An explanation of what I’m doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last time, we went through it while looking at the early 1995 Jaguar releases of Syndicate, Troy Aikman NFL Football, Cannon Fodder, Theme Park, and Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls.
We last left off with the Saturn in July 1996 when we looked at NHL Powerplay ’96, Galaxy Fight, DecAthlete, and Legend of Oasis.
We now reach a critical point in the history of the Sega Saturn as we try to contend with Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996, Alien Trilogy, Alone in the Dark: One-Eyed Jack’s Revenge, and Nights into Dreams.
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**This post was originally published on 11/12/2025 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996
Developer: Silicon Dreams
Publisher: U.S. Gold
Release Date: 8/1/1996
Time to Yellow Card: 25 Minutes
We saw this game about a year ago when covering the PS1 in the Summer of ’96. While this Saturn release seemingly came out about two months later, I don’t fully trust the release dates for U.S Gold games that no one cared about. So, let’s guesstimate that both of these were on store shelves in time for the opening of the 1996 Olympics in mid-July. As far as the game goes, this version is almost identical to the PS1 release in every way other than button placement. The best part of the game is still the out-of-place house music in the menus, while the gameplay is still festering in the zone of extreme mediocrity. It’s not really worth thinking about who this was made for, but the little brainpower I’ve devoted to the subject leads me to believe the intention was almost certainly to trick kids in PAL regions who were excited about both the Olympics and the footie. Maybe if you were under the age of 15 and had been raised on Sensible Soccer there could have been enjoyment to be found in this game, with ignorance being bliss and all. Well, kids can have fun with any 2-player game given the right mindset and correct amount of boredom, so we shouldn’t take what The Kids think into too much consideration. Anyway, Olympic Soccer kinda stinks and I’m going to stop pretending that we’re going to get out from under the shadow of U.S. Gold anytime soon.
Oh, and fun fact. Nigeria took gold in Soccer at the ’96 Olympics, which is something I bet the folks at Silicon Dreams wouldn’t have anticipated when designing the team balance in this game.
Alien Trilogy
Developer: Probe Entertainment
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
Release Date: 8/13/1996
Time to Mostly Coming Out At Night, Mostly: 25 Minutes
We last saw this stupid fucking thing a long time ago in Part 018 of the PS1 series. Back then. I went pretty in-depth on why this game is bad, down to individual gameplay elements. That was before I had been completely desensitized to bad console Shooters. My brain has since been deep fried by the likes of Iron Angel of Apocalypse and Congo: The Movie: The Game. Even still, after all this time, this game is still kinda miserable and not even in a funny or weird way. I suppose it would have been one of those graphics-over-gameplay things, since its atmosphere was the primary selling point. I can see how it would have been a big deal In comparison to those Genki shooters or the aforementioned Congo, but in its time it still was no Dark Forces, by a mile, but that wasn’t on consoles yet.
I bring up the ambiance because I didn’t talk about it enough last time and that’s the only good thing about Alien Trilogy. A lot of work went into the sound design and lighting system to try to capture as much of that Aliens mood as possible in a Doom Clone, and it works right up until the gameplay happens. The shooting doesn’t benefit from the jump to the Saturn, as you can imagine, so it’s still just as bad as ever. Yet, the mood does have a way of creeping back when there isn’t gunfire. You can tell when comparing this to the earlier Aliens vs. Predator that both dev teams wanted to capture the same kind of lonely horror vibes as the movies and that they went in different directions in their failed attempts to get there. Rebellion tried to build tension using the spartan presentation capabilities of the Jaguar whereas Probe is more directly attempting to capture the aesthetic of the movies. This is likely because Acclaim paid for the movie license, so Probe damn well better make it look like the movies, even if the xenomorphs are glorified Pinky demons.
Speaking of Acclaim, for some unfathomable reason they were also able to get a 6-month timed exclusivity deal with Sony, which is why we’re only now seeing it on the Saturn. I know SCEA had marketing dollars to throw around, but really, this thing? How much cache did the Alien franchise have by ’96? Alien^3 had come out four years earlier and was widely reviled by both audiences and critics, to the point that when Alien: Resurrection, a much bolder and more interesting movie, came out in ’97 no one went to see it. I’m also convinced that the need for Probe to kick Alien Trilogy out the door early is the reason why they prioritized it over Die Hard Trilogy, which is a better and more interesting game that could have used a lot more polish.
Yeah, man, screw this game. Let’s never speak of it again.
Alone in the Dark: One-Eyed Jack’s Revenge
Developer: Infogrames
Publisher: Kokopeli Digital Studios
Release Date: 8/22/1996
Time to Feeling Awful…Really Awful: 20 Minutes
We last attempted to look at this game in Part 031 of the PS1 series. I use the word attempt because that release is unplayabely busted, with long loads between screens and even within cutscenes. Alone in the Dark 2 merits plenty of criticism, but none of the many problems with this game could be poked at while buried under a mountain of technical failure. I also was under the impression last time that I would get to the 3DO release before this one, but the intervening scheduling changes have moved them around; a detail that is interesting to no one but me.
Where the unforgivable sin of the PS1 version was in the constant load times obliterating any sense of coherence, the Saturn version is sent to damnation by the NES-ass slowdown that occurs in scene transitions. This game doesn’t stop to load; it just spits out a fraction of the frames while desperately loading in the background. It’s entirely up to personal taste which flavor of bad optimization is worse. The other thing that makes these ports significant downgrades from the original are the inclusion of textures on top of the otherwise flat-shaded polygons. This was meant as a generational graphics update, but in retrospect the textures look terrible and are the likely culprit for this thing’s abysmal performance.
There’s something to be said for Alone in the Dark 2 as a product of 1993 in its own right, but that can be future me’s problem. Just don’t ever forget that the controls are eldritch and most people don’t make it past the hedge maze at the beginning of the game. Not that it’s a long game, if you don’t die it easily takes less than two hours. The original release was also the first instance of a fixed-camera Survival Horror sequel pivoting away from suspenseful horror and towards action gameplay. This would be repeated to wildly different levels of success with Resident Evil 2, Dino Crisis 2, Parasite Eve 2, and if we expand out to fixed-camera games generally, Fear Effect 2 and Devil May Cry 2 as well. I invite everyone reading this to argue in the comments over how many of the games in that list are good (the answer is three). As with many other tropes found in fixed-camera Action games, the first two Alone in the Dark entries are to blame for everything. It’s all France’s fault.
Nights into Dreams
Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 8/23/1996
Time to Saving Christmas: 4 Hours
Where do I even begin with this thing. The place this game occupies in the collective memory is far more dependent on the biographies of its creative leads and the history of Sega than on any details of the game itself. That’s further compounded by Nights into Dreams being kind of a weird game in its own right, such that it could have been a more impactful release had it come out a year earlier, or a forgotten gem had it come out a year later. Instead, it was given the worst possible job of anchoring Sega’s Fall release schedule for the Saturn in 1996, which was the season of Tomb Raider and Mario 64. They needed Sonic Xtreme to be a real video game that could come out, yet here we are with Nights as the pillar on which the Saturn would try to balance itself. Before we get into the real-world nitty-gritty, we should at least touch on the game itself.
This is a sidescrolling game where the levels are looping paths around a large 3D environment. Instead of running and jumping, you fly around as the titular Nights with the combat and collectathon mazes based around the floaty freeform movement. The art and audio design are unique and striking for the time, the level paths are complex in the way you would expect from Sonic Team, the bosses are well designed, and the whole thing is like a couple hours long with a strong emphasis on alternate paths and high scores. You can see this as Sonic Team’s first crack at incorporating polygonal 3D into the Platformer genre, putting it as an especially odd entry in the list of pre-Mario polygonal Platformers, slotting in alongside Jumping Flash, Crash Bandicoot, and Bug. Personally, I’d rank it below Jumping Flash and above Crash; I also don’t count Clockwork Knight because it doesn’t do anything with those polygons. Also, yes, Bug Is better than Bubsy 3D but that doesn’t mean anything and now we’re very off topic. Despite how much Nights was placed in a spot to be noteworthy, nor how much it insists on its own artistic merit, it’s a video game you put a couple hours into over an afternoon, have an interesting time, and return to Blockbuster like you would have done for any random mid-tier Genesis game a couple years earlier.
I suppose this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to touch on Yuji Naka and Sonic Team during this project. Sonic Team formed sometime around 1989 when an internal Sega artist named Naoto Ohshima drew an idea for a weird little blue rodent and got with the guy who programmed Phantasy Star, Yuji Naka, to form a team and make a platformer out of the idea. An adult was put in charge of the team, and they were able to release Sonic the Hedgehog in ’91. Part of that team, including Naka and the game director, went off to California as part of some Mark Cerny scheme to make Sonic 2 and 3 while the other part stayed in Japan to make Sonic CD under Ohshima. By 1994 Naka and Ohshima had gotten tired of Sonic, even if the public hadn’t, and reformed their team in Japan to strike gold once again. Sonic was supposed to be fine without them, though, with the American team that Naka had left behind developing Sonic Xtreme and Sega having various spin-offs in the works.
Ohshima drew another character concept, and now he, as director, and Naka, as producer, would bend their and their team’s creativity to make something that no one had seen before, and which would have universal appeal. They were going to make Sega another mascot, and it was going to be the best game they ever made. Then, they encountered the Saturn’s architecture, as did the team back in California. It took them two years and heroic effort to get Nights into Dreams out the door and Sonic Xtreme was a lost cause. A lot of Saturn game projects were troubled or lost, which put Nights as the biggest original first party game Sega could come up with for video game season 1996. It was a game designed to appeal to an audience outside the Sonic demographic that would release alongside it and expand Sega’s reach. Yet instead of Nights hitting the way originally intended, Sega put a floaty dream jester out into the world to compete with a violently insane marsupial, a snarky pin-up model who’ll kill you, and the old enemy, Mario. It didn’t help that the Mario game in question is better than anything that would ever come out on the Saturn.
I’m getting myself wrapped around the axle thinking about this thing because it’s very clearly a good game, but not as good as it needed to be in its moment. Does that then mean it’s disappointing or underwhelming? That would depend, I guess. Is it wrong to judge Nights for not being a completely different game? Sega desperately needed something that could hang with the big marquee titles on the other systems, but that game simply didn’t exist. This could also be why some subset of Sega people latched onto this thing in the years after its release, as it represented the final short peak past which the Saturn would freefall. It was its own piece of artistic expression which couldn’t bear and didn’t deserve the weight placed on it. I know that I’m repeating myself on this, but again, I’m struggling with the disparity between what Nights is and the position it holds. It’s a game where you rotate a clown to death after flying through an abstract circus zoetrope, which is fun but not a generationally transformative experience.
Though it seems like Yuji Naka made the case to Sega leadership that it was a transformative artistic experience, which is yet another fraud count to level against him. At least in this case, I respect the hustle of bullshitting your bosses into funding your pet art project. Yet, there really needed to have been more effort into getting a polygonal Sonic up and running; and while I would describe this art project as “neat”, the Saturn needed so much more. Nights still reviewed well in its day and was considered a must own game for the Saturn, but opinions soured over time because everything all went downhill from this point. There was no killer app for the Saturn, only Nights into Dreams.
Of course, because traditional sentiment around this game got wrapped up in the feelings people had about this moment in Sega’s downfall, that means there’s tons of room for people of future generations to come along, play it, and go on about how it’s way better than its reputation. Let’s make a two-hour long YouTube essay that goes into minute detail about every level and the deep Nights lore, while we largely misunderstand the context and not even know how to use Moby Games like a goddamn Zoomer…*ahem* anyway, that’s not what I’m here to do. I’ve got games to look at, and Nights into Dreams is a decently well-made 90-minute break from the horseshit. It’s one of the best games I’ve seen so far for the Saturn, but it would have been an afterthought if it were on the PS1. Yet, if you want, we can have our own private little flame war about whether it could even run well on that flimsy, underpowered brick.
It might not seem like it, but we’ve now reached the top of the roller coaster and it’s all a series of gradually shrinking loop-de-loops from here. Let’s update the Ranking of All Saturn Games and ride this thing to the bottom.
1. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei
…
9. Nights into Dreams
70. Alien Trilogy
75. Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996
80. Alone in the Dark: One-Eyed Jack’s Revenge
…
103. The Mansion of Hidden Souls
Next time, we’re back with the Atari Jaguar in 1995 as we look at Hover Strike, International Sensible Soccer, Power Drive Rally, Pinball Fantasies, and Super Burnout.
Following that, we’re going to bring the Saturn right up to the cusp of video game season 1996 as we finish off August by looking at World Series Baseball 2, Virtua Fighter Kids, NFL Quarterback club ’97, and Battle Monsters.
You can find me streaming sometimes over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. Those streams have us looking over the games covered in these entries along with whatever other nonsense I have going on, such as my effort to play through every PS1 JRPG and Genki racing game.
Also, I’m on Bluesky now for reasons of self-aggrandizement, though I need to post more often.
I also randomly appear like a cryptid over on the Deep Listens podcast network. Be sure to check out their podcasts about (supposedly) obscure RPGs, real video games, millennial-core anime, Canadian sci-fi, and sometimes sports!
You can watch the stream archives featuring these games below.
Fifth Generation Gaming 
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