The Sega Saturn!

Today we're going to talk about something I have very fond memories of, the Sega Saturn.  Holy fuck was this console AWESOME!

I don't remember how old I was when I first got my Saturn, but I was still pretty young.  All I remember is that I was going back home in the car with my family from....somewhere, and my dad just decided to randomly stop in an electronics store and pick one of these bad boys up.  I mean I was young and stupid at the time, I didn't have a fucking clue what it was until I got home and popped in Fighting Vipers!

This was probably the first game I ever played that was 3D and it blew my fucking mind.  You may think that this title has been long since forgotten and no one gives a shit but you'd be fucking WRONG!! If you've played Soul Calibur 4 (not sure if it's in 5) then then whole system where you could break off bits of armour, this is the game which did it first.  Hell, the game even had a feature to save your goddamn replays before anyone even gave a fucking about that kind of thing.

Despite all the fond memories of that game though, the Saturn is home to my personal favourite video game EVER! Which is Panzer Dragoon Saga

This game was fucking HUGE, it came on 4 discs and has one of the most interesting game worlds I think I've ever seen.  For anyone who doesn't know, Panzer Dragoon is a series of arcade type shooting games where you fly a dragon, but this game was an RPG spin off.  This game was so fucking good that a couple years later when I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time, I was disappointed with it because I didn't feel it stacked up to PDS.

The rest of it's library was pretty stellar too, things like NiGHTS and Die Hard Arcade just to name a couple kept me occupied for fucking hours although it did have a couple of crap games too, but what console doesn't, right? The Saturn was basically the point for me when gaming became more than just a thing to do to kill time, it became a full blown hobby, or passion, or whatever you want to call it.

It wasn't all wonderful though, the Saturn had some really awkward hardware so emulating it is a real bitch, and the console itself had a battery backup to save games, so if you don't replace that little bastard then your save games will delete themselves when you turn off the machine.

The last thing I want to say is that it had one of the best advertising campaigns I've ever seen in Japan, take a look.

Segata Sanshiro is a fucking bad ass, no wonder it did so well in Japan.  Shame that in the EU, it came out so close to the PS1 launch that no one gave a shit.  Oh well...

So to finish this post I want to announce Sega Saturn September!  Starting from September 1st, I'm going to make some kind of Saturn related post every day, so you may be seeing 2 or 3 posts daily during this month while I blog about other stuff as well.  Also, providing I can get the stream to work, I'll be streaming Saturn games whenever I have free time, I'll provide the link once it's set up.  So I hope you're ready to be educated on one of the best gaming machines EVER!