Yes, it’s the successor to sonic 3&k in that regard
4 Likes
REAL HARDWARE IS A PAIN THE BUTT.
playing Gungriffon you need that right should button. Clicky clicky. It suddenly stopped working midmission. I decided I’d open up this 30 year old controller and clean it. I got it open and dissambled. Then lost all interest in cleaning it at 9pm.
I’ll just grab one of my 5 other saturn pads. Grab. It is surface filthy so break out the ethanol and cotton swabs at least for the surface. Plug it in. The start button doesn’t work.
grab a third controller. Stare at the title screen. Decide to turn it off for the night and clean up. I only have uhm, 4 more controllers I could use for that Saturn if this one doesn’t work. Probably everything will be fine if I clean all of them.
mister is looking real good right now though.
11 Likes
they did just get the newest Saturn core in update_all
3 Likes
sega hardware is cursed, their good controllers are all built like twigs and the monstrosity that is the dreamcast pad is a fucking cockroach
4 Likes
Sorry for your troubles, Rudie. (All my original controllers work fine 
)
4 Likes
Sega is too cool for QC.
I’m still in the Dungeon, but I don’t wanna spoil the cool stuff. Which is to say it gets weirder and better as you descend. If I was managing this project Id have been really tempted to push some of this to the first hour instead of hour 20.
Still not drawing maps, still not getting lost.
I should try more first person dungeon games.
7 Likes
I cleaned those controllers btw. They seem fine now. One of the 3 had a capacitor in it? That was strange.
I finally won a yahoo auction and got an obi for Virtua Fighter. That was harder than I thought. I must have checked 10 in the wild copies that did not have an obi. This auction made me learn I do not have a copy of Virtua Fighter 2. Which seems unthinkable for Saturn ownership. I’ll correct it.
But that Virtua Fighter port, woof. Seeing the camera teleport and the polygons pop in and out in existence. The 32x version Is Better. Damn.
we had Neo Rude be our helper with controller 2 for some games and they both enjoyed that and seemed to catch on “This isn’t doing anything.” Smart Kid.
Sega Rally’s 2 player mode works great though.
i just rolled credits on Burning Rangers. I played through it years ago with much worse Japanese. What a bombastic short game. What a treasure it looks like that. I loved it has Platforming For Sickos at the end. Unlike VF1 the Saturn and Sonic Team are doing their absolute best to run this game. Just an Awesome Game. It is like a ps3 AAA game with long cutscenes and disjointed gameplay and you’re never quite sure what you should be doing and all the characters won’t shut up!
Game Rules. Does Panzer Dragoon Azel also have a sicko platforming section at the end (and a on rails shooting section) that I just don’t remember like Burning Rangers?
In short the Mister core is good enough and will switch to that soon enough even if it can’t run Fighters Megamix yet.
9 Likes
Turns out in Dungeon Keeper Nexus getting caught in a door really hurts. I used this knowledge to defeat a purple fire breathing wolf Enemies have started respawning more often as I have descended. Floors can now have multiple entrances. Im running out of water more often. Currently doing a run back for more before we dry out. Items dropped stay there forever.
6 Likes
Started playing the english patched Princess Crown and its a delightful little game so far. The art (huge sprites) and animations are really nice, story and writing are enough. The crown jewl is the side scrolling battle system which has dedicated attack, parry and item buttons.
She always looks up or down to meet the gaze of the person speaking.
16 Likes
Thinking about how much Action RPG UI could be indebted to Secret of Mana and that incredible smooth menu wheel. There’s some John Romero quote about how blown away he was upon seeing it and immediately recognized the work of Nasir Gebelli
12 Likes
Yes I love the wheel. In this one items swirl around you with the selected item appearing in your outstretched hand.
Princess Crown battles have enough fighting game basics for me to enjoy that particular flavor of challenge without combo execution difficulty getting in the way. I love that you can spam dodge but if you hit dodge in the dodge menu it cancels it. Its such an elegant punishment mechanism. Knock down destroying your accessory is a strong choice. I like it but i can see others hating it. Combined with the very limited inventory space it can feel like a real blow. Enemies however shed useful items constantly. Which you can grab and use right away.
The focus on fewer more dramatic fights feels really good to me. I have no good fight shots because Im busy fighting.
The game feels unfinished but all the stuff that made the cut feels polished and well considered so far.
This whole spooky graveyard zone has like 2 fights and an old house where you can teleport to a previous teleportation wizard’s business.
I keep thinking of napple tale when playing it. The characters and writing feels like they wanted to appleal to girls.
featuring talk of goat petting (but no animations) and unicorn admiring.
So far nearly all the important characters are women, its about a girl trying to live up to the legacy of her warrior queen mother. But the malegaze is pretty strong in some of this art lol.
Edit: i keep thinking about it and I don’t like that I called it malegazey. women / notmen also enjoy bigtiddy anime girls.
I was trying to use a 90s framing but I dont actually know shit about development’s frame of mind
8 Likes
Princess crown continues to open up and get more interesting.
There is a lot more to the graveyard. Its a whole zone with multiple unique shops and a pumpkin king
Different areas of the map have different items that drop that are useful in other areas. Its not quite lock and key but an optional boss was made a lot easier by combining a towns person’s tip from one corner and an item from a third location. As I get better at battle the game is really getting fun. Having more fights where I take no damage. Its also got good hangouttitude. I may keep this game on regular rotation after I beat it.
10 Likes
Sega Saturn doing Ray Tracing.
10 Likes
You’re selling me on it here, where do you get an English patched Princess Crown?
1 Like
RE: Princess Crown
I think the Return spell might be dangerous.
It teleports you back to where ever you last saved.
I used it after a big event to see if I could warp out of an area and found that not only could I that it returned the area I landed in to the state it was in when I saved there. So I dont know if I rewound the plot or if the world was in a mixed state. I didn’t play long enough to figure out the full implications but I made a backup save state before I tried it.
EDIT:
Tried messing around with the return spell further and what it does is allows you to rewind time to your last save but keep your current experience and items. If you wanted to be over leveled or have multiple of a rare item you could use it to for example beat a dungeon, rewind and beat it again.
There is probably some extremely wacky speedrun tech in here.
6 Likes
I’ve had my eye on this game for a while because…look at it. Never heard anybody talk about it. But today I found out there is a PS1 version and clearly that was supposed to be the target platform, it almost looks like a normal game.
Massive props for them to even try making this run on the saturn but seeing the “real” version makes the whole thing less interesting to me. And a little sad about the saturn hardware itself. I guess your reaction depends if you think its a bad port (sad) or that it’s actually the best anybody could have done (wistful smile)
11 Likes
Princess Crown is like 10 feet from greatness. Its just really lacking in the sound track and it needs greater monster variety. Id love a mega dungeon that really drains my resources. If I play it again I may skip one of the item bag expansions. The game just added griffons, which seem to have twice as many animation frames as anything else. Going frame-b-y-frame in a youtube play-through it has sequences animated on the 1s with all 6 limbs and a head going and staying on model. Its nuts.
Ive also recently found out that Princess Crown has 2 shorter post-game scenarios which might get me what I need.
If its not apparent this team went on to form Vanilla Ware of Dragon’s Crown fame.
You can really see princess crown in their future games. So maybe this is the start of a Vanilla journey. Hopefully the other titles are as tight. Ive never tried them.
8 Likes
They are kinda all over the place in terms of tightness.
1 Like
SAROO is an open-source ODE that plugs into the memory expansion port of the Saturn, allowing Saturn games to be run from microSD card.
With 13 lines of assembly code added to its config file
it’ll dump the Saturn’s BIOS to the microSD the next time a game is launched from the cart.
The drive-busted J Saturn my used SAROO came with also included this wireless pad; some SAROO builder appears to be a Jack Frost fan, I’ve seen that head appear on a few SAROO carts–I guess they probably sold this pad alongside their carts. Pad seemed fine–maybe a bit rattly? I’m no Saturn pad expert. It worked fine for navigating the SAROO menu far enough to dump the BIOS. ^ D^
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
SAROO started in China in 2013
and went open source in 2015, but had unresolved timing issues. Came back in 2023.
The “joker” head on the pad is the character Jack Frost from Megami Tensei. Seen it on some SAROO carts:
– https://www.reddit.com/r/SegaSaturn/comments/1qfd52w/saroo_control_pad_lightgun_crash/
– https://www.reddit.com/r/SegaSaturn/comments/1hupo4o/hi_can_anyone_help_me_figure_out_what_this_is/
7 Likes
