.
i guess i should say that i keep seeing gifs of bulk slash, which is not only aesthetically beautiful, but also a pretty good game, so if you haven’t played it yet, you should.
increasing accuracy and performance of saturn emulation + increasing availability of + knowledge regarding solutions for playing backups on real hardware imo
Yeah I recall the Rhea drive emulator “coming out”. The creator just makes a batch when they can and sells them via their website. You get an email notification and rush to check out before they disappear again. I assume you pretty much need a bot to get one. I gave up on buying one a few months ago and got into emulation.
Loki I think your page is why I know about Ninpen Maru (ninpen = ninja penguin?)
Its a cute little hang out of a game from what I played. Levels remind me of early Jumping Flash stages. Small, simple, blocky.
here’s a recording of me beating arcade mode in sega rally championship for saturn, which is harder than it looks!
i remember playing this in sbcon2 in bumpass and rudie et al watching and rooting me on. thank you @Rudie for the salaryman saturn, it is perhaps my most prized possession.
what an absolutely incredible game. i apologize for not using manual transmission
I love how beautiful Lakeside is. There’s no better reward than unlocking one more edenic environment to immerse yourself. Honestly, it’s the element I miss most from games of this time.
yeah the analog support in the later revisions is nice (the netlink version for US has the changes from sega rally plus), though i’m still mad that you can’t remap accel/brake away from R/L respectively when using the 3D control pad
that’s why the run i posted above was done strictly with d-pad and buttons, tbh
I was always told to avoid Sega Touring Car Championship but aside from some touchy handling, it’s pretty good. Having the 3D pad really helps and I wonder if those who were turned off were only using the regular controller. Graphics and extras are miles ahead of Daytona or Sega Rally and as such it feels like the definitive racing “package” for the Saturn, even if those games are better and more influential.
It made me wonder, given what a difference the 1/4MB cart makes for 2D games on the Saturn, were there any 3D games that used the extra memory? I find it hard to believe that VF2 or PDS are the best looking 3D games on the system.
i believe there are exactly 0 3D games that use RAM carts
it makes sense for the games that are using it - fighting games and other 2D games with giant sprites and tons of extremely fast animations. there’s no workaround for that, you either have the fast ram in the appropriate quantity or you don’t. in a 3d game i expect you have many other tricks you can use such that enforcing a cart like that wouldn’t be practical
there are a few visual novels on there too, not sure what their deal is
you can see the sorts of effects in n64’s similar expansion pak ram expansion and imagine the parallel effects such an expansion may have had on 3d stuff, but saturn was never particularly* good at 3d in the first place and it’s unlikely throwing more ram at it would have been the answer
*there is, as always, a lot to unpack here but it’s true
i mean the saturn is infamous because the vast vast vast majority of games did not take advantage of even a fraction of what it was capable of, nor could they in any practical sense without structuring their game entirely around the hardware. there is a beastly synthesizer in the saturn that like, a handful of games poked and was otherwise ignored entirely… a whole piece of badass music kit baked into the saturn that was shockingly unloved
AM2 were at one point working on a 3D accelerator cartridge for VF3 on Saturn but that would have flopped the game. It’s just a tech demo, but Shenmue on Saturn is a good showcase of what the platform was capable of (if you had years to learn the inns and outs and if you were a first party developer with good tools and libraries)
