All Saturn Games In Order: Intro

**This was originally posted on 11/9/2022 on Giant Bomb**

I have never touched any piece of Sega hardware even once in my life. All my exposure to Sega games from their hardware manufacturing days has either come from re-releases, videos, or occasional emulator tinkering. The Genesis and its library have been relatively easy for me to get my mind around; the tragedy of the Dreamcast has been extensively discussed in multiple venues, and there is relatively easy access to the parts of that library which are worth a damn. The Saturn, on the other hand, has always been kinda inscrutable. As I’ve been playing through the first year of PS1 releases, I’ve wondered what the alternative to that system was at the time.

So, I’ve decided to play every Saturn game in order. Like with my playthrough of the PS1 catalog, there are several important caveats:

• I’m only playing games with North American releases. I’m not about to try to dig into the Japanese gaming environment of the ’90’s, that could be an entire PhD topic or something.
• I’ll do this at a pace of about six games per week, though this will float up or down as the situation dictates
• When there’s more than one game released on the same day, I’ll play them in alphabetical order
• If I can’t find a way to play a certain game, I will conclude that it doesn’t exist and skip it
• Saturn emulation is still a bit funky, so if a game gives me serious technical errors, I’ll either skip it or reserve judgement
• Because it would take thousands of hours to play each game to completion, I’ve decided that I will play each game until it pisses me off or gets boring, with the aim of getting at least somewhere between half an hour to an hour with each game, but I won’t make promises

The meta through line I’ll be looking at in this series will be the exact opposite of the through line in the Playstation series. We know how the story ends with the Saturn, so as we go through the ~240 games released for this doomed console, I’ll keep an eye on the demise of classic video games and where this thing went wrong. I’ll also make an effort to rank these games in the same way as I’m doing for the PS1, and I’m sure that won’t get messy at all.

Finally, this is going to be a more abbreviated endeavor, I won’t go into as much detail or depth as with the Playstation. This is primarily a search for context in the 32-bit console war. I’m going to put out parts in this series during breaks in the PS1 series, so any multi-platform releases that were covered there will be looked at here just enough to compare versions. It might seem like I’m giving the Saturn short shrift, but so did Sega what do you expect me to do.

We’ll kick this quixotic quest off with the North American launch line-up: Clockwork Knight, Daytona USA, Panzer Dragoon, Pebble Beach Golf Links, Virtua Fighter, and *inhale* Worldwide Soccer: Sega International Victory Goal Edition.