The Saturn was great. If you were a real gamer, buddy, you'd already know that. Like, oh my god.
But seriously, the Saturn-- like the PC Engine/Turbo Grafx 16-- isn't fondly remembered despite having had an excellent library. The stories are similar: the consoles were poorly marketed outside of Japan, a lot of the best games were completely buried, they had vastly stronger competitors, the list goes on.
The good news is that you don't have to worry about that kind of thing anymore because we're no longer in the age of multitudes of competing plastic videogame boxes, and we likely never will be again. Furthermore, many of the classics of that era are getting sold off as cheapo download titles for the dominating consoles. Lately we've had a good run. I'll be doing posts for three titles, whose names I won't say but which you can probably guess.
I never owned a Saturn until long after it was dead, and by then game prices were prohibitive anyway.
Like a lot of people, I bought Radiant Silvergun as soon as it came out for the Xbox 360 just because I could. RS belongs to a special club of videogames known mostly for the fact that they're very expensive: despite being readily available for the 15 years since its release, Silvergun's original Saturn release has regularly commanded prices in the range of $150 to $200 on auction sites. It was priced at $15 on Xbox Live Arcade, and nobody batted an eye.
The legendary action game developer Treasure was doing really ambitious work around this time, and Silvergun does that for the 2D overhead shooter. Though a precursor to the well-known Ikaruga, the mechanics in RS are significantly more complicated on every possible level: depending on which are held down, three buttons control eight different weapons on the ship. Each has its own vital role depending on the situation, and like any game in the genre, mastery requires a perfect knowledge of the stages and enemy formations.
Silvergun is unusually long and content-packed for a game of its genre and it's even got a story mode that's designed to be attempted over and over again, with limited continues but progressively easier each time the player fails.
Like its successor Ikaruga, Silvergun is an obssessively patterned game: even more memorization-oriented than other titles in the genre. High scores are achieved by chaining enemy kills, and players aiming for the high score are obligated to plan out their course through the stage and arrange their kills just so. The fun of the game is figuring out just how to do that, and then in realizing that the task is much easier said than performed.
Ikaruga is a distillation of the same game idea: it doesn't exactly make Silvergun obselete, nor vice versa. They are related: strikingly unique, solvable puzzle boxes that are nevertheless incredibly demanding. If you like to solve puzzles with guns, either will suit you just fine.
Ah, yes, the Sega Saturn. Like you, I didn't get the console until after it was succeeded by the Dreamcast (and shortly after the Dreamcast ceased to be in the U.S. console wars). It wasn't until early 2005 or so that I started to uncover games previously unheard of by Western gamers (titles like Gunbird, Sengoku Blade and, later on, Astra Superstars, Bubble Symphony and Cotton Boomerang). Years later, I started running panels at anime conventions based on lesser-known games for the Sega Saturn (with Otakon 2010 and Katsucon 2011 as my most recent appearances).
I look forward to hearing your impressions on Guardian Heroes for XBLA (that is, if my assumption is correct).
Posted by: insaneben | October 31, 2011 at 01:58 PM